Mark Zuckerberg’s dream for the future of the internet. An all-in-one experience where you live and work and entertain yourself. The next big leap into modernity for brands looking to attract new consumers. A tool for people looking to forge their way into a brighter future where they could truly be anyone they wanted to be. 

The metaverse: a seamless, interactive, internet-brought-to-life experience championed by AR, VR, and XR. 

In March 2023, a handful of months after hiring countless workers to boost Metaverse production, Mark Zuckerberg announced two pieces of news. 

1. Meta would layoff over 13% of its employees. 
2. Meta is going to focus on AI. 

Naturally, the internet took it as a clear indication that the metaverse dream is entirely dead in the water, and Meta threw away $36BN of profit. 

The truth is a little bit more complicated than that. 

Is the Metaverse dead?

No. For the Metaverse to be dead, there needs to be a complete stop in all activities related to the metaverse. No more activations. No more brands working on virtual reality store fronts. No more money pumped into the metaverse itself. 

There’s a second aspect. For the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg envisioned to be dead, it would have needed to have been active to start with. 

The metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg imagined – that of a fully immersive environment – was never brought to fruition. The environment that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to create, where you would put on a headset and hop down into a world where you could feel as though you were there in person, was hampered by technological setbacks and the pure, unmitigating factor that that kind of immersive experience is years away from being even minorly accessible. 

As the metaverse stands now, it’s an extension of the internet with interesting AR and VR opportunities, but it was never anywhere near what the original video promised. 

And brands are still using the metaverse that was created: the metaverse that is just another extension of online activations that we’ve had before. 

Will the metaverse ever be created?

There’s always the chance that the metaverse will exist.

But not any time soon. 

The metaverse isn’t just as simple as saying ‘the internet, in reality’. It’s a combination of cutting edge technology that we simply don’t have available to us right at this moment, and that we won’t have available until more time has passed. Similar to James Cameron taking ten years to film the sequel of a popular movie because he had to wait until better technology was available, the metaverse isn’t fully dead yet, but its sleep might last for a long time. 

Why did Mark Zuckerberg stop developing the metaverse? Is it because of AI?

The official reason Zuckerberg gave is this: Meta now has a team that is dedicated to producing generative AI tools. This announcement, and the relative silence on the Metaverse, has led to the internet concluding that the metaverse has been paused indefinitely. 

It isn’t the worst thing in the world. The metaverse can’t move forward until the issues of better technology are breached. As a result, some stalling is expected. 

But AI likely has nothing to do with what’s going to happen with the Metaverse. 

In our first blog, we said that, although Zuckerberg is the one who named the Metaverse, it’s a bigger entity than just Meta, and that still holds. Meta itself isn’t the sole company developing metaverse technology, and new improvements can happen any day. 

It’s unlikely. 

But people also said that ‘thinking’ AI was unlikely as well, and generative AI made an impact in 2021 that hasn’t slowed down yet.

What about all the technology developed for the Metaverse?

They’re probably not going anywhere. 

Neither is that the metaverse suggested: the understanding that we can communicate on a much deeper level online. 

The problem with the metaverse isn’t a case of technology that isn’t useful in other ways. It’s a case of technology not being developed quickly enough to keep the momentum and hype going, and of being a steep price of admission for brands with very little possibility of payoff. The advancements made in VR and AR aren’t wasted: they’re new opportunities for brands to play with. 

However, it might be a while before we see them become the norm. They’re still expensive technologies to use, with little guarantee of significantly higher payoff – deep concerns for any brand operating during a global recession. 

Is AI the next big thing?

Yes. At least for now. 

However, generative AI models might find themselves hampered sooner rather than later: the industry itself is inundated with negative stories about the use of AI, and public backlash about generative AI has been swift. Brands that have opted to work generative AI into their regular line-up have to be careful how they do so: too much of it taking over traditional artforms, and the complaints are swift. 

Add in the current controversies about where, and how, language models are trained, and the capabilities of AI might be limited to certain aspects of businesses rather than become a wholesale creative approach. 

