SIGNAL IN THE NOISE: ADVERTISING IN THE AGE OF DATA

Advertising is the quintessential example of an industry known for creatively embracing what’s new and next. From emerging technologies, channels, and formats to bold, go-to-market media strategies that are guided by evolving customer expectations for personalised, seamless, and omnichannel experiences, the most successful brands, agencies, and vendors just keep moving forward. 

This topic has been discussed for a number of years now from “Talking to Ourselves”, “Lee Chow Will Only Say This Once”, CP+B’s “Woodshed”, and “the Disruptor Series” and many others. What is absolutely clear is that the agency model has shifted. We all know it’s shifted. We can feel it. Our relationship with the client has shifted. Our value proposition (and perceived value) has shifted. The culprit? For the sake of brevity – is “Data”.

The introduction of “data” into our business has shifted the perception that what, once upon a time was considered alchemy, is now quantifiable. The pendulum that swings between art and science in advertising has decidedly taken a step towards science. Why? Well, for one, it’s the natural course of human progress. 

We humans have a history of decoupling and commoditizing our once lofty constructs. You may remember years ago the arduous task (and associated costs) of building a website? Today, we have Squarespace for $16 per month. 

Moreover, with the dollars attached to advertising at large, you can bet that any number of intelligent people will attempt to commoditize any number of its functions. To this end, the advent of this “Age of Data” has put all advertising practices under scrutiny.

But the backlash today being witnessed (against the traditional ad agencies of the world) is palpable. The problem appears to be that this “Age of Data” promised far more than it has delivered.

It is the natural and inevitable course of human evolution. However, being able to quantify and benchmark every consumer transaction along the customer journey is not tantamount to success. We now, arguably, have access to every metric under the sun but the data is largely meaningless. We are still pressed daily to find the signal in the noise.

This harsh reality has manifested in plateaued CX performance, digital transformations that did not deliver the expected returns, and early efforts to capitalize on new technologies and models that took a technical, rather than operational, viability path.

The larger risk may be market-based. While taking a step back to build foundation, those firms may have missed a closing window of good economic times and deferred more aggressive strategies to an economic climate that is at best mixed and, at worst, recessionary.

At the same time AI and robotics move deeper into the organization, closer to the customer, and, more profoundly, into the very makeup and operations of the company. This presents the best mechanism to drive growth - a strategically planned ecosystem that delivers value to customers throughout their life cycle. To establish a successful ecosystem, CMO's will need to thread the needle between employee experience, customer experience, brand purpose, creative, and technology, imbuing all these crucial areas with customer obsession.

Smart CMOs will undoubtedly begin pulling back on strategies that drive short-term gains at the expense of customer affinity, including dark patterns —design patterns that manipulate customers against their own interests. Meanwhile, spend will flow back into creative as the importance of differentiated branding becomes apparent in a world of digital sameness.

At the same time, technology-driven innovation — the ability to deliver new business results through opportunities discovered by continuously experimenting with technology, both emerging and established — will soon be table stakes for leading organizations.

Today, deep learning is sorting pictures posted on Snapchat, natural language processing is providing the backbone for customer service chatbots, and machine learning is helping companies accelerate product development by handling tasks from forecasting the effect of cancer drugs to helping to edit Hollywood movies.

Just imagine an advert that dynamically changes the tone of the voiceover based on the unique preferences of the viewer. The convergence of AI with human creativity and insight will transform advertising, and we’re just beginning to see what’s possible.

Artificial Intelligence allows machines to be able to carry out tasks in a way that we would consider “smart”. And, Machine Learning is based around the idea that we should just be able to give machines access to data and let them learn for themselves. Employing both, however, despite their infinite promise, has also not yet delivered real, tangible value (at least at scale or en masse.)

Yet, we are still pressed daily to find the signal in the noise. Moreover, we are still dealing with error-laden legacy data in disparate silos and clients are ill-equipped and the speed of technological change (which means we are always catching up.)

