Ray Wang of Constellation Research and Tamara Gaffney with Adobe Digital Insights made predictions about digital video, social media, advertising, mobile and commerce today. Tamara has access to lots of anonymous data in the Adobe cloud.
Tamara started by reviewing last year predictions. They were right about flexible screens, voice, connected TVs and VR impact in gaming. They had predicted that smartphones would go Android instead of iOS, but they missed that prediction.
Ray focuses on two aspects of trends – Organizational Adoption and Business Impact. Along the organizational change dimension, we have Mainstream, early adopters, and bleeding edge. In the business impact, we have incremental, disruptive and logarithmic impacts.
Tamara and Ray sees the following disruption happening from her data:
- Inflation hits hard and disrupts markets. She has seen 3 straight months of US inflation with poorer states experience greater inflation.
- Unpredictable and volatile pricing. There are bigger swings in pricing. Shoppers wait for big sales – 16% of all TVs were sold on black Friday.
- Blockchain joins our vocabulary. 90% of banks are investigating Blockchain today and it affects every industry
- Digital business models create a winner take all market, not a digital divide. Digital leaders are taking 70% of market share and 77% of profits.
To help with the disruption, focus on the brand promise and mission and get the business model right. Choose technologies to support the business model. Understand that speed and time to innovation trumps perfection. Finally commoditize whats disrupted and then move on.
How about things that are getting saturated:
Growth will come from stealing rather than attracting. Visits to U.S. sites grow by only .1%. Mobile is cannibalizing desktop, not adding to it.- Consumers get efficient at knowledge gathering and buying. Total time on sites declines 22% YoY, so protecting loyalty becomes job 1.
To stand out in the attention economy, context provides the relevancy from real time to right time. Understanding the customer’s context is the way to protect loyalty. You have to capture attention quickly or save the person time.
Regulations that affect our world:
- New devices usher in a 4th wave of navigation norms. VR Device sales were up 8x this holiday. Smart home assistant sales were up 50x in December 2016. Ui design will undergo yet another change because of this.
- AI is the new UX.
- Joystickers – consumers act in the mass for and against your brand. Rapidly changing trends and customer communications channels take everybody by surprise. Consumer driven content is taking over Brand content
We should expect more regulation and more cries for privacy. There is a bipolar nature of trading privacy for convenience. Privacy must be earned. Backlashes can make or break brands in seconds.
Trends in Modifications:
- Digital cannibalizes traditional. Digital TVE video use is taking over prime time viewing hours while unauthenticated video declines. Length of video has gone done, especially for mobile video.
- Search Shift – advertising price hikes force marketers dial in campaign efficiencies. New ad price is rising faster than ever. In search you are spending 42% in ads and only getting 11% more growth in traffic. This forces marketers to optimize media buys.
To deal with these modifications, we need to look to commerce measures like CRO and click. Contextually relevant immersive experiences over omni-channel. Earned trumps paid in the long run, but paid is needed to grow reach.
Automation trends:
- Autothink – routine tasks become programmatized as we rapidly flee from our chores.. Robots and task automation moves from early adopter to early majority. Pre-programmed grocery shopping takes off.
- Forget about it – IoT devices link together and start running their own show, like IFTTT. However this creates more interdependency on technology as we slowly forget how we used to live.
- For AI, what’s important. Marketers can manually recommend things for smaller populations. AI comes into play for much larger audiences. It also starts to affect predictive abilities.
AI driven worlds need to start with the business question not the technology. We need to understand what the important outcomes and benefits before jumping on board AI.
Changes in perception:
- Drones equipped with cameras create entirely new viewpoints. More cameras were sold this year (165% YoY increase). New viewpoints create controversy because we might not like the new vantage point.
- Cultural conversations around women’s movements challenge the status quo. Imagery of women has become more multidimensional.
Trending for 2020:
- Design thinking inspired user experiences – things like IoT, 3d printing, AR/VR, Blockchain, Robotics, and cognitive computing.
