Future Tech for Brands
Oct 1, 2018 · 7 min read
What are some of the frontier technologies we are seeing here at betaworks and how might they affect brands and the marketing business in the future?
A live session recorded at Betaworks Studios in New York City featuring, Suzana Apelbaum; Head of Creative at Google, Dan Bennet; Worldwide Chief Innovation Office at Grey; Alex Magnin, Head of Revenue for GIPHY and Richard Ting, Global CCO design, R/GA.
There are many great sessions and conversations held every day at Betaworks Studios but one of my personal favorites is Frontier Tech Live, a Friday lunchtime session where we do a deep dive on a piece of frontier technology. The session is led by Jared Newman, part of the ventures team. Every week he looks at five or six things that the ventures team have uncovered — possibly to inform an investment, possibly to inform something that we build. As you can see from the below chart it is often a simple piece of technology or an understanding of how that technology will create a societal shift that lead to innovation opportunities.
Having been a creative director for 15 years my first impulse is to think around how some of the technology I see at the Friday lunch sessions might influence the advertising industry. So I put together a few slides and also invited Suzana, Dan, Alex and Richard to speak about some of technology they were making or using and how it will affect the industry.
We had a fascinating discussion. We touched on a lot of the big topics that people are thinking about, whether that be voice, virtual and augmented reality and whether the robots will replace creatives.
My slides are below but please take a listen to the podcast. It’s a unique opportunity to hear from some of the most forward thinking people in the industry on their current focus but also their general hopes and fears for technology.
1. Venmo is the best Social Media Network
Some people, actually a lot of people, look at their Venmo feed not to see who they have paid but as entertainment. The idea of a social network, the right social network, is not going away any time soon. As we see a decline in usage of what we might call traditional social media (Facebook, Twitter) other things fill that void. The Venmo feed is an excellent way of keeping tabs (snooping) on your friends lives. It’s public, it’s chronological and you can’t apply a filter to it.
Venmo encourages users to communicate with emoji which adds some intrigue to the feed but as a general ‘what are you doing’ it’s hard to beat.
For brands: I believe that there are interesting ways authentic brands could insert themselves into this conversation. After all Venmo is about transactions. The conversation is already about buying stuff — not family vacation photos etc.
2. Synthetic Media. Shit is getting real.
Venmo works because it’s real. The flip side is that the technology to create what we call synthetic media is making our normal social feeds a guessing game of what is real and what is not. We have been watching this for a while. For those of you who read the betaworks end of year 2014 book you know that we wrote about Russian bots invading twitter to spread propaganda. We didn’t know it would help elect a president and presage the whole Fake News shitstorm we now find ourselves in.
Two examples: A recent paper called Dank Learning shows how neural networks can create synthetic memes. We played a game on which memes were made by humans and which by machines — it’s impossible to tell.
And there is now technology that can create Deep Fake Video portraits — without getting too deep — this tech figured out to show lip movement that seems genuine. Lip reading was the technique that DARPA used to determine whether a video is fake or real.
For brands: Now you can create a video of Obama saying anything — which is scary for politics but what could mean that anyone could be a spokesperson for any product. And as humor becomes more esoteric does that means it’s easier for machines to trick people? Or do we still need creative people to make us laugh?
3. Motion Capture is Catching Up.
Amazon, Google, FB, Disney and more are all spending a lot of money innovation motion capture. All for different reasons but mostly flying under the radar. But the end result is that we are seeing a shift from the traditional green-screen and suits of the past decade, moving to much cheaper and quicker markerless technology, video to video capture and finally machine learning. We can now take a few minutes of a basketball player dribbling and then create further unlimited footage of basketball moves through Machine Learning.
For Brands: For someone who has been present on countless green-screen shoots this is exciting. About ten years ago I was making a tennis game for Sony Ericsson featuring, the then no.2 player, Ana Ivanovic. We needed her for a whole day in front of the green screen endlessly repeating serves, forehand, backhands and smashes. Incredibly expensive and incredibly boring for her. Moving forward if we just need 5 mins with Serena or Neymar then that’s a huge opportunity for brands to be more ambitious with their productions.
4. Listen Up. Podcasting ad revenue.
We have been looking at the audio sector for a while now. We were one of the first investors in Gimlet — the HBO of podcasting with hit shows like Start Up, Reply All, Crimetown and Homecoming. Anchor, the Podcasting platform was born at betaworks and we also invested in breaker. We see huge growth potential for the podcasting ad industry.
Few reasons; brands are pissed with Facebook, it now costs too much and their business practices are shady (although I wonder if the former was not true how much the latter really matters). We’ll see a shift back to TV and more traditional media — but those are expensive and take too long to produce and get feedback on. Advertising within great podcasts is a happy medium. It’s quick and cheap but also if you work with the right people high quality.
For Brands: Right now there are a few formats, a normal radio ad, presenter read or interviews with brand spokespeople. But I see so many different ways to experiment here. And most of the podcast producers are new so are up for trying things. The other thing that is interesting is that entertainment companies are turning podcasts into movies and tv shows. Gimlets’ homecoming is launching as an Amazon show with Julia Roberts, their first podacst Start Up was an ABC show. So the idea that you test something (for relatively low investment) as a podcast, and if it pops, turn it into something bigger should be interesting to any creative person.
5. Chat Roulette is Back! Badoo Video Dates.
Badoo, Europes biggest dating app, is launching video dating. The thought being that because the chat is linked to your profile there are less bad actors and it prevents catfishing (people pretending to be other people). I guess you could use some of the stuff we just talked about motion capture and deep fake video portraits to create a fake video you but that seems like a way off. The key here is synchronicity . The live aspect.
We just launched our fourth accelerator camp — so far bot camp, voice camp, Vision Camp and now live camp. So have five new companies all working in that space. With hits like HQ, Twitch and even Peleton, we think live interaction is something to keep an eye on.
For brands: I’m fascinated to see how brands handle this live experience. Many moons when I ran digital at Saatchi we did a brand experience for Cadbury Creme Egg on Chatroulette — it was a ton of fun, but the market has matured. It will be fascinating to see some of the more confident brands making content for these live experiences.
Again — take a listen to the whole podcast for the larger discussion and some great questions.
And check out other episodes of the podcast. You can subscribe here. We hit on some great topics including designing for blockchain, building experiences for instagram and why you should delete your social media accounts.
Thanks again to Suzana, Dan, Alex and Richard for taking part and sharing their wisdom.
