Digital Darwinism

by Tom Goodwin

  Pervasive internet

  If you ask a typical 60-year-old how much time they spend online, they may say three hours per day; ask a similarly representative 40-year-old and they may say they use the internet for four hours a day. Generally speaking younger people spend more time per day online. A 20-year-old may say they spend five hours per day online. Yet if you ask a 14-year-old, and trust me I have, many times, they go quiet. They can’t answer the question. The youth of today don’t have an ‘online’ because the concept of ‘offline’ doesn’t exist. Remember when we typed into chatrooms the letters BRB (be right back)? The youth of today don’t do this because they never leave.

  Consuming is just part of being alive; it’s not a behaviour, it just is. We misunderstand the world around us because of our memories and the way we’ve slowly added things to adapt to the new world. My first experiences of the internet came around 1997 at university. I remember hearing about e-mail, being given an account and much like the first person on the planet with a telephone, wondering just who it was that I could write to. It was a long time before I could get my parents to get an e-mail account or even the internet. What would it do? We’ve been fine until now. E-mail was confusing and new, and even now they share an e-mail account, because that’s what addresses are: the place you both check mail.

  Have you noticed today how rarely we see on/off buttons? Most devices like TVs, phones, tablets, sound docks, are things in a permanent state of quasi on. The internet is the same. We now have the notion of ambient connectivity. We’ve always assumed connected things had screens, modems ‘went’ online; increasingly, if things have power, it’s almost always the case that they have potential to be connected. From lightbulbs to art frames, toasters to cars, house keys to phones, TVs to clocks, speakers to thermostats, the world is one of connected devices. We’re moving from items to systems; it’s less about the individual item and more about the holistic ecosystem. What increasingly will make things special is how they work with others and how they create solutions rather than do things. The smart home is a long way off, but when it comes together, works seamlessly around us, it will bring about a profound shift: thermostats that talk to automatic blinds to keep apartments cool and save energy, lighting that knows where you are, turns off and on as you leave, and changes colour and mood based on the time of day and your calendar.

  What can companies do about it?

  1. Change our mental model

  We have constructed and adapted companies as the internet has developed by adding things on. When the internet first arrived, we bolted on ‘interactive’ departments and then relabelled them ‘digital’ departments. We found new people who understood the technology best, created small teams, kept them at arm’s length and invited them to some meetings. As the world evolved we repeated the same process, getting ‘social’ departments, then ‘mobile’ departments, each with their own area to work in, P&L and clients or agencies to serve or be served. We built a structure that still insists on seeing the world from our memories. We still talk about e-commerce or m-commerce when it’s just how people buy things in the modern world. We didn’t call catalogue shopping ‘phone’ commerce; how things get to people isn’t interesting. We talk about streaming TV vs linear TV, a distinction that means nothing to people. We label some channels social media, when pretty much all media is now social and all social media is essentially just media to people.

  People today do not do ‘e-banking’; they pay people, scan cheques, make deposits, regardless of the pipes used to convey information. They don’t do digital photography, or online dating, or buy e-tickets to events; they take pictures, date people and see shows. Spotify is different to radio in that you can control what you get, not because it comes to you via a different infrastructure.

  We have to entirely change our mindset, work around people and not channels, explore better ways to serve people and take their money in return, find better ways to make advertising that flows across screens and contexts and not focus on how things get to them. As discussed earlier, our companies need to be structurally aligned around people, not delivery technologies.

  2. Form bridges

  We talk a lot about ‘online’ as if it’s still 2005. People today don’t go online. We don’t plug in modems or dial up. We don’t spend time surfing the web, e-banking or online dating. Being online is just life in 2017. We continue to keep trying to segment life as digital or non-digital. We talk about ‘digital influencing’ and ‘mobile influencing’ 56 per cent and 37 per cent of purchase decisions, respectively (Marketing Charts, 2016). When we do so, it shows we have no clue about people today.

  Our reality isn’t augmented with headsets; it’s augmented with information. Our phones serve as the primary conduit, but the additions of the Amazon Dash button, Google Home speaker, tablet or laptop and others have created a truly hybrid world. The next stage is to better bridge reality with the lattice of the internet. For example, while I’m not quite as excited about voice as many are, TV ads that instruct you to ask Alexa to order something are interesting and reduce complexity. As Alexa, Siri, Bixby are built into phones and devices, you’ll soon be able to speak and get help anywhere.

  Geolocation is another example. In theory, your phone could show train times as you wait on the platform. Your gym app could open as you walk into its lobby. Airlines could check you in as you get to the terminal. When the real world and online are connected by where we are, we can automatically be served relevant information and outputs.

