The human brain is extraordinary, and we have capabilities which other animals lack, putting us at the top of the food chain. Other animals may have stronger muscles or sharper claws but we have cleverer brains. Human-centricity is a window to consciously innovate the way we connect brands with people. To connect with today's customer, we have two choices. We can either outsmart people's filters by being sneaky, conniving and devious in the way we connect with people or we can simply be more empathetic to the human condition. From my recent travels I can surmise my thoughts into five broad statements:
- The digital economy is leaving us in a post-digital landscape, where the world has changed, and our only constant is the continuous evolution of the internet of things.
- Planning was designed to understand the audience and a consumer, but as marketers we have arguably lost our way.
- People can't be reduced to numbers or trends; instead we need to return to emotional truths and relationships which value the idiosyncrasies of a consumer to honour them again as humans.
- If we don't become more creative and make our advertising fit in to stand out, we will see the collapse of our industry.
- The industry is headed towards a reverse Big Bang, where brand experience and performance will collide into a singularity.
If you have to be sold something, you don't need it and as marketers we simply cannot forget this common truth. When a brand immerses themselves into the environment and fits in seamlessly, you experience the brand rather than consciously take a 180-degree turn away from it. I believe in a resurgence back to the old marketing principle of the right place, right time, right message. There seems to be a paradigm shift over to the need to innovate for the sake of innovation and the deification of award bodies.
Where we are now in a world of advanced advertising and the emergence of connected devices, it is more complex than ever to have meaningful connections at a one-to-one level because of two key events that have helped to accelerate the democratization of experience for the consumer.
The first is the internet. More specifically, it's the explosion of big data that has happened because of it. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data—so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. We are becoming more aware of the data ecosystem as consumers, and giving this precious information up is no longer the fleeting acceptance of terms of conditions, but the democratisation of data by the consumer. Google's consumer surveys is a glimpse into a dark world our brands aren't considering—that time is in fact money, and the arbitrage of data between a brand and a consumer is in fact time exchanged by monetary reward. We are beginning to accept a reward for our time—we are in a period of gamification, and the consumer knows it.
The second event was the global financial crisis in 2008. More specifically, it wasn't the crisis itself but more a mindset change that came about as a result. No longer was it good enough to say:
I know my advertising is working, I just don't know which half
With the tightening of advertising budgets and the capability to track and measure across all mediums, the global financial crisis gave us the motivation to think about all advertising through a performance lens. We have pushed arduously to explore new advertising streams and open new channels such as programmatic and content. These channels have always existed, albeit primitively, and we are now exploring how to make the most out of them.
As marketers we have created channels and products to reflect the expansion of our universe, however I would like to make the parallel with Hubble's Law when referring to brand experience and performance. Hubble was able to prove that the universe is still expanding and he made this observation in 1925. He proved that there is a direct relationship between the speeds of distant galaxies and their distances from Earth. Let's put this in the context of media and advertising: we too think that our industry is expanding and has infinite possibilities. It is possible that the universe will last forever, or it may be crushed out of existence in a reverse Big Bang scenario, but the idea seems so far in the future that it might as well be infinite. This isn't the same forecast I put on the media and advertising industry. Only recently have new studies of supernovae in remote galaxies and a force called dark energy been documented which may modify the possible fates of the universe resulting in a cataclysmic end to the world as we know it.
We are expanding at such a pace that one day brand and performance will collide again like a reverse Big Bang Theory and a new world will begin.
At its simplest, a new universe will be born not as we know it. We will start again from a small singularity, then inflate the common truth over the next era of media to become the post-digital landscape of the future. We will experience a technological singularity where artificial general intelligence (constituting, for example, intelligent computers, computer networks, or robots) would be capable of recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect—an intelligence explosion—that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human understanding and in some cases all control.
Without sounding like a crazed doomsday preacher, the signals are clear for us as scientists and artists. But when will we accept our impending journey and take action with our brands to create our own singularities and welcome the collision of branded experience and performance.
I firmly believe we need to welcome back old marketing 101 principles. Honour thy consumer. Practice meaningful advertising and stop trying to dupe the consumer. We should welcome technology and not fear it, as it only serves to support our industry through the ideas boom both for advertisers and for brands.
In the next five years, advertising as we know it today won't exist as it is today. There will be no insertion order buys and hefty brand budgets without a performance lens. As the user experience is democratised by the people who live it, why should we put up with a bad experience? Why wouldn't we want a bot or intelligent machine determining our next action, if that action is to be made only more positive than the last?
I forecast it is not the strongest of the brands that survives but the one which is most adaptable to change. Thanks, Darwin.