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CIM Digital Summit Special 2017: Gimmicks Vs Reality
00:24:53
CIM Summit Digital Marketing Podcast Special
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- [00:00]
Kieran Rogers
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to a CIM Digital Summit special of the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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Daniel Rawls
And I'm Daniel Rawls.
- [00:23]
Kieran Rogers
And today, Daniel, you're going to tell us a little bit more about what we have in store for everybody.
- [00:28]
Daniel Rawls
We do. So we are going to do a gimmicks versus Reality edition. But this is a special for the Chartered Institute of Marketing Digital Summit. So some of you will be familiar with the cim, some of you won't. But essentially we have the Digital Summit once a year. I'm hosting it and keynoting it this year. And actually Kieran's doing a talk as well about measurement. So we're going to give this away to people that attend the summit, but our podcast listeners will get this a little bit afterwards as well. And my keynote is really about gimmicks versus reality, and I wanted to give some, some kind of deeper insights to our audience about this as well. So there's kind of three topics I want to talk about. One is artificial intelligence, one is virtual and augmented reality, and the other one is some technologies that didn't quite make it, like QR codes. Oh, well, I know, I know. And we'll explain to those people that haven't listened to the podcast before about Kieran's obsession, some would say fetish, with QR codes. Let's start off with artificial intelligence. Is this a gimmick? Is this reality? Every conference you go to at the moment, there'll be someone talking about this. And I think what's happened is the wording and the titling has shot itself in the foot a bit with this one because it's a reality. But it's going to be a bit more subtle than we realize. So artificial intelligence would imply you're kind of talking to a Siri, like artificial intelligence that communicates with and speaks to you and appears intelligent. And the reality is it's not really about that. That will come into it and that will be part of it. But what this is really about is machine learning. And actually, Google have started to talk a lot more about machine learning than they are talking about artificial intelligence, because it puts it in perspective a lot better. And all that machine learning is is essentially computers analyzing data and recognizing patterns, then using that to do something with it. So a classic kind of example is if you've got a photo app on pretty much any platform now. But I mean, I use the Apple Mac one when you take your pictures, it will start putting them into groups and it uses facial recognition to work out this picture is of this person and also this picture is of that person and this picture is of that person. That's the use of machine learning. And then my photo out now is taken a stage further. And if I go out in Brighton where I live for a day with my family, it will then create a little photo album of the day saying fun in Brighton with the family. And it's kind of worked out that we're in Brighton because the location based data, it's worked out these people are my family because of the fact that I spend lots of time with them all the time. And then it's gone through and identified those faces are the same faces that I'm with all the time. So that's a classic example of machine learning. And within digital marketing there's huge amounts of opportunity for this kind of thing. So give you a couple of examples. Siri and other personal assistants. So the Amazon Echo and the Google One and so on are gradually getting more proactive. So the idea is that they don't just wait for you to request things, but actually they're learning about your patterns of behavior and they're trying to give you the right information at the right time. So if you've got an Android phone and actually on other devices as well, you'll notice if you go to the same office every day, when you get up to leave the office, your phone will tell you what the traffic on the way home is like because it's anticipating the journey that you're going to take because you take that all the time. So that's another example of this. Recently Google had a big event and pretty much all they spoke about was machine learning and a lot of that was about advertising targeting. So for example, rather than you going in and you targeting your ads and saying, I want someone in this location of this age demographic that has shown an interest in digital marketing, what they could do is they can analyze the landing page that I'm sending people through to and they can start to use machine learning with all the huge amounts of data they've got about people, what they're doing online, what they're interested in, to try and get me the best audience rather than just having some narrowly defined targeting. And so for example, when I see an ad, you might know I'm interested in digital marketing and you might do it by keyword. But the problem is you might give me some really 101 digital marketing basics. Whereas if I'm an Advanced practitioner or vice versa. If I'm really basic and you start giving me advanced stuff, it's the wrong type