Replicators, Fearlessness and You
We were promised jetpacks.
They’re just about here, in a manner of speaking. And while owning one should be extraordinary, I want to talk about the way in which the veritable jetpack is going to affect your creative life.
Sure, actual jetpacks aren’t coming (sorry to get your hopes up) but the type of future we once imagined coming alongside jetpacks and flying cars is on the way. It’s a future that’s defined by an ecosystem of things that seamlessly work together and make life a whole lot better. That ecosystem, that future? That future is within grasp.
Scroll through the pages of Gizmodo or the offerings over on Kickstarter and you’ll find a glut of intriguing technologies, from 4K 3D TVs to gesture based wearables. There’s rarely a day that goes by that doesn’t include me staring slack jawed and wide eyed at some new awesome thing. (On that note, I got a chance to “drive” the self-driving Google car (very fast) at TED which was quite amazing. It was also easy to see how this would be good for advertising — watch TV while someone else drives.)
For the most part, the development of this new tech has been in silos. One car company comes up with a proprietary navigation system. Microsoft develops Kinect. Makerbot introduces affordable 3D printing.
What’s about to change — in fact, what is already happening, is that these disparate technologies are becoming a whole lot less disparate. They’re starting to connect with each other and pretty soon, you’ll be thinking more about what you want to do than who has the technology to make that happen. Think about this…
Today we’ve got Bluetooth speakers, wireless headphones and connected watches. Within a decade, we won’t have individual pieces. Instead, we’ll be surrounded by an entire Bluetooth zone. Want to watch a movie? You won’t pick up a phone, you’ll tap into your zone and project the image right in front of you.
Today we’ve got texting, video chat and voice data. Soon, we won’t think about the platform we’re using, we’ll just communicate. We’ll say what we want to communicate and to whom — that person will then choose how they’ll receive that information. It could be a phone conversation. It could be a text message. It could be something we haven’t thought of yet (Side note: In a way, we’re already preparing kids for this in schools. The shift is on to move from the physical process of writing/spelling to the context-based process of communicating an idea).
Consider those 3D printers. Today, they’re just out of reach for the mass market. Tomorrow, they’ll be the basis for everything, whether it’s a replacement part or a replacement heart. The existence of the interconnected internet and cheaper hardware means we’ll be able to make anything for anything. Think forward far enough and you can see the possibility that 3D printers could easily become the Star Trek replicator…or even transporter.
The most fascinating part of our future isn’t that it’s lined by unheard of technology, it’s that the foundation for this convergence of things into a seamless ecosystem already exists. We see this pattern again and again in current technology and you need to be fearless of this future. Photography led to film, then digital. Horse and buggies were superseded by a buggie with an engine. Screens became touch-screens, which became environments controlled by hand movements and voice commands. Our 360º future has many of the pieces in place that will form the foundation of our future. Those pieces are just in the nascent forms.
So. What? What does this educated guess at our future mean to you?
If we’re about to cross that line from proprietary technology silos to an interconnected series of ecosystems, you need to start thinking about how you can create for, mine and fund those ecosystems. For example, instead of simply creating a smartphone app, you want to think about a smartphone app that connects to a wearable that talks to an iBeacon that relates to a physical installation.
“Creating” for the future is going to be a lot of fun, and in a way, it’s already begun. The shift from “brands” to “brand experiences” is going to be accelerated (and hopefully, improved) by this integration. It won’t be a “social media” campaign or an “above the line” campaign. It’ll be the answer to the question — how does the promise of the brand stay with you wherever you go? My film company pitched a client on the idea of replacing the seats of a movie theatre with the seats of its luxury car brand. We proposed creating a short film that played with the trailers, a film in which the audience could use their own smartphones to affect the outcome. It’s early days, but this sort of integrating into people’s lives and what they do is going to happen more and more. That can be a promotional experience like the film we proposed, holographic way-finding systems that send data to a phone, or simply the ability to say “Hey Siri, find me a restaurant,” then looking up from the phone to see digital signage flashing at locations with sight.
We’re going to need to get paid for the work we do and that payment won’t come in the traditional ways. Today, we bill for our work, but as we continue to monetise data, the model will shift from paying for work to paying for action. 15 years ago, the dotcom crash happened because we tried to apply old financial models to the technology frontier. Then Google came along and demonstrated how data could make money. Amazon started generating revenue by becoming the backend to the Internet. As we move forward, even these relatively new models are shifting. Google is taking data to the personal level. The purchase of Nest shows that they’re thinking about this integrated ecosystem and how to make money from it. Expect more and more of these types of acquisition as we all explore how to make sense of the future.
Technology can still be expensive, which is why advertising should continue to do what is has historically done very well — fund the future. Advertising built the infrastructure for TV, keeping costs reasonable and getting sets into homes. Advertising expanded the smartphone and tablet markets, using data mining as a way to create revenue and subsidise the cost of the amazing little computers in our pockets. We’ll be counted on going forward, financing the base technology for things like those Bluetooth zones. In a sense, we’ll be responsible for setting up the ecosystems in exchange for data that we can use to tell and sell our stories.
The future isn’t about reddit or Facebook. It’s not about iPads and Oculus Rifts. The hardware and software will be there, but it’ll be integrated into customised experiences. At retail, that’ll mean that the next generation of iBeacon will generate a personalised shopping experience. At home, that will mean more efficient everything, whether that’s air conditioning profiles or lighting connected to the RFID in your phone. The promise is that it will all work together, and it’s up to us to fearlessly find new and compelling ways to turn those ecosystems into great storytelling.
And jetpacks. Hopefully, there will finally be jetpacks.
The above piece was written by James Stewart, Chief Creative and founder of Geneva film and was taken from the “Future” section of our latest book, Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief: Advertising’s Next Generation, which features chapters from 35 leading creative directors and business owners giving their views on the big topics shaping the future of advertising and brands.
