If you are a professional marketer, you understand that throwing all of your resources at a new, trendy social network as soon as it comes on the market is a bad investment. Imagine being the marketing team that took a real shot at Yik Yak as it became the biggest craze on college campuses a couple years ago, only to see it completely defunct now.
But technologies that serve a real need, yet are slower moving, do deserve attention -- from the ones that are creeping into our daily lives now to the ones that foreshadow entirely new industry paradigms in the next 10 years.
Here are five categories of technology that are poised to change digital marketing forever.
1. Amazon Alexa And Google Home
Amazon Alexa and Google Home are examples of voice assistants. Currently, many people who own these devices just use them for basic news briefing functions or the voice-controlled music functions -- however, as people get more familiar with these devices, their common applications will expand.
Search engine optimization specialists are keeping an eye on how the "voice user interface" will change how people search for things, and how Google, in particular, uses rich snippets to give answers to common questions.
With over 10 million Alexa-equipped devices sold, earning the top result in Amazon search engines will be more important than ever. When people are in a hurry, they don’t have time to hear out the top 10 plastic trash bags, but instead will trust in the algorithm to give them the highest rated items and buy those out of convenience.
For Google and Amazon, the challenge is to create a balance between ad revenues, their margins on physical items and consumers trusting that the first result is actually high quality. If the trust in quality deteriorates past a certain level, people may try out another service like Bing in place of Google or Jet and Walmart in place of Amazon.
2. Alphabet’s Waymo
The use of self-driving cars will obviously be a massive cultural shift in general, but to marketers, it means that more people will be looking at a device while being driven to their destination. And that means more for digital ads. It’s bad news for billboards, but just like virtual reality and augmented reality, the lead-in time is slow. In this case, it will be even slower with the number of regulations cars will have to bypass and address.
3. Microsoft’s HoloLens And Oculus Rift
Cirque du Soleil created an application to allow its designers and engineers see how different stage set pieces fit into spaces, and in the marketing world, Lowe's is using HoloLens to allow customers to pick out appliances and paint colors with an augmented reality app. According to Adweek, “HoloLens remains relatively untapped ... but the wearable could be huge as a visual search engine that layers holograms over the real world.”
Oculus Rift, the virtual reality company sold to Facebook, keeps dropping prices to the point where the average consumer can casually pick one up for $200, rather than the $2,000 price tag of the past that was only suitable for serious users. Facebook knows from experience that these technologies get more valuable to advertisers as usership increases, so it makes sense that they are trying to capture market share in an early, impressionable stage of the industry.
4. Facebook Messenger And Chatbots
Forward-thinking industries like finance have been engineering robotic helpers for advertising to and advising their customers for years. The opportunity is reaching the mainstream in the form of a familiar app: Facebook Messenger and chatbots. Once a fairly inane gimmick of the early 2000s, bots that respond via a messenger are becoming smart enough to handle more complex situations. Companies that engineer chatbots that are actually useful are sprouting up to handle the demand for this new technology.
5. IBM’s Watson And Deep Machine Learning
Deep machine learning can be applied to millions of studies, patents, proprietary documents and other information to extract knowledge graphs and charts detailing data points – potentially leading to new solutions for patients.
According to LiveScience, “Baylor College of Medicine in Houston used Discovery Advisor to pinpoint proteins that modify p53, a protein that is involved in slowing down or preventing tumor growth. Within a matter of weeks, Watson read about 70,000 studies on p53 and identified six other proteins that could modify the protein.”
Reasons To Keep An Eye On Tech That Will Disrupt Marketing Over The Next Five Years
Whatever the advancement and whatever the device, the only real “disruption” that marketers will need to pay real attention to is the one that has a significant market to warrant mass adoption. Yes, marketers in the nooks and crannies can live off of Facebook’s chatbots, but does that mean it’s right for everyone and something we should all run to?
I’m not so sure.
However, Alexa and other voice assistants have reached a tipping point. If the average smartphone owner picks up an Oculus Rift a couple years from now, you’ll see major advertisers placing significant emphasis on this technology to get a piece of the attention. The truth is, most shouldn’t flit off to obsess over every emerging technology but rather be aware of the seismic undercurrents in your industry – some of which will be devastating, yet invigorating shake-ups for whole industry (commercial driving, for example), some of which you should be catering to now, like Google Home and Alexa.