In Part 1 of the Future of Marketing we looked at what people are searching for around the future and the future of marketing. In Part 2 we looked at keeping target markets and goals in mind amidst the current explosion of channels and devices and the inability of platforms to keep up with it all.
In this third and final post, we’ll dive into the uber-geek promise land of the future - looking at what may be in store for us sooner than we know - things like reverse engineering the brain, computerized human telepathy, and two way communication between consumers’ brains and marketers.
Personal and Relevant is not the Future, it’s Now
Personal and contextual advertising is here, and becoming more granular and more ingrained in our surroundings every day. FourSquare is an iPhone app growing in popularity that allows people to “check-in” wherever they are, see who else is checked in there, any notes anyone has left about the place, and where their friends are checking in. Locations appeal to their FourSquare patrons by giving deals to frequent visitors, and by showing specials nearby. Personal and contextual promotion in action. Another app, UpNext lets you fly through a city and “see” what’s inside buildings. Ample personal and contextual advertising opportunity.
That stuff is already here. Now here’s the really fun part. What do the marketing and technology futurists, the Nostradamus’s of the information age, have to say about what’s in store for us? Here’s a few examples of where thought leaders think we’re headed in 2010 and beyond.
Ubiquitous Computing (and Ubiquitous Marketing)
Ubiquitous computing was coined by Mark Weiser in 1988, and is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s world. Wikipedia defines ubiquitous computing as “a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone “using” ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.”
Ubiquitous computing envelops concepts like ambient intelligence, ubiquitous learning, and context-aware pervasive systems. In short, this stuff makes the new iPad look like Fisher Price. Ubiquitous computing means your target markets are going to be accessible anywhere. Smart floors could identify and track people (including summoning assistance in the event of a fall), toilets could measure weight, fat, blood pressure, and heart beat, ubiquitous cities (U-cities) are even being built, like Korea’s New Songdo City where information systems like traffic, parking, hospitals, retail, and crime are linked, and your own personal RFID smart card controls your house keys, movie tickets, parking meters and more.
Can your radical creative marketing mind start to picture the opportunities? Don’t think of this as information overload, think of it as taking personal and relevant marketing opportunities to the extreme - truly to the individual.
Ubiquitous marketing is a term that is so new it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page as of this post (nor does ubiquitous advertising), but it speaks to marketing in an extremely relevant context – taking the concept of reaching the right people at the right time in the right place to a whole new level. It is two-way communication, at visible and invisible levels, all around us, all the time.
Consider providing a targeted online ad, knowing not only the consumer’s demographics, but also that they went to see an action movie last week, bought a high-performance bike, live in an A-frame in Tahoe, and booked a two-week camping trip to Yosemite. Would you put designer heels in front of this person, because her demographic profile that you currently have shows she’s a mid-income 23 year old girl?
Adam Greenfield (who visited us at Yahoo in 2006 and spawned the futurist fascination in me), wrote a book called Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing that explores the adaption and future of Weiser’s ubiquitous computing concept. Check it out for yourself.
Marketing Straight to the Brain
Did you know there are systems that can project a sound that only a specific person can hear? Imagine walking down the street in your home sweet U-city and when you’re within a block of a department store you hear a sound coming out of thin air that a pair of Adidas you’ve been trying to find are in stock at this store and on sale. Mix ubiquitous computing with Audio Spotlight’s hypersonic sound applications and you have just that.
How about getting TV commercial feedback from viewers by knowing what they’re feeling when they watch the ad, without consumer survey or online listening platform feedback? Already being done. Innometrics claims that of last year’s Superbowl ads, Careerbuilder.com had the highest engagement (this year’s results to come). They know this by measuring conscious and unconscious measures in the brain.
We put microchips in our pets’ necks to find them in case Fluffy should wander off and get lost someday. We’ve been experimenting with humans too, using the same technology (RFID) that U-cities are using. There have been tests on controlling human emotions through microchips, which is just downright scary when you put it in a marketing context, or worse yet, the possibility of being hacked. But awesome when you consider that microchip implants in the brain could help control the tremors in Parkinson’s Disease.
In 1998, Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, had a microchip implanted into the median nerves of his left arm, linking his nervous system directly to a computer in order to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. They created the first extra-sensory input for a human and the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans - a computerized telepathy of sorts. While he was at it, he also had the chip in his arm open doors at his lab and turn on the lights for him when he entered.
According to Ray Kurzweil, an eccentric futurist and author of The Singularity is Near, we will be able to reverse engineer the brain by the year 2019. In reverse engineering the brain, nanobots inside the brain could replace actual senses with virtual senses, replacing actual experiences with virtual ones. Brain microchip experimentation for controlling disease was happening in the 1960s. This implies that software could be (and according to Kurzweil, already is) downloaded straight to the brain. Progress is being made in controlling a computer interface by reading the brain, and the future of gaming could likely go this way (no more expensive TVs broken by Wii controllers!).
All of this suggests that the future of marketing and advertising hasn’t even begun the profound changes we will encounter in the coming decades. Imagine providing singly personal and contextually relevant ads to specific individuals in shopping malls, on street corners, in virtual realities, or better yet, zapped directly to the brain. Imagine getting your marketing data from signals sent directly to your desk from inside your consumers heads…
This is the kind of stuff Neal Stephenson fans drool over, the kind of stuff sci-fi movies are made of, and the kind of stuff our real life, near term future holds for us. You can prepare for marketing through the newly released, highly hyped iPad, but I suggest you start keeping an eye on RFID systems that will hold our valuable marketing information in the near future.
See you there.