However, AI is undeniably a part of the future of marketing. 

Whether it’s going to be used to generate reports or write short captions, to come up with campaign ideas or to design simple things, AI has a place in the world we’re building. 

But its place is likely going to be less influential than we’re seeing right now. And AI – for all its capacity to emulate and respond to queries in a human way – is still a machine. 

Can AI be better than what it is now?

AI will improve: that much is certain. 

How it will improve is difficult to say.

The initial image-generative AI had a problem with hands. A program was written in a handful of days to train AI to spot this weakness and to fix it; therefore, now, a generated image that includes hands is more accurate than it was before. The journey for AI is going to be full of these setbacks and quick fixes, and we’re going to see the interim stages of AI develop in real time. 

What needs to be kept in mind is the public backlash against AI models. The program mentioned above received a lot of criticism levied at the idea that it’s training a machine to create artworks that real artists can do far better. This might prove to be AI’s biggest stumbling block – no matter how good AI can get, it’s always going to be dogged by the idea that the human element of art resides in the human. 

However, there’s hope for AI as a tool: to generate reports, to generate ideas, to come up with a quick way of saying something simple. 

For things more complex than that, the jury is still out. 

Some companies are already implementing AI into their systems…

When the Metaverse first became active, a handful of brands immediately hopped online to create their virtual worlds. 

This is a similar situation. 

AI isn’t refined enough yet to take over the amount of jobs that people are predicting. Similarly, the Metaverse isn’t refined enough yet to solely become a brand’s only presence online. 

At this implementing AI into the way your business runs isn’t a bad idea. 

It’s just not going to look the same between now and the next update to the generative AI models you’re using. 

That’s part of the process. 

Is AI likely to end up like the Metaverse?

No. 

The metaverse might be in stasis for a very long time, but the opportunity to improve on it is still relevant. 

However, our capacity to create generative AI models and to train those models is a far more accessible level of possibility than creating a new dimension of interaction. AI has almost half a century of headstart and is far more advanced than the Metaverse.

There’s another aspect to consider: AI and the Metaverse are going to collide. Tech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The progress that is made in one will impact the other – whether or not we plan for it, and the progress that is being made for AI is going to change what we can do with  the metaverse. 

What else should I know about AI?

AI is still growing. 

This blog is going to be out of date by next week. The advancements made in AI move so quickly that we’re always going to be a little bit wrong about where it’s going, and when it’s going to get there – so our advice is this: keep an open mind. 

There’s a way to use AI that’s respectful, useful, and beneficial to your company, without generating the kind of backlash that other companies will generate. 

But the time to do that might not be now. 

In the meantime, all you can do is wait, and keep an eye on things. 

And the metaverse? What should I know about that?

This is a personal note. 

I think the metaverse is likely to happen – but I think it’ll look a lot more like the early days of the internet. Do you remember cluttered webpages, full of easter eggs and secrets? 

The thing about developing massive, structure-changing things like the metaverse is that if it doesn’t stick to the timeline originally envisioned, its development will slow down – but it doesn’t mean that the iteration already available won’t be used. In the Metaverse, the option to to create niche little corners of the web where secrets abound is already on us, and in some cases, it’s an option that people have taken to heart. There’s hidden comedy clubs. There’s places where you can play games. There are opportunities for you to meet strangers from around the world, and establish a routine online that’s different to the way the internet functions now. 

If you separate the metaverse from the idea of using it as a brand playground, there’s a lot of opportunity to be creative. It just won’t be fully immersive in the way that we’ve already seen – but that’s not a detriment. 

As it stands, there are fewer and fewer places online where you can go online and just be. A lot of the spaces that we remember from our youth have either become a shadow of their former selves, or they’ve rebranded and therefore lost their way, or their rebrand appeals to no-one because they try to court too many audiences. 

The metaverse is uncharted territory. At this moment, it can be whatever we make it, and everything online tends to go back to its roots, and that is both its greatest asset and its biggest downfall. 