As a result, somewhere between ‘what is infinitely possible’ and ‘what is possible today’ lies the ad agency paradox today. Selling the promise of data-driven creative and personalisation at scale to clients whose platform simply will not get them there.

This paradigm shift also extends its own vernacular – now also far more focused on return on investment and short-term results. And herein lies the problem du jour. But, in the short term, humans are still the ultimate software. 

It is as if, metaphorically, someone had just invented the paintbrush. Despite, potentially, never using one, you can still see the infinite possibilities in its premise. But you can see (in this example) that the paint brush’s promise far exceeds its current application. Ultimately, this is simply the ebb and flow of all human endeavour. 

The agency of the future will undoubtedly be consumer centric, automated, transparent, collaborative, intelligent, nimble, experiential, and focused on a sprint versus a marathon approach. They can champion creative but will undoubtedly have deep expertise in strategy, consumer insights, and measurement.

Moreover, this heightened focus on the measurement will allow agencies to not just understand campaign performance, but to also understand how a brand is moving people through a journey and how advertising is fostering that movement.

With a heightened level of insight about what people think, feel, and do (after they interact with a brand’s advertising) we are simultaneously entering an advertising landscape with more immersive experiences that engage consumers on a deeper emotional level. 

One thing we do know? The importance of data and how it’s used to make changes that put consumers first cannot be understated. Agencies that pay attention to this now are sure to set themselves up for success in the years to come.

MEDIA 2025 | THE CONNECTED SOCIETY

Today, the term "media" can mean different things to different people. Ultimately, however, media is mass communication regarded collectively. Media today can be the message, the medium, or the messenger; and to complicate things, the lines between them are becoming very blurry. 

Social Media is participatory and connected. One might argue that once all media is participatory and connected that the term 'social' is redundant. Media is simply media. The future of social media, therefore, is a discussion on the future of media itself. To that end, social will just be folded into the broader marketing discipline.

Social Media today is focused on driving real-time engagement, (unedited and unfiltered) live streaming video, Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), social commerce, mobile wallets, metadata, search/visibility, data-driven decisions, content marketing and mobile devices. 

Moving into 2019, more and more users are using messenger apps (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WhatsApp) but there's still a lot of growing happening for social networks. Social platforms, social customs, and communication standards are all in a constant process of evolution.

Transparency is the new black, and there is a clear shift from talking at the world to making the world talk. To wit, most branded content in the next years will come from consumers, and user-generated content will far exceed branded content. The next wave of media apps will help filter the clutter. 

Ultimately, everything that can be connected to the Internet will be (i.e. homes, humans/ wearable tech, TVs, cars, jet engines, locomotives, lights, appliances, etc.) Everything from cars to coffee cups will be connected to the Internet by 2025.

That said, people will care increasingly more about culture than products. 

MOVING AHEAD

The future of media is inextricably linked to technology. The promise of technology was always to improve the way people live and to make our lives simpler and easier. Around the world, people are utilising technology to create new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive, and change the way we interact. This transformation is happening everywhere and in every culture, country, and industry. 

Integrated mobile devices like Google Glass and the Apple Watch are already taking major steps to eliminate the gap between "technology" and "life." What is clear is that we have quickly evolved from the age of industrialisation to the connected society. 

The connected society transforms everything. Information and communications technology (ICT) and big data are also fuelling the rise of a new economy in which new market actors – commercial, "indiepreneurial," and crowd-sourced – are empowered with new models of production and exchange, as well as automated, frictionless and highly personalised consumption. 

In this new economy, consumers become curators rather than receivers, products give way to services, and consumers adopt more and more complex roles as citizens, users, co-creators, specialists, and actors. Collaboration, crowdfunding, crafting and sharing are just some of the hallmarks of the modern, involved consumer. 

The connected society encourages a rise of meritocracy and the formation of a creative elite. Within this order, merit is increasingly defined by a new set of emerging values, such as knowledge, transparency, fairness, quality of experience, authenticity, sociality, healthiness, and simplicity. The ability to make informed choices, to a very large extent, will drive the consumers of the connected society. 

