News: Big Ideas

Outlook 2012: Welcome 2012! Man, have we been waiting for you

By Brendan Gallagher

I can’t help but get excited for 2012. The primordial ooze of technologies that have spent years being developed, mashed, shared, and scaled have finally reached a point where we may see some real disruption. For this year’s forecast, however, I tried to group the technologies and trends into 3 behavioral predictions:

1. Companies will adopt a “Mobile First” philosophy.
2012 will (finally!) be the year marketers take mobile seriously. The numbers are impossible to ignore and the speed of adoption is scary. Just think, 5 years ago, the #1 source of revenue on mobile devices was ringtones. In 2010, eBay did $2b in mobile commerce. According to Forrester, mCommerce will reach $31b by 2016, a compounded annual growth rate of 39% between now and then. Even that might be conservative.

But to become “Mobile First,” marketers and their agencies will have to embrace a new design approach and content strategy. More than ever, decisions around device, OS, and the underlying technologies that support them, will need to be a part of the conversation from the start. If you haven’t already, grab yourself a really smart interaction designer or developer and have a conversation about “Responsive Design.” It’s a design concept that allows website design to adjust to a variety of factors, including screen size (and orientation), browser capabilities, and bandwidth. When planned for, we can build experiences that take true context into account—both quantitative context (screen size, processing power, device capabilities) and qualitative context (user goals, environment, attention).

2. Our social graph will begin to collide with the Internet of things.
Back in September 2011, Facebook announced at its annual F8 Conference that the company was moving from nouns to verbs. So instead of being forced to “like” a product, you can listen, or watch, or read (or buy). Spotify was the first example (for music). Soon afterward, Ticketmaster announced its new Facebook-powered system. Now you can see where your friends are sitting at a concert, choose a seat near them, and announce that you bought your tickets on your news feed, where your friends can click “Like,” “Share,” or “Buy” right from the feed.

The much-awaited “Internet of Things” has been overhyped for years--its delay mostly due to the pace of embedded sensor and image recognition technology, and the security around near-field communication (NFC). But that’s changing fast. Google Wallet’s vision states that “In the past few thousand years, the way we pay has changed just three times—from coins, to paper money, to plastic cards. Now we’re on the brink of the next big shift.” It’ll be interesting to watch how pilots reward early adoption. Perhaps people with high Klout scores will get point-of-sale discounts for announcing to their social network that they’re buying a product. “Just tap the sensor to tell your friends about these shoes and get 30% off right now!”

In the Health field, the Internet of Things might have an immediate and profound impact. Companies like Scanadu are developing devices that help keep anxious parents out of doctor’s offices, saving countless co-pays and emergency hospital visits. A recently approved patch from Corventis allows “continuous monitoring for a broad set of arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation, as well as patient falls that may be associated with arrhythmias. Patients can also trigger the collection of an electrocardiogram (ECG), on-demand, upon experiencing symptoms, further aiding in the correlation of symptoms with the ECG.” If a patch like that can get a patient out of a hospital bed 2 days early, that’s a LOT of money shifting hands.

Expect to see greater adoption of technologies that facilitate this collision. And watch what gets disrupted quickly. For instance, SEO experts are already talking about how the Apple iPhone 4s’ voice-enabled Siri assistant will impact organic search ranking (not to mention the impact of Google+’s brand pages).

3. Companies will actively recruit next-generation marketers
Let’s face it: the lines between offline and online are officially blurred. With QR codes in print and audio watermarks in TV, it’s a wonder why the advertising industry makes any distinction whatsoever. Rishad Tobaccowalla from VivaKi accuses many agencies of brandishing “Digital Lipstick” to overcompensate for being behind in digital, and that “the future will be about people, and we should put people at the core. Because people are analog and we have feelings, hopes and desires, successful marketing will combine art and science, media and message, paid, owned and earned and a lot of combinations of the analog and digital world.”

In 2012, many companies will seek marketers that think this way. And more importantly, they’ll seek marketers that are quick to adapt, and facilitate, change. These marketers will have to understand Big Data—next-generation analytics that shift from historical (How’d we do?) to predictive (What should we do?). Understanding data from offline AND online, and from multiple sources (video, text, imagery, partners, apps, etc). And most importantly, they will understand how to innovate—how to USE all these new tools at our disposal, and still prove (or disprove) ROI.

These next-generation marketers will also know that no one company can do it all. Collaborate or die. They’ll face cost pressures through a lens of opportunity and assemble a team of hybrids around them. They’ll know the value of an interaction designer who practices responsive design. They’ll find the area’s best HTML5 developer and pay them to get better. And they’ll truly value the power of a generous idea – an idea that extends beyond a “message” and gets to the heart of what your customers need (whether they know it or not); an idea that is generative enough to have several “Acts” and works despite the channel.

I can’t wait to work with those folks this year

Brendan Gallagher is senior vice president/emerging technology & channels at Digitas  Health