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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Digital Marketing Predictions for 2018
00:24:32
2018 Digital Marketing Predictions, Artificial Intelligence,AI, Voice Search, Virtual Reality, VR, Augmented Reality, AR, Oculus Go, Facebook Spaces
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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B
And I'm Daniel Rawls.
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And today, Daniel, we're going to be talking about future trends. It's January. Happy New Year, everybody. We're back. We're going to be talking about exciting futuristic stuff.
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B
Wow, that was pretty enthusiastic for the new year.
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A
I am very excited.
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B
Gone slightly red as you've said that as well. That's quite amazing. Happy New Year everyone. We are going to talk about Digital Marketing Trends 2018. Everyone does these and as normal, we're going to go through them. Kieran is going to show puppy like enthusiasm for some of these and I'm going to be miserable and cynical as normal, basically. So there are some things there I totally believe in. Now you might be aware that we. I normally write a blog post on my predictions for the year ahead. Yeah, I've got a pretty awful hit rate, I have to say. So not that I've been wrong, but actually they take everything seems to take longer than I would like it to. So some of the stuff I was predicting like two years ago is now. Oh, look, that's come to fruition. All of a sudden you're ahead of yourself.
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A
It's like all the great, you know, foretellers of the future.
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B
Maybe that's it.
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A
Even Nostradamus.
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B
Maybe that's it.
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His stuff's only still happening now.
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So maybe that's it. Maybe I can decide, I'll say something now. In 400 years it might happen.
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Nostradamus, digital marketing world.
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I wasn't expecting it to go in this direction, but okay, so let's look at a few of these. So the first one, you've heard loads about this. We've spoken of it before, machine learning. I do actually think this year we're gonna start to see this in practice a lot more, but not in the.
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Way that people think from the Isle of Wight. Daniel, what is machine learning?
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So you've heard people speaking about artificial intelligence before and artificial intelligence takes people's thinking in the wrong direction. Cause we get this assumption, we're gonna have these intelligent agents that we can speak to. And as I've mention that we're not there yet. I mean, if you've used Siri, you'll know it's good, but it's not a genius yet. It's growing pretty quickly, getting a lot smarter. But machine learning is basically computers recognizing patterns in data that we wouldn't necessarily see ourselves. So you've got it on your phone already probably, if you go to your photo app and it will recognize your face and it will group together pictures of you or your family or your kids or anything else. And for example, it's clever enough now if I go in and type the word dog into the search box, then it will show me pictures of my dog and Eddie the Beagle will appear of all the pictures and even in videos. So it's pretty clever. So you've got. That's an example of machine learning. It's recognizing patterns, it's matching them together. Google have come out and said they are increasingly using machine learning to place ads. So not just you set a target demographic and that's who your ads are shown to. But when you say things, I want more people like these people. These are my best customers. Here's some data. I want more people like that. So we're starting to see this machine learning coming into advertising. And what it should mean is our ads are better placed based on things that we might not even be aware of and the subtleties of user journeys that we're not even aware of.
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A
It's a shame in a way because I think the whole industry focuses on the advertising prospects and kind of, oh, more opportunity to bend people's minds and force them to do these things like get sales in and stuff. And actually there's a lot more to it than. I kind of slightly blame Google because obviously advertising is very important to them, 90 plus percent. Yeah, it makes sense. They're putting a lot of weight behind that. But actually some really other great examples out there. So I was at the IABM conference in the autumn and they had really interesting team there from Microsoft. In fact, I'm really hoping we might be able to hook up with them for a podcast interview specifically on this. But one of the things they'd applied machine learning to was video. They've got a brilliant.
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B
This is amazing.
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Yeah, a really brilliant little system where you can pull your video in and basically it analyzes all of the video content and it will actually machine learning. If it spots any graphics with text and names that crop up within the video, it annotates that onto the video. It puts all the different clips into different little annotated blocks. It'll even like you do kind of Big Brother style when they leave the house and you get my best bits. It'll even kind of edit together best bits of and highlights of your video. And I think this kind of technology, it opened my eyes to the fact that actually machine learning can do a lot of the heavy lifting. It's still not good enough to just replace people, but it sort of gives you kind of superhuman powers. And they were talking about, you know, not just video, but actually they're already beginning to build some of this stuff into Microsoft Office. Imagine, imagine what you could do in Microsoft Office if things were, you know, if you were given superpowers to sort of get a lot of the heavy lifting. Lifting done. It's quite exciting.