For me, I think the Metaverse will be a resetting of the idea of online communication. I think we’ll go back to the nineties way of creating places just for fun instead of profit. I think the Metaverse will be tantamount to discovering a new way of communicating between us. 

But that’s only my take. 

Here’s another. 

The metaverse feels like an inevitable trajectory for tech, even if the shape it takes has yet to be fully determined. So far, we see it as a separate space. We consider the metaverse to be this parallel existence that we need to wear VR headsets to participate in. We see it as a sandbox within which humans (and brands) can exist in a way that’s not bound by the limitations of our corporeal existence. That alone can be fun. If you’ve played role-playing games or world simulators (remember The Sims?), you can see how a VR version of this could be hugely enticing.

Then there’s the AR version, an augmented version of our reality that’s simply superimposed by means of tech. This is even closer than we think and, as hardware shrinks in size and simultaneously gets more powerful, feels well within reach.

But this is only thinking about the tech. Consider the tech that is thrown our way and that we simply refuse to adopt. 3D televisions were all the rage for a minute but we didn’t buy them. Then it was curved screens but we didn’t like those either. Just because there exists a device that does something doesn’t mean we will all adopt it and it takes critical mass for tech to make financial sense. With Apple now making bold moves and their history of category-defining hardware, this aspect is moving closer to a reality we can grasp.

So, while we can’t speculate on what the form we adopt will be, we can be quite certain it will be the user experience that determines the success (or failure) of the metaverse. 

The post Metaverse is dead, long live AI? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

OpenAI, the latest tech darling, might fully remove operations in Europe following the ratification of the EU AI law. Meta has just been fined €1.2BN – the largest ever – for violating GDPR. New acts such as the Digital Market Act, which regulates the activity of search engines and social media platforms, are opening up new avenues for big tech corporations in the United States to stumble over – and we’re still in the first few months of 2023. 

If it feels like a lot of things have changed about the idea of Europe: it has. 

When the European Union was founded way back in 1993, the internet was just fifty separate web pages and about ten years old. Flash forward thirty years later, and we have roughly 1.13 billion active websites, only 18% of which are active. We have countless social media platforms with users tuning in every day to communicate with others. The technology we are used to now has become more complex, more capable, and more nuanced.

But in the forward march towards profit and innovation, other things such as privacy were slowly eroded by companies looking to squeeze the last little bit of important information out of their product.

As a result, the world wide web now has a significant additional function: as a money-making entity that is intrinsically designed as the infrastructure for a global market. While it still works as an information highway, as a connecting point, as a bridge between countries, the internet remains a marketplace where the cost of participation turns out to be a little bit of user privacy. A price that seems to have been accepted by the market as it crept up on us – slowly at first and then accelerating as the world became more connected. 

However, the European Union has put forward laws that actively prevent this from happening, and as a result, the very landscape of Europe and tech is changing. 

Here’s how the future of Europe might work: 

A shift away from Silicon Valley

In the beginning, there was Silicon Valley. 

With fantastically easy access to Stanford University graduates, computer firms, semiconductor companies, and a heap of industrial and residential spaces going cheap, Silicon Valley grew as the unfettered hub of technological innovation from about the early 70s onwards. The internet started out there, as ARPANET; the idea of venture capital took place on Sand Hill Road. 

Tech, and Silicon Valley, are intrinsically tied together, and will be. 

But the European Union’s stringent data regulation laws have been one of the claws that’s hooked Silicon Valley from growing further. The global recession, collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the widening gap between what organisations want to do and the pushback from a user-base progressively more concerned with their own privacy are other matters that are concerning for Silicon Valley’s continued growth. 

However, it doesn’t change the fact that EU regulations and Silicon Valley practices no longer mesh. 

What this means is: tech companies will still exist, but their base might shift to Europe. 

We’ve already seen a lot of this over the years. Revolut, one of the biggest financial service companies with over 330 million transactions a month, is based in the United Kingdom. Bolt, a rideshare service competing with the likes of Uber, is in Estonia, Tallinn. Vinted is a Lithuanian startup with a 40% share of the European second-hand market. Hello Fresh, a German recipe box startup, eclipsed U.S.-founded Blue Apron within three years of it entering the United States. 