Fast-forward to the future, and we should see global media usage continue on its upward trajectory. By 2020, eMarketer projects that 2.44 billion of the world's population will be on connected networks. Media usage will be ubiquitous, seamless, and integrated into our daily lives in a multitude of ways. 

The ways we both input and observe media will also shift. Holographic displays will be shifting into the mainstream and keyboards on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones will become increasingly irrelevant, as interactions on what was once called social media will largely be voice-controlled. 

Driven by continued advancements in technology and rapid rollouts of commercial products, the future will be shaped by an information ecosystem that's increasingly more intuitive, anticipatory, transparent and personalised. Some very fundamental human activities like learning, thinking, working, and being "present" with others will be transformed by these changes. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing will also play an integral role in shaping the future. Over time, the computer itself - whatever its form factor - will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. Your phone, for example, will proactively bring up the right documents, schedule and map your meetings, let people know if you are late, suggest responses to messages, handle your payments and expenses. Technology won't just serve as tools for you, but they'll even serve as your stand-in in some cases.

Even today, Google scans your texts; understands the context and supplies readymade human-like responses for you ("Cute dog!" and "That's good!"). Not just when you were sent words, but even when you were sent pictures. Just imagine how much more dynamic and robust these technologies will become.

As a result, Social Media will become far more specialised and personalised to the actual needs and interests of each audience member. By 2025, social media sites will have adapted their platform for each user so that it would appear by today's standards that people live in their own universe. 

Social Media platforms will compete to maintain their share of the audience. Users of social media will gradually only expose themselves to news that affects them. Future platforms will be even more equipped to predict exactly what users will need to keep them engaged. 

Social media platforms will connect advertisers with potential customers by using multiple regression analysis and correlation analysis. When a consumer behaves differently than the formula predicted, the formula will automatically adjust. The connected society will know when you are tired, hungry, thirsty, stressed, or even low on Vitamin C. 

In the connected society envisioned in 2025 people will increasingly seek out a sense of belonging and social media platforms will provide "fireplaces" for people to gather around and topics for interaction, conversation and relationship building. Products, services and brands will be instilled with meaning more through the crowd than through branding and marketing efforts. 

Products and services infused with a social component of some kind can more easily move from product/service status to an experience. For the 2025 consumer, the experience will always be more original than the actual product or service.

This means that consumers will be looking for original experiences delivered by humans and which are embedded in a social context, rather than searching for specific products and services. Subsequently, value will be grafted onto products and services by how a network of users – or a network of peers – decides to use them.

Human beings are inherently social animals, and we are ultimately at the centre of our own universes. On average, people spend 60 percent of conversations talking about themselves—and this figure jumps to 80 per cent when communicating via social media platforms.

As a result, our social media platforms will increasingly place us at the centre of our unique, personalised ecosystem. In 2025, parents won't be complaining about their children spending too much time texting. Rather, they'll be complaining that their son or daughter seldom steps out of their own self-made virtual-world.

Social Media in 2025 will be a ubiquitous enabler, producer and facilitator that shift the consumer from receiver to curator. This is a natural evolution to a sharing economy and change in values, preferring services and access to function, rather than ownership. This means that businesses will have to engage and collaborate with users in different roles (rather than merely as passive consumers.)

Social Media will continue to create and connect new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive and fundamentally change the way we live. As William Gibson espoused, (Neuromancer, 1984) this brave new world will be "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation."

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BRANDED BREAKTHROUGH - NOT ALL ADS ARE CREATED EQUAL

The best ads are enjoyable. They educate, entertaining, and inspire. They are memorable, capture our attention, and connect with the consumer on an emotional level. They make the brand central to the story.

That said, in 2018 analysis of the Adtrack database from Kantar shows that in 2018, 77% of ads failed to resonate with consumers. Incidentally, the categories which consistently had the highest recall are carbonated soft drinks, fast food (QSR) restaurants, CPG, banking, and alcoholic beverages. What’s clear is that, while capturing the consumers attention is imperative, it must result in brand recall. 