of content. But keyword matching wouldn't necessarily tell you that. Whereas machine learning, if it knew my behavior, the kind of searches I do, the websites I visit, the content I look at, could work out my level of knowledge and maybe give me more appropriate ads and not show ads to me that aren't relevant. When we talk about ad blocking because of irrelevant ads and things like that, this is the kind of technology that hopefully will get us past that and actually make much more intelligent choices. Now, it's perfectly possible the machine learning can go wrong. You might have seen that Microsoft launched up their artificial intelligence Twitter account. So basically it was a Twitter account that kind of pretended to be a person and tried to interact with people. And one of the things you find about machine learning is that what you put in is going to impact what you get out. So loads of people started to teach this, this Twitter artificial intelligence, really negative things. And essentially the Twitter account, within about 48 hours had become racist, sexist, misogynistic, trying to carry out world domination and basically looking for Armageddon, really. So, you know, it's an example of actually, if you teach an artificial intelligence or machine learning incorrectly, then incorrect stuff will come out. And. And it's also people trolling things online that can kind of do that. The other thing is why this is maybe seen as a gimmick is because things like messenger bots. So there was a lot of buzz recently about messenger bots and how they were going to be the way forward for customer service. And the idea is you'd have a little live chat button on your website, someone would click on it, and you'd have this bot that you could chat to and it would automatically kind of answer your questions and all those kind of things. That isn't really artificial intelligence. And neither was it machine learning of any sort. All it was was scripting that said, if you type this, respond with this. If you type this, respond with this. And it wasn't really learning and adjusting. So it was piped as artificial intelligence. It wasn't. But then four people got a bit of a negative view of the whole thing. So artificial intelligence, rather, I'd refer to it as machine learning. And it's an absolute reality and it's starting to come into place already. And actually it's really, really exciting because there's a lot more stuff we can do with this. There's also some dubious uses that people will get A bit upset with. So if you've seen Google Clips yet, Google Clips is a new camera from Google and it's a camera that decides when to take pictures and videos. So you don't sit there and take pictures, you just put it down somewhere and it will decide when to take pictures and videos. And it uses facial recognition and movement to learn when's a good time to take a video. The idea you have it somewhere and it will take pictures of all your memorable moments. Some people thought it was fantastic, some people thought it was completely inappropriate and there massively be privacy issues with it because you could sneakily leave it somewhere and take films of people and so on as well. So there'll be good and bad uses of this, but it is a reality and it's here now and it's only going to grow. And I think very much this is the future of digital marketing in the fact that it's the right ads at the right time, the right content at the right time. And more and more we're going to be relying on these algorithms and these rules to decide what content we show people. Why have a website that's kind of linear? Why not have a website that adjusts to the person that's using it? So I think it's quite an exciting one.
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Kieran Rogers
Interesting. So do you think there is a lot of confusion out there about the difference between machine learning and an artificial intelligence?
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Daniel Rawls
Yeah, it seems like it. I mean, it's one of those things like we're going to talk about augmented reality next and Microsoft have started calling it mixed reality, so people get a bit confused about the whole thing. So, yeah, I think there is, and I think that gradually it will become, you know, people just be used to the whole thing in reality. And I think it's just. It's just a bit of terminology, but yeah, it's there and it's going to happen.
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Kieran Rogers
It's potentially a dangerous misunderstanding to have, actually, because if it's really machine learning and people are expecting artificial intelligence, the whole intelligence thing is going to become a little bit of a joke quite quickly.
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Daniel Rawls
Yeah, I think that's it. And I think that, you know, it's from watching films and things like that, we expect these things to talk to us and interact with us like people. That's not necessarily what it's about at all. We'll see. And I think it's the industry's job to really teach people. And I think that's very much why Google are now talking about machine learning a lot more, so that people get an understanding of what it really means.
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Kieran Rogers
Let's talk about augmented reality.
