Earlier this year, I was asked on a Tech4Good (YAEP initiative) panel discussion how I think the next few years will look like online marketing wise.
Before the new year starts, I thought I’d share my answer here.
“Many changes will come from the technologies that are taking over our lives – AI (Artificial Intelligence), AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), IoT (Internet of Things), Voice.
AI mixed with voice is a huge revolution happening now with the personal assistants. The one leading the way is Alexa but also Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Cortana from Microsoft. We’re becoming more and more dependent on personal assistants because they are helping us live “handless”, so you just give an instruction to your assistant and she tells you how’s traffic, what’s the weather, what’s on your calendar today, buys your groceries and turns off the lights for you. And these are super small examples of what they’re capable of. Amazon going into health care – the integration of this move into Alexa will be a big deal.
Facebook recently announced their collaboration with Rayban, The Rayban Stories, where you can take photos, videos and take phone calls, straight from the glasses (it’s not new per se, Google has created the Google Glass in 2013) which will make phones redundant. Not too far in the future, it might just be lenses.
Two other things that are on the rise are content creators and communities.
Content creators, or if you’d like, influencers, make a lot of sense in a world where we are bombarded with information and everything is so much in the tip of our fingers that it’s hard to choose what to believe (especially companies), so we trust people.
Communities are linked to content creators because once you start creating content, and you offer value to your audience, you start building a community.
And finally the future is definitely more private. From the big companies, the one that seems to be doing the most in this space for now is Apple. It started with iOS 14 where people were asked if they’d like to let websites/apps track them, and by far the majority answer to this question is “no”. It continued with iOS 15 where email behaviour is not shared with advertisers. I believe this trend will continue and marketers will have to be more and more thoughtful about the content they create – it should be valuable, educational and interesting enough so that the results will be coming from their communities.”
And here’s an anecdote: in 2017 I wrote an article about what we should expect in the year to come. Much of the things I’ve said above have appeared in this piece, and that just goes to show that while the “trends talk” is nice to have, real, in-depth changes take time.