To ensure ads are optimized, focus on the following:

1.     ATTENTION

2.     BRAND LINK

3.     MESSAGE

ATTENTION

Consumers do not remember the expected. Therefore, educate, entertain and/or inspire -- but defy convention. Do something different. Take a risk. Most brand managers shy away from this path because it has higher-risk. That said, with higher-risk there is higher reward.

A timeless example of this was DDB’s (1959) Volkswagen campaign “Think Small”. At the time there was a notable trend towards larger cars in the United States and “thinking big”.  Bigger was definitely seen as better. We have previously discussed truth and authenticity as brand attributes, but this campaign is an excellent example. This campaign was in effect, the exact opposite of how cars were marketed at the time.

Speaking of entertaining, another effective technique to gain attention is to provide (someone) with amusement or enjoyment. It’s why consumers engage media in the first place. So, make your ad part of the entertainment. Incidentally, humour is not the only way to connect with consumers. A great, inspired example is Canadian Tire’s “We All Play for Canada” Olympic (CSR) campaign’s “First Skate” ad which tells the touching story of a father fashioning a sledge for his paraplegic son.

Brands need to remain ‘top of mind’ - so find ways to drive popular culture. Budweiser’s ‘Wassup’ commercial is an excellent example. Originally premiered during NBC’s Monday Night Football in December 1999, the campaign became a pop-culture catchphrase and won the Cannes Grand Prix award and was inducted into the CLIO Hall of Fame.

The ad creative also needs to be matched to the appropriate media. If you knew, for example, that 78% of all engagement with the video you created would be via mobile on Facebook, would you not optimize the video for that channel?  Alternatively, if you knew your print ad would only be extended to billboards, would you not optimize for vehicles speeding by at 80 kms per hour? Of course you would.

You should also be thinking about virality. Specifically, what makes something sharable? There is a wealth of information available of the science of making things go viral and even a great TED Talk by BuzzFeed's Publisher, Dao Nguyen. As an aside, there are a number of (largely unconscious) variables involved in what makes brands stand the test of time, which we have previously discussed at length.

BRAND LINK

The highest brand link comes from connecting your brand closer to the climax of the ad’s story. By brand we ideally mean USP or brand truth.  So, don’t just make your brand central to the story - make it the driver of the story itself. 

Another useful way to tell a compelling human-interest story is to connect with your target audience using a meaningful consumer insight or find an emotional story to demonstrate how the consumer engages your brand.

But arguably, the single most important element in telling your brand story is to amplify what sets you apart from everyone else. Call it whatever you like - USP or brand truth, consumer benefit (or insert the buzzword du jour.) The point is to identify what makes your brand unique and different and weave that into your story (with a strong visual cue.)

MESSAGE

You probably already know this, however, when brand equity is measured it is based upon what the consumer believes (not what you want them to believe.) To this end, communication is not what is said, rather it is what is heard. The best brand communication therefore occurs when you focus on the one benefit that moves consumers.  It’s about telling the story behind your brand purpose.

Ask yourself, if you could tell the consumer one thing about your product or service - what would it be?  Remember also that the more messages you put into your ad, the less likely it is that consumers recall your primary message. *Millward-Brown data demonstrates that when an ad has more than one message the consumer recall drops by 37%.

Ultimately, try to move from a functional to an emotional benefit. Why? Because triggering an emotional reaction, whether joy, sadness, humour or sympathy, should be the goal of any creative.

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Brand Strategy: Radical Transparency

Consumers are more suspicious of companies than ever. Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer found that faith in the big four institutions – government, the media, business and NGOs – is at an all-time low. And to make matters worse for brands, a slew of startups are embracing transparency and creating new expectation levels that companies of all sizes will soon have to match – or risk their relevance.

Setting expectations

Online apparel retailer Everlane is the poster child for the radical transparency movement. Since launching in 2010, the brand has displayed a breakdown of costs for each item on its website. This includes things like materials, hardware, labour, duties and transport. It is an approach that has earned the fashion brand an army of socially conscious and style-savvy followers.