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Daniel Rawls
Yeah. So, I mean, I want to try to work virtual and augmented reality. And I think, just to clarify, and guess we've got more terminology here, so virtual reality is the immersive stuff. You've got two screens in front of your eyes and you're immersed in it, whereas augmented reality is overlaying things on top. As I said, Microsoft has started calling that mixed reality. So we've got to be clear on the difference between the two. There's been lots of conferences I've been to recently where people have been saying, oh, virtual reality, we won't have TV soon. We'll all be sitting around just, you know, immersed in our virtual reality TVs, and, well, think about how 3D TV went. One of the things here we've got to think about is practicality, is that when I sit down and I want to watch tv, quite often it's a social thing as well. You're sitting with other people. You don't want to be inside a little box while you're doing that. I think for gaming, and that's already happening. I mean, virtuality started to take off for gaming. There's a couple of problems at the moment. One is that it's quite expensive. Two is that the processing powers of current games and game boxes, the kind of the Xbox and PlayStations and so on, isn't, I would suggest, quite up to the game. The new generation ones that are coming out are starting to get there, but it's quite processor heavy to run two screens at the same time and so on. But for gaming, it will take off, and it started to do that already. It started to take off on the PlayStation. We're expecting it to happen in the Xbox quite soon as well. You've got things like the Oculus that Facebook own, that's a headset that you can put on. But the problem with quite a few of these is they're tethered. And what I mean by that is you have to be plugged into a computer. So you've got a cable going from you through. Through to the device that you're plugged into. So it's not quite as free as it could be. But for hardcore gaming and things like that, Yes, I think that's going to be the beginning of it. I can already see with that there are some good potential uses, like if you're a home builder, if I can get you to put some virtuality goggles on and actually have a little walk around the space and see what your home might be like. It will give you a sense of space and things like that. If I can put a 360 degree camera somewhere, you put a headset and I can kind of virtually make you be somewhere. So it's quite interesting. There's some nice entry level entrances as well. If you haven't looked at Google Cardboard. Google Cardboard is a cardboard headset that you plug your phone into and it allows you to have an untethered virtual reality experience that you're not cabled into anything and you can look around and it's quite good fun. It does feel like a bit of a gimmick at the moment though, because the practicalities of doing gets in the way a little bit. But I think in some scenarios there's, there's some good opportunity for doing it where I think we're going to see huge levels of growth. And don't get me wrong, virtual reality will get there, but it will take off in gaming first, then maybe movies and things like that. Is in augmented reality, I think Pokemon Go, that happened maybe July last year when it really took off, is a little bit of an insight into how well this stuff could do. At its peak, it was making a couple of million dollars a day by people buying things within the game. And it's not really been exploited yet. And that's because again, processing powers of phones, the developer platforms being there. But the thing is the new version of iOS, the new Apple operating system, and Google have just released developer toolkits for this stuff. So the phone manufacturers are making it way easier for developers to create augmented reality games and apps and so on as well. I think that the Google Glass, they're glasses you could wear, which are really seen as a gimmick and lots of people kind of took the mick out of them. Actually it was a proof of concept that actually if that was a normal pair of glasses and you couldn't tell the difference between that and augmented reality and normal pair of glasses, more people would wear them. There's issues around battery and all those kind of things as well. But yeah, why not overlay a map? If I look at my phone 120 times a day, which is apparently what the average person is kind of doing, why not stop me having to look at my phone and just put a screen in front of my eyes? So therefore I've got what I want in front of me when I want it. Now a good insight into this, if you look at Microsoft HoloLens. So Microsoft HoloLens is their augmented reality glasses, they say they allow you to look at holograms. It's not quite a hologram and I think it's augmented, not, not mixed reality, but it's really terminology. But it's standalone, you're not tethered. It's got computer built into it, it's got 3D sound, it can overlay things on what you see. But they're seeing that at the moment as more of a business tool, not for gaming or anything like that. But actually if we're designing something, we can both look at a virtual object and walk around it and see it from different angles. So there's some, there's some great things to go. And have a look at the HoloLens website. We'll put it into the show notes as well. There's a great video explains what it is, but you only have to take that a stage further. So we've gone from looking at a phone screen to Microsoft Glass, then we've gone through to hololens and there is a prototype product, a kind of proof of concept, which is an augmented reality contact lens. So a contact lens that goes in your eye has a little transceiver of it and it can overlay things on top of what you see. Now, at this stage, it's very basic. It can overlay literally dots on top of your eyes and it's very thick. So once you've got any kind of close your eyes. So it's not, you know, it's not perfect yet at the moment. And maybe we're five, maybe we're 10 years from that being a reality, but that's the path we're going down already. Now, the thing I always say to people about this is that that really opens up some interesting questions because at the moment you might have an ad blocker and that ad blocker will block ads. I could have a constant ad blocker. I can ban TV ads, I can ban display ads. I could have a people blocker. If I'm really tired of you talking about QR codes all the time, Kieran, I can make you invisible.
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Kieran Rogers
That is a use case right there.
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Daniel Rawls
Yeah, exactly right. So. But jokes aside, the reality is, it's that, you know, if my, if my wife is sick of my face, maybe she can make me look like someone else. What does that mean? So when you're marketing in a world where people start changing their own reality, then we get into very, very sci fi kind of stuff. But that's the journey we're already on. You can see the progression in the technology. So maybe some of that stuff I'm talking about sounds a bit gimmicky and future stare at the moment, but the reality is we've already got virtual reality coming out for gaming. Augmented reality is now built onto operating systems. A lot of the phones we're using and I think we're only scratching the surface of it. So augmented reality is the next one to look for.