There’s more. 

Think of Mastodon, Germany, which hasn’t caught on yet, but which is poised to become a serious contender to the social media platforms that we have available – particularly with the troubles that Twitter is facing. Think of Evernote, a Silicon Valley staple that is now being run by Italian company Bending Spoons. Proton, an encrypted mail service with servers in Switzerland, can become a Google competitor if the current EU direction is anything to go by. 

European companies are eminently attractive for several reasons, but primarily: they adhere to laws that are actively looking out for the consumer. 

For over a decade, we’ve heard about the way tech giants are fine with sacrificing customer privacy in exchange for revenue. To have laws in place that protect against this ties into a growing trend for even more protective measures, with ⅔ of global consumers believing that tech companies hold too much control over their personal data. 

Does this mean that Silicon Valley will no longer be relevant?

Absolutely not. Silicon Valley has a history of ups and downs: if anything, this is only a blip in its current iteration. 

What needs to be highly identified is that the world we live in is constantly shrinking. Any tech that is created will invariably go global: the nature of the internet as we know it is that if any one place has developed something that looks interesting, other countries will pick up and plan out their own version of the same. 

Silicon Valley will always be a technology hub, and will still put out innovative creations – but it will no longer be performing this in isolation. Several cities in Europe already have the infrastructure to become smaller Silicon Valleys, and with the tech world becoming smaller – partially due to layoffs, partially due to laws, and partially due to the recession – there will likely be less of a divide between tech made in the United States and tech created in Europe. 

What we can see as a potential hurdle is that tech created in Europe will be held to a different standard to tech created in the United States, and this will be a potential area where communication between agencies becomes vital. 

What about companies who own multiple products?

Famously, the EU isn’t a fan of monopolies – and mergers which give an already-sizeable tech company an unfair advantage over its competitors have already attracted negative attention in Europe. Any company favouring its own product without the opportunity for competition will run the gamut of European law, which puts pressure on tech companies to choose their acquisitions wisely.

In theory, this approach is supposed to create a much fairer environment overall, and it’s something that’s currently lacking. It should also limit the control that companies hold over consumers, allowing them to pick and choose the elements that they wish to support without being tied into an expensive and unnecessary ecosystem that locks them out of other things. 

For example, take Apple. Apple is notorious for keeping users embedded within the iOS ecosystem, however new laws in Europe could mean that users who want to use third-party apps outside of their app store now have the opportunity to do so. 

In short, it is working towards a tech environment that looks out for the consumer. 

How will this affect the world in the long run?

If we’re looking at several European technology hubs coming into their own in the next few years, then a few things are certain for sure. 

The dissemination of data is going to be a considerable challenge for several industries: we’re already operating with a fragmented data landscape, and further fragmentation is on the way. For those companies relying on third party data, this will be the final straw that pushes them into collecting first party data for their own use. 

Stricter control over what these corporations can do to their consumers is another key aspect to keep in mind. At the moment, tech companies in the United States are still running on the borrowed currency of being the first on the scene, but that goodwill is rapidly running out, and we’re likely to see a complete change of attitude by the end of the decade. The reason that these corporations have been able to do so much for so long is the unprecedented amount of data that they were working with seemingly ballooned overnight, and laws took years to catch up, by which point the damage had already been done. The EU is imposing fines on US tech companies in an attempt to curb what it considers anti-consumer behaviour. If these fines grow in scale, or if the EU resorts to more drastic measures, this will accelerate the rate at which tech moves away from the US.

What does this mean for Europe?

It means growth. It means a greater connection between European countries who – equivocally – have a lot less to work with than the United States. It means more data, but more nuanced data that caters to specific countries. It means that the idea of a global village might change from the way we’ve been thinking of it. It means that marketers will have to learn to cater their approaches to specific companies. 

It means opportunity for greater collaboration. 