  QR codes could be the solution

  QR codes have dominated life in Japan since the late 1990s, and have since taken off in China, but have never really been adopted in the West (Loras, 2015). Nobody understood what they were or what to do with them. They required a special app to be downloaded or had to be embedded in another app. The mixture of no clear use cases, no existing behaviour, and friction to download has killed any attempts. I actually tried making the West’s first QR code ad campaign in 2005, but I think they were only scanned twice (and that may have been by me).

  QR codes have many advantages. They are free to use, free to make and free to distribute – it’s just an image that can be created dynamically in seconds. They can be featured anywhere you want: in magazines and stores, on clothing and signs. They can be encrypted, secure, and thus used for payments. By their very nature, QR codes create a virtuous circle in reverse.

  Spotify now embeds QR-style codes in their app so that you can share music in seconds, and Shazam uses them to make business cards come to life in AR. More recently, Apple has embedded automatic scanning of QR codes in the iOS camera function, and Google added them as a clear option on Chrome. We now have over one billion devices that can access them.

  If we can now find a way to leverage QR codes to make great experiences and reward people, the future could present fascinating opportunities for delivering real value to consumers and real ROI to brands across the customer journey. We could automatically convert awareness and consideration to purchase by creating print ads from which you can buy products directly. We could scan spirit bottles to see cocktail recipes with links to additional ingredients, and reorder a pair of jeans we love by merely snapping a picture of their label, thus driving additional purchase and retention.

  QR codes represent a vastly under-tapped technology when it comes to delivering true value to consumers across their journey, and missed opportunities for brands to create two of the most critical contributors to purchases: loyalty and advocacy; and increased touchpoints and reduced friction. When we look at what the consumer actually needs from technology like QR codes, we’ll deliver so much more for them and for brands.

  Create experiences that flow across devices

  Digital convergence now means that most devices are rather similar in nature. We once had single-purpose devices that did very different things. Radios, TVs, Walkmans, video players, answerphones. Things were all different, and each was a key part of an ecosystem: TVs and TV
remote controls with TV shows and TV transmitters and TV channels.

  Now devices are functionally very similar. Tablets are ostensibly big phones. Laptops are bigger tablets with keyboards. Smart TVs are bigger tablets but without touchscreens, even smartwatches have more in common with a tablet than a watch. Most of our commonly used items are essentially (pardon the expression) black mirrors: rectangular glass monoliths that display moving images, are connected to the internet, offer sound, and connect to each other with technology like Bluetooth. What’s fascinating about these separate items is not what they do, but the context used for their consumption. Tablets and laptops to some extent are primarily work-based devices to input data and get stuff done. TVs become lean-back screens, to let us sit more passively and be entertained. Smartphones become key glanceable surfaces to see micro-nuggets of information, but also (as yet mainly untapped) a way to interact with the real world, either as a payment band, a way to unlock hotel or home doors or even cars, or to act as boarding passes for planes, entry devices for secure offices, tickets for events. Our phone is increasingly not just the primary way that we interact with others, or acquire information, but increasingly serves as the entry point to other screens. It is the sun of our digital solar system.

  Intimate screens and data

  I’m not sure when data got big. Something must have happened a few years ago when we were not watching, or at night, when we passed an arbitrary marker of size. When we say ‘big data’, it appears we just mean more of it. We now have more sensors, measuring more things, and with more connectivity we can share it more readily. Greater processing power and cheaper storage means we can do more with it. Sounds great, but so what?

  It’s my opinion that the main power of data lies in informing and making decisions, and then evaluating the decisions we’ve made. Literally, that’s all data is for. When we talk about the size of data we celebrate the wrong thing. What we really need is the ability to make better decisions, faster and about more important things, and then optimize based on this. Big data is really about profound decision-making. In this context we can see that what really matters is the data’s robustness, its cleanliness, and its intimacy, not its size. Fortunately, changing consumption patterns are making this easier.

  The primary screens in our lives have changed over time. The first screen in our lives, in the late 1800s, was the cinema. A massive screen that we watched with many other people, that we sat far away from, and over which we had little control. We could either be in the movie theatre or walk out. The next screen invented was the TV screen, nearly 100 years later, and here we gathered closer to a smaller screen with fewer people, but we had more control, we could change channels and volume. Computers, both laptops and PCs, came next, a smaller screen to which we got a lot closer, and shared with only one or two others. On this screen we could go anywhere, we had the internet at our disposal, the most control we’d ever known.

  So far, the latest and newest screen in our life has been the smartphone. We see the exact same trend lines. It’s the smallest screen we’ve ever known, it’s the one that we watch from the shortest distance, typically a few inches away. It’s the one that we are most in control of. We can touch it, tap it, shake it, press harder and it will allow a much more tactile and immersive experience, but above all else it’s the most personal. This means at any moment in time your screen knows where you are, what you are likely to do, how you are feeling, who you know. It knows the weather, the time of day, your mood, your likes, recent searches; this device knows more about you than perhaps you do.

