My Day 3 at
CES was the most exciting. In the morning I wandered the exhibit halls a little
bit more and even met a person who attended the conference virtually – she was
on a screen and the screen was on a robot that could move around the exhibit
hall, talk to other people, look closer at the items on the table and so on. It
looked cool but seemed more like a temporary solution rather than the future of
conference travel. 3D holograms from Displair seem like a better solution: you
can have a hologram of a person wandering the exhibit hall that you can shake
hands with. And, of course, in the future, it will be a virtual exhibit hall
and we all will be present there virtually. What a tragedy for the airline
business!
The
highlight of the day was the keynote address I attended: Brand Matters. The
keynote had senior level professionals in marketing/corporate communications
from world leading corporations. Among the speakers were Michael Bowling, Chief
Marketing Officer of AT&T; Josh Silverman,
President, U.S. Consumer Services, American Express; Joseph Tripodi,
EVP, Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer, The Coca Cola Co.; and Keith
Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever. But the
session was kicked off by Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of saleforce.com,
whose vision for the future was the most eye-opening.
What all
speakers agreed on was the fact that the main revolution comes not from any
single new gadget but from new era of communications between the gadgets – they
will talk to each other and, more importantly, talk to us and to their
headquarters.
Today in
many of our public relations/marketing/corporate communications programs we
talk to students about how social media influence communications between a
company and consumers. We look at case studies of customers going to Facebook
to complain about malfunctioning appliance or going to Twitter to describe
their problems live; we discuss in classes how companies must quickly and
competently react to this flow of information. But it looks like this is not
the future, but, in fact, the past.
If there is
a Samsung refrigerator connected to the Internet, why cannot it send an email
to Samsung notifying the headquarters that, for example, the temperature in the
freezer is getting outside of normal range before a customer even notices
anything. Then, the refrigerator can connect to the cell phone of the customer
and check his or her schedule to arrange for a technician visit to check on the
refrigerator. In other words, appliances will need to become self-aware and will
be able to have themselves repaired before they can cause any issue to the
final user or even before the user will notice anything. “The circle of love” as
Marc Benioff called it– our appliances can really become our
friends taking care of us.
And we can
take it one more step further – refrigerator can talk to a dishwasher and
notice you do not like one brand of food because there is plenty of it left on
your plate – so, next time it can text you to say remember you bought Brand A
vegetables last week and did not like them - buy Brand B this time. And, of
course, they all will talk to the toilet to see how your body reacted to
different products, how your health is affected and maybe connected to your
medical provider to develop recommendations for you. So, yes, we will be
talking to our appliances and becoming friends with them – in fact, they may
become our best friends and can save our lives. And imagine what a great new
potential for marketing it opens and how targeted that can get! This means
moving from audiences or publics to marketing to individuals.
As always,
it would raise issues of privacy or losing some more individual control, but it
brings convenience and people, I believe, are willing to sacrifice privacy and
control for convenience – see, for example, all the success of Apple products.
And this
maybe not such a long way in the future – already today we have all these
appliances with internet connectivity, already today we have cell phones
containing user’s schedules, emails, credit cards and other information. If a
refrigerator can order food delivery, it can send an email to headquarters.
There is no doubt about the importance of mobile in all this – cell phone will
become or already is the center piece of all our networks and our communications.
So, significant focus in student’s education should be on mobile.
But let’s
look more into the future. If we all are going to get 3D printers at home and
shop online for whatever we desire, a malfunctioning refrigerator can email to
headquarters about its problems and then self-terminate or self-disintegrate;
while headquarters will send an order to print another refrigerator to the
user’s 3D printer and, once printed, refrigerator will be installed in the very
same place where the old one was. All without any people involvement at all.
Which brings up another point – massive data. Already today, there are more customer data
available than companies can process. American Express and Coca Cola representatives
both mentioned that they have plenty of data – the problem is converting data
into insight and knowledge. For now it means importance of research skills for
marketing and communication graduates. But the data volume will continue to increase
exponentially. So, there is no doubt it will lead to more and more demands for
artificial intelligence with data processing capabilities. Yes, companies will
have to develop virtual presence through artificial intelligence living in the
cloud processing terabytes of data perhaps having their personalities and
communicating to us one-on-one via social media – not their representatives but
actual companies – they will become our friends for real. Super computers in
the cloud talking from the name of a corporation to us, collecting and
processing data on us, and helping us improve our quality of life.
What
artificial intelligence lacks, however, is creativity. So, to prepare our
students for their future, we should focus on interpreting research results and
conclusions that artificial intelligence will provide us with in the future and
then coming up with creative solutions to the identified issues.
Of course,
once technology, companies, products move to live in the cloud, people will
move into cloud even more than today. But that is the whole other story…