But over the past year, this transparent way of working has spread to just about every sector imaginable. Cosmetics startup Beauty Pie, for example, gives people a price breakdown of the factory costs for each product it sells. Insurance startup Lemonade publishes statistics on the revenue it’s generating, the number of policies sold and the average monthly charges.

Emerging companies in the financial industry – one of the sectors most distrusted by consumers – are also putting transparency at the heart of their operations. New US bank Aspiration gives customers an insight into the impact of their purchases by scoring companies based on how they treat their staff and the planet. The bank also rates companies against their closest competitors so customers can easily see which brands best reflect their own personal values. 

Similarly, Clarity Money is an app that analyses users’ spending to recommend better deals and even negotiate lower subscription fees for them – forcing companies to be clear and upfront about their pricing strategies.

Who do you trust?

With startups redefining what it means to be honest and open, brands will soon face increased pressure to meet these new expectation benchmarks and highlight their own transparency credentials. For example, research conducted by J. Walter Thompson, London, found that transparency is one of the key ingredients in earning people’s trust (along with honesty, integrity and reliability). And according to research by Label Insight, 39% of people would switch to a new brand if it offered complete transparency and 73% would pay more for such products.

The message is clear: transparency is moving from a ‘nice-to-have’ option that helps startups create differentiation and into a need-to-have asset that all companies must consider. Today, being open and honest is an effective way of building trust. Tomorrow, it will be an essential means of boosting your bottom line.

Media 2025 | The Connected Society

Today, the term “media” can mean different things to different people.  Ultimately, however, media is mass communication regarded collectively. Media today can be the message, the medium, or the messenger; and to complicate things, the lines between them are becoming very blurry. 

Social Media is participatory and connected media.  One might argue that once all media is participatory and connected that the term ‘social’ is redundant.  Media is simply media.  The future of social media, therefore, is a discussion on the future of media itself. To that end, social will just be folded into the broader marketing discipline.

Social Media today is focused on driving real-time engagement, (unedited and unfiltered) live streaming video, Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), social commerce, mobile wallets, metadata, search/visibility, data-driven decisions, content marketing and mobile devices.

Moving into 2018, more and more users are using messenger apps (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WhatsApp) but there’s still a lot of growth happening in social networks. Social platforms, social customs, and communication standards are all in a constant process of evolution.

Transparency is the new black, and there is a clear shift from talking at the world to making the world talk. To wit, most branded content in the next years will come from consumers, and user-generated content will far exceed branded content.  The next wave of media apps will help filter the clutter.

Ultimately, everything that can be connected to the Internet will be by 2025 (i.e. homes, humans/ wearable tech, TVs, cars, jet engines, locomotives, lights, appliances, etc.) That said, people will care increasingly more about culture than products.  

MOVING AHEAD

The future of media is inextricably linked to technology. The promise of technology was always to improve the way people live and to make our lives simpler and easier.  Around the world, people are utilising technology to create new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive, and change the way we interact.  This transformation is happening everywhere and in every culture, country, and industry. 

Integrated mobile devices like Google Glass and the Apple Watch are already taking major steps to eliminate the gap between “technology” and “life.”  What is clear is that we have quickly evolved from the age of industrialisation to the connected society.

The connected society transforms everything. Information and communications technology (ICT) and big data are also fueling the rise of a new economy in which new market actors – commercial, "indiepreneurial," and crowd-sourced – are empowered with new models of production and exchange, as well as automated, frictionless and highly personalised consumption. 

In this new economy, consumers become curators rather than receivers, products give way to services, and consumers adopt more and more complex roles as citizens, users, co-creators, specialists, and actors.  Collaboration, crowd funding, crafting and sharing are just some of the hallmarks of the modern, involved consumer. 