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B
It is. But if you look back and look at what we did with assistants previously, we had Paperclip within. That was. That's where it started. It was just scripting.
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He gets a bad. A bad name, but he's progressed.
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And we're hopefully at a much more advanced place, but we're not there yet. I'll give you another example. There was a Harry Potter book written by an artificial intelligence. We'll put the link into notes. It's hilarious. It makes very little sense. And then if you look at the Microsoft Tay Twitter account, which I mentioned before, Taylor's an artificial intelligence Twitter account. And it's basically trained by what people say to it. And that is one of the challenges of neural networks. People say some horrible things on Twitter and it learned pretty quickly to say very, very offensive things. And it within 48 hours had become a sexist, racist, homophobic, genocidal maniac.
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A
But no, Daniel, no. This is the new year and we need to be more positive about this stuff. So there are gonna be examples out there where it hasn't worked. But I'm filled with enthusiasm. I'm not gonna let you do this in this ep. We have to stay focused on the future, Daniel. Future.
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B
I actually think that machine learning we will start to this year because for practical but not having the same expectations when we say artificial intelligence. So onto another one. You are going to see more of this year as well. Augmented reality. So think back to Pokemon Go year and a half ago, the first really big mainstream augmented reality game. Microsoft are calling this mixed reality. They've released their HoloLens, which at the moment is expensive and quite chunky, but it's kind of getting out there. What was interesting to me is that Apple have come through and built a augmented reality toolkit for developers into one of the latest versions of the iOS operating system. So we are going to start to see lots of augmented reality apps and it's becoming a lot easier to build them. So the idea that you point your camera at something and it can recognize things and overlay Them. I know at least four of our big clients are building things with this at the moment as well. So it's going to be big, it's going to be really interesting. And actually Tim Cook from Apple came out and said he doesn't really like virtual reality because it's too, you're too closed off from the world. Whereas augmented reality offers lots of opportunities. So I think, yes, we're going to see loads of growth as well now with virtual reality. Let's just talk about some of the things. So Kieran identified something really interesting in some notes that we saw from Facebook and then I'm going to talk about that a little bit in my viewpoint.
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Yeah. So basically Facebook have been working on a. Well, they famously purchased Oculus.
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So we had the Oculus Rift, which was the initial virtual reality headset they were developing.
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They purchased it for unknown millions of pounds. But one of the interesting things, you can actually go out and get the. There's quite a few transcripts of the Facebook financial calls. I find them really, really interesting reading. And at the end of 2017, last quarter call, really interesting discussion from Mark Zuckerberg.
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So these are basically like board meetings and then a kind of the minutes or the notes and the board meetings and calls kind of equivalent.
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That's right. But he gives an outline of, you know, what they're up to, where they're going, what they think is going to be going to be big. And he gave a major pitch to something they're calling Oculus Go. Oculus Go is a completely self contained headset which immerses you in virtual reality. And I think what's exciting about the Oculus Go is one, it's not tethered to any other device. It literally is. You pop it on your head and.
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It'S like the Hololens.
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Yeah, yeah. But unlike the Hololens, the Oculus Go is going to retail at $199.
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So I cannot see at the moment how the hell they're going to do that. So I'm really interested.
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Well, he's talking to his financial team and saying that it is going to launch in the first quarter of 2018. So presumably we may well see this very soon.
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Now. What's really interesting to me is that that is a game changer if something for $200 is able to do virtual reality. I'm going to say a couple of things. First of all, quality. You're not going to have the very latest tech. One of the problems with virtual reality at the moment is that you need Huge processing power to do anything that exciting with it. So if you look at the new version of the PlayStation, the Xbox One X that's been brought out with the anticipating that's going to be their virtual reality machine. Because essentially what you're doing is you're creating graphics that can react in near real time to your movement and things like that. But you've got to then do it twice because you've got to do it in two different screens at the same time. So we're used to a certain level of graphics on a games console or computer. We basically then output that twice to two different screens doing two different things. So from a processor point of view, it's hugely time intensive and power intensive. If you're doing more basic things, then maybe that's possible. So there was something else for Facebook you were looking at?