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Kieran Rogers
I agree. I think people have been doing this for a while actually, but with much, much more basic tools. You know, you only need to look at social media and how people kind of augment their lives into something that they really want to be. That's one of the joys of the online space, isn't it? You can be who you want to be. And actually if the tools get better and more powerful at doing this, I think we could see huge shifts in how they affect actual, actual behavior and performance.
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Daniel Rawls
But there's a dark side to this as well. We've got to be careful of that as well. I mean, if you look at people rejecting the life they won't want to be seen and how that affects other people's self esteem and all those kind of things as well, there's lots of concern about depression levels in teenagers going up and all those kind of things as well. So I think like any technology, it's about how we use it, the kind of safety nets we put in place and using it responsibly. And we're constantly having stories about how things on YouTube and search results in Google and Facebook and so on are all, you know, interfering with politics and personal relationships and all these kind of things. And I think, yes, that's good, that's going to be the case. It's a new technology and we've got to try and use it responsibly. And as marketers, it's our job to set the agenda, have these discussions and try and make sure people are using things appropriately. So, shall we move on to your favorite topic?
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Kieran Rogers
Been waiting on the edge of my seat.
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Daniel Rawls
So, failed technologies. I'm going to call this section. I know you disagree. That's what I wanted to say. So we'll start with QR codes. So for those that aren't even that familiar, because I spoke to a big group of people today about QR codes and two people are saying, what are they? It's the square codes that you scan and they, they make your device go somewhere or do something. They've replaced barcodes in many places. So if you buy a ticket quite often instead of Having a barcode on it, it will have a QR code on it. They, to me, make perfect practical sense because you can use it over a distance and there's not really many technologies that allow you to do something like that over the distance. But they didn't really take off in the way that I hope they would. Actually, I have to admit now, much as it pains me to say this to Kieran, is that actually I think QR codes are brilliant and I think it was a brilliant idea. Why do you think they didn't take off?
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Kieran Rogers
Couple of reasons. They look quite ugly and that is a, that is a pretty problem. Very interestingly, there were some formats that looked a lot better. Yeah, I don't know if any of you remember a thing called a snap tag. In many ways these were similar to the SNAP codes which we see on Snapchat, you know, where you put your branding or image in the middle of the code. But these were circular codes so they could be scanned. But they really did look beautiful. It used like a code ring rather than the square pattern of black dots you get in a QR code. And the platform had a back end with data mining capabilities in a really exciting technology and they definitely got around. The issues of ugly codes was a thing of beauty. Snap tags were just starting to take off around 2012, 2013, but then they disappeared somewhat suddenly at the end of the year. No real explanations. If anyone knows what happened to them, I'd love to find out. The key thing with QR codes, aside from them looking ugly, was they were never bundled in like a QR code reader was never bundled into the mobile operating system. So you had to go and get a separate app, which is hassle. And a lot of people just couldn't be bothered to do that. And actually when you look at how they were used, the world and his wife were all, and his dog, in fact, were all trying to put QR codes on things and they were just being implemented really, really badly. You know, the user journey and the user experience really, really wasn't being thought about at all. So you had, you know, lots of horror stories of, you know, quite big brands actually putting QR codes linking to websites on underground stations before the underground had a good Internet connection or wi fi. So completely pointless. Even if you went to the trouble of scanning it, you wouldn't be able to get to the site. So a bad use case. And then other people, you know, putting links to just, I don't know, on a bottle of wine you might have a link to the Homepage of the, the wine producers, like, so what, what do I get out of that? Wasn't it for me as a consumer, it was really, really bad. So actually I do blame marketers a little bit for this. And we use them really, really badly. And actually they got a bad name for themselves so much. So there's a, there's a brilliant little flowchart that went around the Internet with the question, should I use a QR code? Yes or no. And whichever way you went, the answer was always no.
- [18:52]
Daniel Rawls
Well, there was also, I think it was a book or something written that said every time you scan a QR code, a kitten dies. So people just didn't like them. I think there was a bit of an objection to them. Yeah, I agree with you. They were used badly. I don't think there's anything that really replaces them in the same way in that you could do it over a distance and you could put it into packaging and things like that.
- [19:12]
Kieran Rogers
The places where they did work were. We did quite an interesting interview on this with Microsoft Tag, which was a proprietary QR code format. Again, another one that died. That was really good actually, because with that.