What it doesn’t mean is that corporations in the United States will be wholesale chased out of Europe, but they might set up hubs in the European Union to try and adhere to the same laws that govern the continent. This is prosperity for those countries, and a chance to work far more closely with each other. 

What does this mean for businesses?

Businesses have to adapt to a new environment – but this is nothing new. Businesses have been adapting to new environments ever since the very first notion of a ‘business’. 

There is a choice to be made here that will determine the way businesses could function, and there’s one of two paths available. 

For businesses who want to widen their scope and create a cross-border organisation, the name of the game is going to be collaborations. Unless they’re a massive corporation which can afford setting up two distinctive operations, one in the United States and one in Europe, it’s likely that collaborations will be the way forward for organisations looking to cater to both audiences across the water. 

If those organisations prefer to focus, then the choice is clear: focusing on US services, and therefore using US organisations, or focusing on Europe. 

Is it likely that big corporations such as Google and Meta will pull out of Europe?

No. 

Google and Meta are global corporations: fines notwithstanding, they get a significant amount of business in Europe – more than enough to make setting up European hubs a far more attractive prospect than it is to just fully draw away from Europe.

As a result, if you’re using several of Google’s services, those might not really experience any interruption. 

That said, that only covers technology that has been in Europe for decades. New technologies – such as Google’s BARD, which isn’t available in Europe, but is available in over 180 countries outside of the EU – might just never come to Europe from those tech giants to start with. Google hasn’t said why, but the speculation is that it could be a power move to try forcing the EU’s hand on legislation.

On the one hand, this could potentially put millions of EU-based businesses at a disadvantage if they don’t have access to the same tools as the rest of the world. On the other hand, it could be a blessing in disguise.  

In theory, it should lead to a much better playing field to work with. European-led Google derivatives are at the right position to start cultivating their audiences from now. This will have them at the ready for the period of unrest that will come once Europe strengthens its resolve against the way the United States deals with privacy and consumer rights. 

Upheaval is coming. Setting up European hubs for American businesses is a process that will take time, and will bring its own set of logistical problems. Although Google has superior market share at the moment, if new laws affecting the use of that data are put into place, smaller companies may be priced out of using Google to start with – and will look for alternatives closer to home and with less of a financial risk. 

Are there any opportunities for European-led companies right now?

There’s an opportunity to start building a customer base from now. 

Consumers know that their data has been for sale for a very long time, and their dissatisfaction with that just keeps getting stronger. 

Companies set up in Europe – which are prone to stricter regulations to start with – have a golden opportunity to position themselves as the anti-Google, the anti-Meta, the anti-exploitation tech company that is based far closer to home and, potentially, with a better understanding of local audiences. 

This doesn’t change the fact that bigger corporations have a much better chance of attaining business than smaller ones – but it’s not the only chance. Smaller companies positioning themselves on the side of user rights might be surprised at how dedicated businesses are to doing the right thing, if only for greater profits than any other reason. 

Should I, as a business, look at alternatives to grow?

Using alternatives to grow your business is a risky strategy with a high payoff. It can work – but it might be difficult to see the benefit of it this early in the game. 

Remember: these big tech companies are big for a reason. They’ve had years and years and years to acquire a lot of data that is now forming the basis for several of the KPIs that businesses chase after. Pivoting from that into European or smaller alternatives is not an easy, or small, decision to make. 

However, the benefits are undoubtedly high. 

This boils down to what you want your business’ legacy to be. It boils down to whether your business can sustain itself if it opts for the smaller, niche company over the larger corporates that knows every member of its audiences. It boils down to whether you are in a position to take a slower growth period over a faster, though riskier, rise. 

Here’s our take on it: at this it’s early. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to fully divest your business from the stranglehold that tech giants like Google and Meta have on the industry – but it doesn’t mean you have to be locked into those systems forever. Keeping an eye out, and moving small aspects away from the overall United States tech ecosystem, is a sustainable choice. 

As these companies grow, then you can move more of your business away from that ecosystem. 

But it won’t be a quick process. This is a game for the long-haul. 

What about web hosting?

It’s a similar issue. 