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Yeah, so there was a really interesting demo that they did at a recent conference where they basically they've got like a 3D conferencing platform.
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So it's like a virtual meeting, right?
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Yeah, virtual meetings.
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But you can do that with your headsets on as well. And you get little kind of cartoony characters that represent you.
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You can go along and look at a video of this if you go to facebook.com spaces and I think this is quite clever. What they've got is it's virtual reality, but they've almost got an avatar style image that goes over you when, when you're in there. So it's not, it's not unlike various other. There's lots of kind of cartoony avatar type building platforms out there. But you get to create your own avatar. And I think what's interesting about that, if it was literally live video, people don't like that because that's a little bit too close to the mark. But actually having an avatar makes it sort of safer and they, they go on all these experiences within this. Have a look at the videos on Facebook spaces. I think it could be really, really popular.
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I disagree. So I'll tell you my logic behind this show.
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Interesting.
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If you look at a couple of things. First of all, FaceTime, some people use it, most of us won't. Because actually, and I know you just said you didn't, you know, video itself is a bit, there's a bit too.
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Exposed, but that's what I think.
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Well, exactly.
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But then it's not you, it's a virtual you in a virtual space.
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Now I'm just wondering what that adds if you let me just give you another example. So, and I'll try and draw the conclusion to these things. Google Translate, really clever. And there's an app on the phone. You speak into it, it translates it and it says it out loud to the person you're speaking to. Okay. And then they speak back. It translates it. And so if I'm sitting there with a taxi driver in a foreign country, I can use the phone and we can have a conversation. It works. Google came out and did the translation headset. So you put your earphones in and it can translate in near real time what people are saying to you like a Babel fish. Right. That's exactly what everyone's been saying. That sounds great, doesn't it? Sounds brilliant. Doesn't work because it doesn't take into. It does work, but it doesn't take into account human interaction. Having a phone in between makes it clear to the other person that I am translating using the app. So they wait and they speak and then I wait and I speak and we have this kind of two way thing. When I've got the earphones in, they don't know when I'm waiting, when they should be speaking. They can't hear the translation. So for the way people interact, it kind of misses it. And it's tech for the sake of tech. It doesn't think about human interaction, the virtual reality headsetting, how people interact. I think it's going to be a bit of a gimmick at the beginning that you go, I think it will in the long term have a huge impact. But I think at the moment the expressiveness of what you add in terms of interaction by doing that doesn't counter enough. The hassle of two of you having to have the kit, put the kit on, connect up. So I think yes is a proof of concept. No is actually being practically used.
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A
But what I found fascinating was on the call they very much state that Facebook sees it, what Facebook sees its mission as. Ooh, on the edge of my seat, what are you trying to do? And they very much see that they're just trying to bring the world closer together. And actually really interesting. I think if you take a look@facebook.com spaces, take a look at how they've interpreted how they're going to, going to do that. I think it'd be really interesting to see how it plays out. Now, depending on how it, how it plays out, is it going to be a phenomenal success and get wide user adoption or is it going to be an unmitigating disaster? I don't know. But I'm really interested to see.
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Yeah, me too. I agree, I agree. What I would say is that what we can see is where this is going to go now. It might be a year, it might be 10 years. I don't think it'll be 10, I think it'll be a lot sooner than that. But actually when computer power goes up, the price of technology comes down. When we can do virtual augmented reality very quickly, very efficiently at low cost, the opportunities are kind of endless. It's incredible. But we're moving towards it.
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So I'm going to go one step further with this and say that if it does take off we could all be facing a major problem. That problem being that the current Internet as we see it kind of all interacting websites, flat screens. Yeah. Websites in particular are going to look horribly out of date and not really live up to people's expectations as the tech develops really, really quickly. So you could have this situation where big brands have invested a lot of money in the latest e commerce website and it doesn't support all of this new tech and kind of consumer expectations of 3D environments. Do you think that could happen or am I just.
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I think there's risk like a storm.
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Out of a teacup.
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I think still minute teacup, still my inner tea cup.
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I'm mixing my mix.