The connected society encourages a rise of meritocracy and the formation of a creative elite.  Within this order, merit is increasingly defined by a new set of emerging values, such as knowledge, transparency, fairness, quality of experience, authenticity, sociality, healthiness, and simplicity.  The ability to make informed choices, to a very large extent, will drive the consumers of the connected society.

Fast-forward to the future, and we should see global media usage continue on its upward trajectory.  By 2020, eMarketer projects that 2.44 billion of the world's population will be on connected networks. Media usage will be ubiquitous, seamless, and integrated into our daily lives in a multitude of ways.

The ways we both input and observe media will also shift. Holographic displays will be shifting into the mainstream and keyboards on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones will become increasingly irrelevant, as interactions on what was once called social media will largely be voice-controlled.

Driven by continued advancements in technology and rapid rollouts of commercial products, the future will be shaped by an information ecosystem that’s increasingly more intuitive, anticipatory, transparent and personalised. Some very fundamental human activities like learning, thinking, working, and being “present” with others will be transformed by these changes.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing will also play an integral role in shaping the future. Over time, the computer itself - whatever its form factor - will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. Your phone, for example, will proactively bring up the right documents, schedule and map your meetings, let people know if you are late, suggest responses to messages, handle your payments and expenses. Technology won’t just serve as tools for you, but they’ll even serve as your stand-in in some cases.

Even today, Google’s new messaging app, Allo, scans your texts; understand the context and supplies readymade human-like responses for you (“Cute dog!” and “That’s good!”). Not just when you were sent words, but even when you were sent pictures.  Just imagine how much more dynamic and robust these technologies will become.

As a result, Social Media will become far more specialised and personalised to the actual needs and interests of each audience member. By 2025, social media sites will have adapted their platform for each user so that it would appear by today’s standards that people live in their own universe.

Social Media platforms will compete to maintain their share of the audience.  Users of social media will gradually only expose themselves to the news that affects them. Future platforms will be even more equipped to predict exactly what users will need to keep them engaged.

Social media platforms will connect advertisers with potential customers by using multiple regression analysis and correlation analysis.  When a consumer behaves differently than the formula predicted, the formula will automatically adjust.  The connected society will know when you are tired, hungry, thirsty, stressed, or even low on Vitamin C. 

In the connected society envisioned in 2025 people will increasingly seek out a sense of belonging and social media platforms will provide “fireplaces” for people to gather around and topics for interaction, conversation and relationship building.  Products, services and brands will be instilled with meaning more through the crowd than through branding and marketing efforts.

Products and services infused with a social component of some kind can more easily move from product/service status to an experience. For the 2025 consumer, an experience will always be more original than the actual product or service. This means that consumers will be looking for original experiences delivered by humans and which are embedded in a social context, rather than searching for specific products and services. Subsequently, a value will be grafted onto products and services by how a network of users – or a network of peers – decides to use them.

Human beings are inherently social animals, and we are ultimately at the centre of our own universes. On average, people spend 60 percent of conversations talking about themselves—and this figure jumps to 80 percent when communicating via social media platforms.  As a result, our social media platforms will increasingly place us at the centre of our unique, personalised ecosystem. Parents in 2025 won’t be complaining about their children spending too much time texting.  They'll be complaining that their son or daughter seldom step out of their own self-made virtual-world.

Social Media in 2025 will be a ubiquitous enabler, producer and facilitator that shift the consumer from receiver to curator.  This is a natural evolution of a sharing economy and change in values, preferring services and access to function, rather than ownership. This means that businesses will have to engage and collaborate with users in different roles rather than as passive consumers.

Social Media will continue to create and connect new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive and fundamentally change the way we live. As William Gibson espoused, (Neuromancer, 1984) this brave new world will be “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.”

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Written by Andrew B. Giles. Andrew is the head of digital innovation and strategy at Goodbuzz Inc. You can follow him @Goodbuzz and on Facebook. 

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Goodbuzz is a digital agency based in Toronto, Canada. We help brands create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace. We prototype the future - and believe the best way to predict it - is to create it.  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or if you have any questions contact us directly.