You can use the bigger companies. You can also decide to branch out. 

Websites are still a massively important part of having a business, but it’s one small aspect of your business that you can use as a testing ground for whether a smaller host would work for you, and whether you can start pulling away from the established tech ecosystem into something that might be more fine-tuned for your audiences – or, at the very least, might give you a better chance of connecting with your audiences in a way that matters to them fundamentally: with regards to their privacy, safety, and data. 

Is there anything else I need to keep in mind?

These are early predictions, so the landscape might fully change by this time next month – but it’s unlikely. 

The European tech expansion isn’t just an individual effort set up by companies scattered throughout the continent: it’s an actual bolstered effort championed by the European Union itself, looking into creating its own tech hub the same as Silicon Valley, just on a much smaller scale. Its startup culture has taken a lot to get into its own, but now that it’s here, it won’t slow down. 

The choice for how this impacts your business is yours. 

What we can say is this: keep an eye on the news. The fines are just the beginning of an overhaul in the way that tech corporations will function, and while it’s unlikely that they’re going to cease European operations, their power may become limited – and your business might benefit from working with corporations closer to home.

But it’s not happening yet. You have a lot of time to think about what this means for you – and to identify what kind of business you want to run in the future. 

The post The Future of Europe appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

AI is going to take our jobs. AI is a bubble. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner. AGI will never happen.

In reality, there is a little truth in all of the statements being made about AI but neither can be completely accurate because, like every industry caught in a frantic rush of development, it is impossible to see where all the pieces will land.

The AI space is vastly unpredictable

Even when the pieces land, the landscape will shift. AI isn’t a destination. It is a journey that our species will forever be intertwined with. We didn’t stop inventing machines when the Industrial Revolution had blown its last puff of steam. We kept inventing and aggregating. It’s unlikely that the inventors of the steam engine would have predicted Boston Dynamics and their robotic dogs but we can trace the lineage from one to the other.

Perhaps even more pertinent is the nature of the industry and the complex web of moving parts that it encompasses. Medicine, finance, search, advertising, aviation, energy, blockchain, imaging… the list of activities impacted is multiplied by the number of technologies being developed by all the established tech companies, universities, startups, and even individuals to leave us with so many moving parts that we can’t really nail anything down.

To add another layer of unpredictability, we must not forget that we are dealing with an intelligence. It keeps surprising us and bewildering is as we develop it. The idea of a predictable or explainable AI continues to largely elude us. While we know what we ask of an AI and can see what results it gives us, the inner machinations of deep neural networks that we have developed is too complex for us to understand. Add to this the “oh shit!” notion that we are using AI to develop better AI and it should cause us to pause for a moment before deciding that we know what’s next.

If there is one certainty, it is that this industry will keep surprising us.

Let’s look at jobs. As horrible as it sounds, some jobs are almost immediately at risk. And these are the ones, quite predictably, that most commonly resemble the tasks that the newly emerging AI models perform so well. But first, we need to have a shared understanding of what AI we’re referring to.

So what’s an AI in this context?

Let’s for a moment qualify what we mean by an AI.

An intelligence can be described as any entity that has the ability to choose a better outcome from a possible list of outcomes. The more intelligent this entity is, the more outcomes it can choose from and the better equipped it is to pick the best possible one. Using this model, an ant is not as intelligent as a mouse, and a mouse is not as intelligent as a human.

Humans have a broad spectrum of intelligence types – the same person can ride a bicycle in a city, write a novel, peel an orange, and flirt with another human using subtle, non-verbal cues. And the same human can generalise intelligence very quickly. We only need to burn our fingers once to know to avoid all flames, no matter what the source of the fire is.

Artificial Intelligence and the neural networks they run on, at least the ones we have access to today, work differently. They take a huge amount of training to generalise knowledge. Tesla have billions of miles of training on their self-driving car models to approach a reasonably good driving AI while it takes a human a few hours of lessons to achieve the same ability.

And they have a narrow spectrum of intelligence. The AIs at our disposal are really, really good at one thing. They are far superior to any human at that task but that’s all they know.

