Future Thinking: The Technological Revolution

One billion people will join the internet in the next two years - but through their phones, not PCs

Big hitters in the tech world are keen to reinforce the notion that advertising is seeing a shift towards people power, articulated on new platforms and devices, transforming relationships between brands and consumers.

The new giants of media and technology were out in force at this year’s Cannes Lions. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt was named Media Person of the Year, while Facebook courted advertisers and talked about the explosion of opportunities on offer via social media. Twitter was ubiquitous, on and off the stage, and Yahoo! was on hand to remind everyone it isn’t just about Google, asserting it is still a media powerhouse to be reckoned with.

Gone is the old order of passive consumers and traditional broadcast messages, in which the media monoliths decided what was news or entertainment and the couch potatoes vegetated. Today is the age of interaction, with technology putting the consumer in control in a way that seemed unimaginable a few years ago. So where does this leave the creative agency and the client?

Crossing boundaries

Everyone recognises that the lines are blurring in every way – platforms are becoming channels, advertisers are becoming content creators and agencies are becoming much more than the creators of 30-second TV spots or print campaigns. In this rapidly changing market you’d need to be a little crazy to make projections about what developing technologies mean for advertisers and agencies, but as this was Cannes Lions, plenty of people did just that.

Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice-president for global marketing solutions, said that “the social” was everything. Everson said that the rise of social media and massive online communities meant brands could now learn directly and respond quickly to the behaviour of consumers.

She cited Facebook’s photo section, with 100 million photos being posted and tagged every day, as evidence of the tremendous desire to share and join in: “We watch what people are doing and we build products to address that. Inherently we are all social human beings – social is what we do.”

Smarter TVs

Traditional media is also being reinvented through technological innovation, not least television. In a session on connected TVs, Jeremy Kaiman, who heads development of Samsung’s smart TV and 3D TV division, said the company’s research showed people still loved TV, but wanted their set to be smarter. That means a connected TV that enables apps, along with the ability to browse, share, comment, vote, recommend and buy through their screen.

For Mark Holden, global strategy and planning director of PHD, the connected TV would be a game-changer, allowing what are now regarded as online brands to exert even more influence over content. T-commerce, trading via the TV, would be worth an estimated $15bn by 2016, he claimed.

Keep taking the tablets

Then of course there’s the iPad and other tablets and the next generation of apps. During the Cannes Debate, News International CEO James Murdoch (before he had other things on his mind) agreed when DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg described the tablet as “arguably the most powerful and impactful device” that had been created in his lifetime. His view was that we hadn’t seen anything yet in terms of what these devices would do and the way they would change the media and communications industry.

In all of this, print felt a little left behind. A seminar hosted by Adobe Systems on publishing and digital sent the clear message that, apart from Vanity Fair, Wired and The Guardian in the United Kingdom, the panel was struggling to point to traditional publishers doing standout work in the tablet world. The message was that tablets and apps needed the kind of focus that publishing companies had brought to their websites.?CD

Ringing the changes

Google’s Eric Schmidt was doing some of his own future-gazing, but with the authority of someone who was not merely making predictions. He was telling us what was going to happen, because Google would make it so.

Schmidt told the audience that, in a year or so, one in three checkouts in retail outlets and restaurants would allow people to “tap and pay” with their mobile phone. Google Wallet, announced on Google Android earlier this year, will allow your phone to become your primary means of paying for things. “The terminals are available now, the software is available this summer,” he said.

Others echoed the view that the next stage of the evolution will be a phone revolution, based on estimates that another billion people will join the internet in the next two years – but through their phones, not PCs.