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Daniel Rawls
Yeah, but I think proprietary is the problem there. It's never going to succeed because Apple and Google aren't going to embrace it and they're the two people who need to embrace it.
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Kieran Rogers
But what they found was that when marketers embrace the idea and actually made sure there was, you know, consistency in how they were being used and a really good user experience, it worked really, really well and they saw adoption go up and that makes sense.
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Daniel Rawls
Right.
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Kieran Rogers
So it was a great case study there of. It was a. It was like a plant nursery that had put them on all their Christmas trees and you could go and get information about the Christmas tree, who grew it, you know, how to look after it. And actually they started rolling this out across all of their products and because it was useful and it added value, hey, guess what? Consumers bought into it. And actually if you're a fan of that, that brand that became a thing that you did, it was quite, quite natural. So there was a, there was a reason for having it. You know, it wasn't just pointless and gimmicky, there was substance behind it. And actually with all of these technologies, that's really going to be one of the keys because once a consumer's had a bad experience, they don't generally come, come back as long as hassle. And yeah, I'm not impressed.
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Daniel Rawls
I think it's critical mass as well. I mean, if you look at something like Blipper. So just to take this stage further with Blipper still exists, I think about 50 million people have downloaded it when I looked at it last, which is a good number. But it's just not enough to get to critical mass that everyone uses it. Blippa, you didn't even need a QR code. Blipper would recognize an object or recognize a page in a magazine. And I think what we're going to end up with is that you're going to use augmented reality to do these kind of things as well. So it has to make practical sense, the use case, it has to get to a level of adoption. And because Apple and Google didn't build it into everyone's phone, it maybe didn't get to that as well. And then my expectation now is because it started to be this augmented reality stuff is built into people's phones, we're going to see a lot of this stuff starting to come back again and lots of conversations about it. And the classic example of that is NFC near field communication. The promise of NFC was you could touch your phone onto anything that had an NFC chip on it and it could trigger a behavior. So you could have an NFC sticker in a magazine, you could have it on a poster, you could have it as you walk into a store, all those kind of things. And the reality was that actually it has taken off, but people don't know because NFC is used for Android Pay and Apple Pay and things like that. But Apple haven't opened it up to other developers within the iPhone and therefore no one else is using it. Whereas in an Android phone you can have a business card that's got NFC chip inside it. And what it allows you to do is to touch your business card onto your phone and launch up your website or launch up your LinkedIn profile or similar. So I think this adoption into our mobile devices and that saturation point is really important. So we've looked at, you know, artificial intelligence. Is it gimmick reality? It's a reality, it's going to grow, but we need to think about machine learning and pattern recognition, more virtual augmented reality, massively. But it's the very early stages and that's why there's a little bit of, there'll be a few different platforms to go through, QR codes. You never know, we might see a resurgence. I'll put something into the show Notes, which is an experiment from Google and it's just o d e m.chromexperiments.com and it shows You a really clever use case for QR codes that allows you to connect your browser on your phone to the browser on your laptop. So it's hard to explain, but go and have a look at that as well. NFC is already there, but it's just because of the platform adoption and how it's being used by different, by different kind of manufacturers. So we're going to constantly have a flow of these things. When Snapchat came out. Is it gimmick? Is it reality? It's gimmick. It's not going to last. Well, it's changing and it's evolved and actually it is a reality for an awful lot of markets now. So I think that's our job as marketers. We need to look at the technologies, we need to take a proper analysis of them and we need to decide, should I experiment? And you have to test and learn and you have to work out, is there something I can do with this? And the problem is this. So, so say, for example, when Twitter came out, someone said, oh, should we try Twitter? You go, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. And you go off and you do a few tweets. Don't really put much strategy and effort into it. And you come back a three minutes like, did it work? Nah, not really. Go right, Twitter's no good. We're not going to do it anymore. You didn't do comprehensive testing. You didn't look at all the variables in terms of frequency and content and growing your audience. And you have to test all those things thoroughly before you know if something's going to work. So I think we need a more rigorous approach to these technologies. And it's about culture. It's about a culture of test and learn. So thank you for listening for this CIM Digital Summit special. If you're at the CIM Digital Summit, thank you very much. Hope this gets you to listen to the Digital Marketing Podcast more in the future. If you're a Digital Marketing Podcast regular listener, thank you for being here and we've put some extra resources in the show Notes from the CIM Digital Summit, so you get a bit of value there as well. So thank you for listening and we'll speak to you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast.
- [24:13]
Kieran Rogers
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mention, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show. We would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes. Or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.