  When a TV repair person comes around our house we don’t mind leaving them alone. When our work computers are being updated, we’re a little more worried. Phones are different. Get a person to unlock their phone and pass to someone else for a few seconds and tension appears immediately. Phones are the most personal things we’ve ever known. Between the stress levels that can be detected in our voice, our activity levels from accelerometers, locations visited, barometric pressure recordings, social activity, browsing behaviour, our phones know everything about us. They can reasonably figure out the weather where we are, where we plan on being, what we’ve done, and to some degree what we’re thinking and need.

  In theory this trend should continue. We should have access to another smaller screen, one closer to us, measuring more intimate detail than anything else, more expansive and tactile in the experiences it can rely. It’s this theory that suggests that smartwatches or VR headsets will become the norm. For me it’s a big question about humanity. We have, without exception, hated technology on our face; from Google Glass to Snap Spectacles, our faces are too vital to be augmented until society moves on. I can see VR not as the next smartphone or the next TV set, but as a large niche within gaming, but nothing more. Smartwatches have a greater chance of success, but I can’t see them being fashionable. The real estate on many people is there to express who you are, not to suggest that you’re obsessed with your body’s metrics or that you need to know everything now. To some extent being disconnected, being demonstrably in the moment, will probably soon become the ultimate in status.

  Use the power of intimate data

  The first change comes from data. If we’re wearing watches, clever clothes and using sentient spoons, our heartbeat, moods, location, stress levels, calendars and search activity are all being recorded, shared and analysed. If we circumvent for now the obvious privacy concerns, we’re armed with the best data we’ve ever had. Forget big data. When you have intimate data, little else seems important.

  Target people at moments

  The ads of the future may be promoted routes in our cars, notifications on our smartphones that it’s about to rain and an Uber is close, or money-off codes for holiday resorts when sensors on our smartphones detect we’re getting stressed.

  Personalize communications

  There is no time in my life when I am less likely to buy some white trousers, a toaster or a flight to Los Angeles than after I’ve just bought these items, yet that’s precisely the time I see ads for these products or services.

  We can do better than this when more and more behavioural data is overlaid with checkout data, credit card data and recommendation engines. We will soon see a new era of personalized advertising. We’ll be shown ads for big-ticket items at precisely the right time, after we’ve been thinking about them for a predetermined period. We’ll be shown ads for items that work perfectly with our new white trousers. Technology is moving so fast that soon both the ad placement and the advertisement itself will become automated.

  We’ll see fully-rendered completely personalized video ads based on real-time pricing, real-time availability, the weather and thousands of other data points. The art director and copywriter team of the future is the algorithm and processor.

  One-on-one communications with instant messaging

  The fastest growing technology and behaviour the world has ever seen has been the incredible rise of instant messaging (IM). Its rapid growth has destroyed the text message business and put the power of instant, peer-to-peer communication in the hands of over 2.5 billion people around the world, though this is expected to grow to 3.6 billion by 2018 (The Economist, 2016). Yet few if any businesses or ad agencies seem to have noticed.

  The scant marketing conversation going on seems to entirely miss the point. Most companies see sponsored emojis or branded keyboards as the way to explore this world. Even less imagination seems to have been used by the myriad of companies hoping to inject advertising into our most personal conversations. In fact, this channel represents a whole new way to think about retail, customer service and how we experience brands and the notion of one-on-one customer relationship management. Collectively the advertising world spends around $600 billion per year putting messages out there. We hope that with all of this wondrous messaging and smart targeting people will click or buy or call up or find out more. The hope is that ‘people want conversations with brands,’ yet businesses o
ften refuse to offer e-mail customer services, let alone IM.

  A generation of people have grown up hating phone calls. Even those that grew up with them now prefer any form of brief written communication over verbal. In fact 72 per cent of people (according to a TeleTech study) think phone calls are the worst way to undertake customer service.

  There are several key unique advantages of IM over phone calls and e-mails:

  Secure: unlike e-mail, snail mail or even phone calls, IMs can be a guaranteed way to reach the specific, correct, single person. Using Touch ID, cameras or facial recognition to unlock phones creates the most secure platform we’ve even known. No more pin numbers or passwords; just frictionless personal, secure service.

  Asynchronous and immediate: nobody likes waiting for call backs or for slow computers. IM offers both immediate and asynchronous communication, which allows multitasking while the customer services representative investigates. It also stops dropped signal areas from interrupting calls and means customer services can work with several people at the same time.

  More informative: IM platforms allow messages to include location maps, images, videos, money, attachments and other rich items, which allow a far better conversational exchange. Want to see what shoes are left in stock? A quick IM makes it possible.