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So the. I think the reality is I don't want an all singing or dancing graphical experience when I'm buying stuff online. I want quick and efficient. Yeah. So actually depends on what you're trying to do. And actually if I look at my social media experience, I want my social media experience to be unobtrusive and a little bite sized little moment away from my reality. So I'm at 3pm in the afternoon in the office. I'm a bit bored of what I'm doing. I'm gonna have a little scroll through social media. I don't have to put a headset on. And I think how many of us have got 3D TVs that never put the 3D specs on? Because actually it just gets in the way a little bit and it's not worth it. I think there's something of this in both of it. I think where it's gonna end up is somewhere quite different to where we are now.
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Probably not this year though, right?
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No, that's it. That's it. Right. I say so I think it's gonna take a while. So anyway, let's move on from virtual reality voice search virtual assistants. Lots of you for Christmas will have got a little thing that goes in your room that you can say thing, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow? And thing put some music on. And I'm in mixed feelings about this.
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I don't get it. I really honestly, I've watched all the adverts and I just think, yeah, why, why do I need to ask my device to play music or to change TV channels or to do any of the other rather pointless things? A novelty factor. Yeah. But seriously.
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B
But voice search is growing. Yes. And this is kind of part of the same thing. So all the evidence would suggest that voice search is going phenomenally and it's become a significant percentage of traffic for a lot of search engines. And I can kind of understand that on your phone. I can understand there are limited capabilities things. And I also think that maybe I am maybe not quite the right target audience on this because I don't use voice search at all at the moment. But actually the stats are showing us growth in this kind of area as well. I think we're still in that stage of this is a little bit of a gimmick still as well.
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Well, I don't think the ad guys have really picked up on the proper use cases because they haven't been developed yet. But I've started to see some things come through. So there was quite an interesting article I was reading today about an in car navigation system that worked off the back of the kind of Amazon Echo type technology. And you can see that would make, that would make sense, right.
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In car all of a sudden it makes sense now I have a nice car and it's got voice recognition to doing things in it and it's the most infuriating thing in the world, the voice recognition and this is like a top mark brand whereas actually voice recognition on Siri or on the Amazon Dot and things like that is light years ahead of this. So actually automotive manufacturers need to get on this. That definitely makes sense. And we're seeing a lot of change. The automotive and this is one of the kind of trends as well. I think we'll see is that automotive companies are starting to realize they're going to be squeezed pretty tight pretty soon now. Driverless cars may be a number of years away, probably going to get here quicker than we expect because of Tesla and people like that. But what it started doing is making automotive manufacturers think about their cars, the technology integration of those technologies, media within cars and all those kind of things a lot more. So I think you're going to start seeing this kind of voice search stuff in cars a lot more quicker than we would have expected before just because they've switched onto it. So yes, there is growth in voice search. More people are using it. I think you'll see continued but steady growth in that. But the virtual assistants, I think because there's more of them out there, the investment in the artificial intelligence will grow. So I think that's it will move faster is my one. Is my one kind of prediction for things as well. But I think cars will change as well. Now the other thing that was interesting is Apple at this point are it looks like buying Shazam if they haven't actually just already completed it as well. So Shazam, if you're not familiar they are the music recognition platform, where are they going to go that? Well, they've clearly got some plans to integrate that in with Apple music and those sorts of things as well. What Shazam have got that Apple haven't got is years of data as well of what people are listening to and where and those kind of things as well. What's interesting with Shazam is that with Shazam you can actually scan like augmented reality and QR codes and those kind of things as well. So we'll just see what happens with that.
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Yeah, I mean I have some really interesting uses of Shazam. I've seen advertisers tying it up with Shazam. This advertising.
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Yeah. And I experience if it's built into your phone anyway, suddenly that makes a.
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Lot more sense as well.
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Now one thing I've been predicting now for three years. Three years and I've suddenly started seeing it in more places, which is good. It is, yeah. I've just got it wrong three times and this will be the right one. Beacons. Right. Beacons are location based devices. You closer you get to them or how far away from you the beacon knows and you can integrate it into your app. They work really well in museums. You get the app for the particular museum and as you get closer to a particular piece of art or anything else as well, it knows where you are and it can trigger something on your device. The cost have come down. But what's really interesting is the cost of developing the apps to do these has become a lot simpler as well. So suddenly we started to see these in quite a few of the retailers we're working with. So if you haven't looked at beacons already, take a look at beacons if you've got any physical spaces. Makes a big difference. Last one. This, I mean this is a prediction from Kieran from about 20 years ago.
