Marketing is on the cusp of a major shift, as technology continues to transform the way we live, work, and consume. In this article, we'll explore how technology is driving the future of marketing, and what it means for businesses and marketers.
Introduction
Technology shifts pave new experiences in our way of living which further entrenches the physical, psychological, social, and cultural dependencies on those technologies.
With an ever-increasing amount of information being consumed, more data is accruing about us, representing our persona in a more accurate, digital format.
A new generation of apps is combining deep learning (AI) with ultra-fast big data processing in order to better predict our exact needs and desires.
Harnessing these technologies, mega-marketing platforms will eventually create a closed-loop advertising ecosystem capable of automatically matching products, services, and experiences with customer needs.
The classic marketing spiel of driving awareness for products, services and brands, or fighting for intent capturing will become redundant.
From hunters to hunted: if marketers today hunt customers for the products or services they promote, the future of marketing entails products, services and brands will be hunted by the mega marketing platforms, on behalf of the customers.
A new form of digital marketing is formed. So what will marketers do?
In this article, we will try to analyze the causes and enablers to why marketing morphs so dramatically in the future and then try to take a glimpse into how it will look like.
From Hunters to Hunted
We live in a marketing 2.0 era. An era of multi-device, multi-channel touch-point. Where marketers promote products, services, brands and experiences over multiple marketing platforms, trying to reach out to as many customers as possible, build awareness and ultimately drive revenues. In the 2.0 era, marketers hunt customers by buying or earning exposure through search, social platforms, media buying, TV, and other online and offline mediums. All in an attempt to catch the attention through feeds, competing ads, and generally, digital content clutter.
Comes the day when instead of businesses trying to hunt customers for their attention or share of wallet, technology will be so powerful that giant marketing platforms will become the hunters, hunting products and services fitting human beings (i.e. our customers). Meaning, marketing platforms will crawl the web, scoring services and product relevancy and will be the ones deciding which specific ones to suggest to each of us.
In the deepest sense, marketing platforms will be much less serving advertisers and become really a end-to-end solution for its users - our customers. I call it, the era of Marketing(x).
The Cause: Psychological, Social, Cultural, and Physical Drivers
The integration of technology into our lives is material. In some aspects, we are already dependent on it to maintain key aspects of our way of living. In the future it’s going to be very hard for any of us to find any aspect of our life which is not dependent on technology, and that's because of our inherent physical and psychological human traits. Here are a few:
The inherent laziness of human beings (i.e. energy preservation). We long for convenience, cutting back chores in our life. We have a need to be guided and expect a faster fulfillment of our desires.
Our desire to keep ourselves surrounded/connected (physically and virtually) with people similar to us and that make us feel good about ourselves.
A faster pace of how we conduct our lives and the expectancy from our close environment and workplaces to become hyper-productive and efficient.
The cultural shift in life moving from materialism to experiential.
Entrenched understanding that information is free. Wanting to be informed and to inform, means privacy is not a boundary, as long as:
It's not turning against oneself, or;
It not applying the notion or actually materially bounding one to a specific service. We hate feeling imprisoned (commercial leverage is not considered as such).
Now that we have established why we are very much likely to further adopt future technologies and share our information, thereby increasing our dependencies in it.
Let's take a look at what and how this information is gathered and most importantly, what makes the leap into the future that is missing today.
Data Tsunami Turns Into Our Digital Selves
Compounding information of every walk of our life is being gathered. It used to be our browsing history. But today and into the future, many more signals are being added, almost exponentially. Some direct and some indirect.
Multi-sensing data feeds and traces of our lives manifested through our online and offline actions are being gathered. May these be feeds from our digital car, bio-signals from our watch, IOT signals from our fridge, e-wallet, and others - they are all a piece of who we are. The convergence of these multiple dimensional “self-bytes”, allows building a more accurate, near real-time, representative digitized outline of a person. This is achieved by applying advanced algorithms which can derive a fairly reliable clustering. Taking these algorithms a few steps further, and you can apply predictive algorithms to predict a person needs, may they be physical, mental or experiential.
Losing Control
During the days of Marketing 1.0, it was simple and practically fully controlled: as an advertiser, you would integrate into an ad network, select what publishers you want to appear on, insert few ads and place a competitive bid.
Similarly, during the early days of Facebook, you had a firm control over your doing by defining age, gender, affinity and customer interests. With Google, you could easily target customer by intent via selecting specific keywords and search terms to bid on.
The Marketing 2.0 era, is where marketers are evident to an increasing loss of control over who they market to and how they market.
Who Is Going To Have The Controls?
Marketers are losing control, slowly but surely to sophisticated, highly complex learning algorithms. These are formulating significantly faster, more accurate decisions and actions than the ones marketers can ever take. Eventually leading to the redundancy of most of what marketers currently do.
Facebook paid ads in its latest form, Look-a-Like targeting, makes for a great example. You basically uploads (or mark) types of customers you believe are the right ones for your business (i.e. the training sets), and then Facebook decides who gets to be exposed to your ad - you have almost zero control over it. And then it either works, or not.
When it comes to search, one key milestone paving the way from the 2.0 era towards the Markeing(x) era is the emergence of Personal Assistants (PA).
PAs already change the landscape of search results. With the introduction of voice searches and progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, assistants such as Cortana, Siri, Alexa and others, provide direct responses and suggestions, slowly eliminating users from being exposed to others’ search content (paid or not).
As these services will improve and more trust will be built, they will drive new habits, behavioral and consumption changes and build dependencies into it, further entrenching the change.
PA learn you and your needs to the neuance level and correct themselves overtime. The most visible aspect is the (or elimination) number of potential relevant answers a user is exposed to. Practically, the PA reduces significantly the option to show alternative, competing content/options for the customer.
Example Scenario
You are at work. It’s late at night. You’ve been busting your ass on a serious deal you want to close for some time now. You missed some workout sessions in the last couple of weeks because of it and couldn’t get a proper night's sleep. You’re calling it a night.
Walking toward the car. Your biosensors report to your PA that you are dehydrated and fever just picked up a bit. It also knows that you haven't had a proper night sleep in the last 11 days. Your PA knows you have a 45min commute (these damn road constructions…), and the algorithm “develops” now a real concern that you might fall asleep during driving.
Your PA, being such good pal by now, goes into action and you don’t argue: It orders an autonomous cab. It picks you up. On the way, you get a text message from your spouse, saying the milk and serials ran out at home. The PA suggest changing the route so you stop by a convenience store and buy groceries, mint tea and something for the fever. You accept, and it already makes the order at the store, so you won't lose more time.
Questions Arising:
Did the PA optimize the route based on the fastest way back home or the cheapest? maybe the healthiest?
What are the rules by which the PA decides which of the 5 relevant convenience stores along the way, will I stop?
What brands did the PA chose to purchase? According to what set of preferences? Which payment method did it use?
Where is the marketers' ability to impact in all this?