New interfaces, new opportunities
I’m definitely old.
When I started in this industry- at an agency called Pres.co, one of the agencies that grew into DigitasLBi- there was one way to interact with the thing we called the Internet, a website on a desktop based browser.
Interestingly though, that single platform, slow access speeds and lack of moving image, drove a lot of experimentation around the interface itself. Lack of rules and a settled design language drove innovation.
15 years on and the fragmented landscape of devices, channels and platforms may have driven new audience behaviours and communication strategies but it has in some ways imposed creative uniformity. The video unit has become a one-size fits all piece of creative currency- fit for desktop, mobile and tablet- and interfaces have been reduced to a thumb friendly swipe left for yes, swipe right for no experience.
However the dominance of the mobile screen isn’t going to last forever and there are two polar opposite modes of interaction heading our way, which will change the interface landscape and perhaps spark some experimentation from brands- and their agencies.
Recessive and Engulfing interfaces
At one end of the spectrum- in the world of wearables, smart homes and cars- interfaces are becoming recessive. Rather than you making active choices, decisions are made by AI’s- filtering content and data through your past behaviour and preferences to show only the news, notifications and communications they think you want.
In this world, interfaces are for fine tuning experiences not explicitly driving them. This trend has begun, for example, with Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm giving you what it think’s you want, with under the hood options to tailor and correct it’s thinking.
The other extreme is the emergence of experiences and interfaces that demand your full attention. From Hololens which overlays visual data on the real world, to the fully immersive VR of Occulus Rift, through to technologies that use facial and brain data to change the flow of video based stories.
Through implicit and explicit movement or even thought, you’ll drive the interface and the choices you make, data is a bi-product rather than a driver of the experience.
Opportunities for brands
Neither a small smart watch screen nor a fully immersive VR experience are easy places for brands to play by the current rules of digital marketing.
On recessive interfaces, useful digital marketing media will become rarer, more expensive and more complicated to execute in and whilst VR gives a large creative canvas, our current models of disruptive and native advertising don’t feel wholly appropriate. Then there’s the fact that both of these interface types are deeply personal and personalised, which creates another set of challenges for brands.
The video dominated, interaction light mobile screen isn’t disappearing any time soon, but here are some questions brands and their agencies could be asking about the future:-
1) Is your brand ready to be useful? The answer to the question is not always yes, the graveyard of brand apps in the app store is a good indicator of that, but if you’ve got products and services that are vital to a consumer’s life than you can develop these to be successful in the new world of recessive screens- and potentially in the world of AR and VR by overlaying product support onto real world products. Utility gives you permission to exist and to communicate in any environment
2) Is your brand a curator? The more screens disappear the less active choices consumers will make about what they receive on their devices and what new information sources they seek out. It’s when Google Now comes of age. Can your brand be a curator? Are consumers happy to leave you to make choices about what they see and don’t see?
3) Is your brand a creator? Brands have a long history of helping drive content creation on new mediums- Soap Operas anyone?- and VR an AR give them similar opportunities. The question is whether being a driver means sponsoring and nurturing content creators or creating that content yourselves.
4) Is your brand trustworthy? The potential brake to consumers embracing these new intensely personal technologies is whether they trust the people collecting data from them. We know that brands can fill the trust vacuum left by governments in the wake of Snowden, it’s a question of how to create business advantage out of transparency that consumers are demanding.
And what about Agencies?
It wouldn’t be right for someone who admitted to being an old agency lag in the first sentence of this thing, to ignore what the these two modes of interaction mean for agencies. In fact defining how you approach this particular technology trend, can help define how you approach new technologies and innovation in general.
Here are three things that I think are important for agencies to do, in a bid to stay relevant.
1) Admit you don’t know everything
The most liberating thing you can do as an Agency is admit you- like everyone else on the planet- can’t tell the future. It’s much more useful to define an innovation journey for a brand and build a framework for discovering what works and what doesn’t together. That kind of shared risk and reward is good way to create different costs models in a non-threatening way and to build a cross client-agency team.
2) Define yourselves by the company you keep
Agencies have been cosying up to start-ups and new technology platforms long enough for the backlash to have started. Start-ups question how useful endless agency beauty parades are, agencies ask whether they’re just an unpaid introduction service. The fact is though it’s a cost of doing business and the most interesting ways of brands and agencies using new technology will come from partnerships with small, passionate, new enterprises.
3) Don’t forget what you already know
It’s hugely tempting to think that the skills we have as agency people become less relevant when technology can serve, analyse and refine ads and every day a new piece of marketing technology promises to optimize the hell out of the future. However our ability to create consumer insight and simplify brand messaging is often massively lacking in the tech space and something that becomes more important as every new channel and opportunity comes into view.
In the end it’s going to take a lot of experimentation, some wrong turns and some misplaced bets to find out how to take advantage of these new interfaces and behaviours Hopefully though, we might end up with something more interesting than a way to place video ads directly on people’s retinas.
Here’s hoping
This article was originally written for the book of the amazing Silicon Beach 2015.