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I'm uncontrollably excited.
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And it's something that he loved and it failed. And now he's found another way of sneaking it in. So why don't you tell us what it is?
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So quick response codes, but it's not.
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Really quick response code.
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Quick response codes are back. This is a quick QR code. Response code, yeah.
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Qr.
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Well, it's. I'm not going to call it a QR code.
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Good. Because it's not.
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Because a QR code is a very specific thing in my mind. It's the funny little square black and white dots that I loved and everybody else thought were a bit of a joke. And I've had ribbing for many years from you on this and I got very excited because there's a new kid on the block. Danny. There's a new kid on the block and it's called a snapcode.
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B
So that's that. I should say. Snapcode's been around for a while and it used to be you got a snapcode, you scanned it and it would allow you to find other Snapchat accounts. So I could create a Snap code and then you could find my Snapchat account. Because discovery in Snapchat is a bit of a problem.
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A
But it really upsets me because I got excited by that. But all you could do is find other people's accounts. But what they've opened up and actually they did this back in January. I'm a year behind, kind of January a year ago, 2017. So last year they opened it up. So actually you can create a snapcode from any URL or, or app and I think that's really, really exciting. So if you go along to scan.snapchat.com this is log into your Snapchat chat account. This is where you can create the codes. Very simple interface. You enter in the URL, you make the SnapCode and SnapCodes, if you, if you've seen them, they're kind of cool. They've got lots of little black dots in them, but they're all placed around the Snapchat ghost icon, which is white. And the reason why that's designed, it gives you white space to do something graphical with your Snap code. So actually you can create a quick response code, a snapcode, in this instance, a proprietary brand of it. And you can put your own kind of graphical representation or brand or imagery in the middle of the ghost. And to do that, I found it's best to download it and edit it within Photoshop. You can do a little bit more with that. We produced one recently for the podcast went live on Spotify, which we're very excited about. So if you have Spotify, you can search for digital marketing podcast, you'll find us there. But when we go out to conferences and things wanted to create a cool and funky way of getting to that Spotify link and the easiest way of doing it was to create a snap code that did this.
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B
So I think what's interesting is that this is going to introduce the scannable codes to a whole new kind of generation of people. If you're targeting an audience over the age of 25 at the moment, that's not really going to work because Snapchat is a younger demographic. But if you're targeting that demographic, it hasn't got the whole problem that oh, I have to install a QR code app. They've already got the Snapchat app and they know what to do with them.
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A
It's better than that because QR codes had this stigma around them. They got a bad name for them, a lot of marketers abused them, use them really badly. Linked to non mobile websites, linked to even some big brands got caught out linking to their websites on tube stations where there was no Internet access. So the whole thing just kind of failed and it became a real joke. A snapcode is cool. You know, they don't have that and I don't think yet enough people realize that actually you can do all sorts of fun, funky things with them, but you have got a fairly significant user base that have Snapchat on their devices and I think this opens up lots of possibilities. There's one other thing I wanted to mention about Snapcodes which is once you've created them within your account, you do get some interesting analytics and how many times they've been scanned. Okay, that's great.
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B
So we can prove where it's been working on.
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Yeah, that's not. You always have to tie it into your analytics and it's a bit fiddly to to do, but that is in there. So yeah, take a look at it.
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B
So there you go. There you have our predictions. 2018 QR codes are going to take off. Virtual reality is not going to happen and voice search doesn't really work. Maybe it's not quite that cynical. But anyway, there's some things for you there. So take a look at some of those new technologies. We're going to do some more predictions on the website as well. So go and take a look@targetinternet.com we're also analyzing what we and other people have predicted in the past and whether or not we were right. And then we're doing a bit of summing up everyone else's predictions as well. So get over to the blog on Target Internet and you'll see that as well.
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Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free Benchmark Skills Test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide to help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date. Just visit targetinternet.com or forward/ Benchmark.