Armed with this knowledge, we can make a few assumptions about what tasks we will be passing on to AI or at least working with AI to help us do our job much better.

AI will help us do our jobs (and relieve us of annoying ones)

Let’s take a day in the life of a content writer or a designer. The day is usually split into many different ‘jobs’ or tasks. There’s some time dedicated to research, some time dedicated to thinking and putting ideas together, and some time devoted to actually creating something new. But there are also parts of the day that are relatively repetitive – the kind of tasks that we do without really needing to think too hard.

Let’s say a beautiful piece of artwork has been created. Now it is time to resize it to fit a pretty standard set of assets.

Or a wonderfully crafted blog post has been written and now it’s time to summarise it into brief captions for a handful of different social media platforms.

Both of these can be offloaded from our mind and given to a machine that has learned how do one of these tasks and to do it quite well. It’s been trained, by assigning weights to successful outcomes, to perform in a way that we like best. It is equipped to learn our preferences and to keep working that way. So, both of these creatives can work side-by-side with an AI and spend the time they’ve saved just enjoying their lives.

Now if there is a person whose job it is to do just the task that’s repetitive and that we would rather give to a machine to do, then that person’s job can be replaced by an AI. This is not to say it will, but it is possible.

But let’s take a plumber. They come home and troubleshoot the most bizarre of faults that we, messy humans, create in our own homes. They use their experience, their tools, their hands, and their ability to take instant decisions on the most practical outcome to get the job done and restore order and harmony in our homes.

Carry this over across all jobs that require skill and we can see that these jobs are safe for now. It will take us a while to implement the broader kind of intelligence needed to do these jobs and to build the robots it takes to give this general intelligence a useful corporeal form. To be more precise, the tech we need to build this robot probably exists, scattered around industries and intellectual property licenses, but it would cost as much as the GDP of a small nation to put one unit together and that’s not good business. For now.

It’s the mid-level white-collar jobs that are at stake.

Wherever there are groups of people in a bullpen doing what is mostly repetitive work that can be passed onto an automated system with a narrow but deep intelligence, the likelihood is that the populations of these bullpens will be the first to start thinning. Whether this is a good thing or not is up to your personal ethical standpoint and the subject of a significantly deeper discussion than this brief blog can go into.

A good point of departure is to think of the fate of the ecosystem around horse-drawn cabs at the dawn of the popularity of the motor car and work your way up from there.

We’re all coders

For a long time – meaning for all the time that computer code existed and all the way until a few months ago – programming a computer to do your bidding was the reserve of the coder, the software engineer, the guys and girls who knew languages that were esoteric to the rest of us. Now, we can address some of the most powerful computers out there by just typing a sentence into a chat box. In essence, every time we ask a chat-enabled AI for something, we are writing a little single-serve app and asking it to do our bidding. The more creative we are, and the more complex the task, the more useful and productive is the result of our interaction.

This means that natural language is already the de facto programming language. And as the AIs available to us get even more powerful, the need to use the programming languages of old (they’re so last week) will dwindle into obscurity. If you’re a sub-par coder, you’d better watch out because there’s a grandma out there doing a better job than you are and all she had to learn was how to write in English.

Symbiotic relationships are desirable

When we think of symbiotic relationships we usually go to that bird that eats the insects on a crocodile’s back as an example. The bird is fed and the crocodile isn’t itchy so both live quite happily. It’s an old definition of symbiosis but for the sake of this article we can put up with eye-rolling of biologists.

The happy relationship we’re referring to is the one between carbon-based lifeforms (us) and silicon-based brains (Artificial Intelligence).

The abilities of the systems that are available to us are quite staggering. They far outstrip the ability of any one person because they have been trained on gigantic models, huge data sets that represent the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of humans. They run on GPUs (the computers that power AI) that just love parallel processing and do so at outrageous speed. This means that, unlike us, they think of multiple things at the same time and do so thousands of times every second.

The highest ideal is, therefore, a human-machine tandem. A carbon-silicon creature that thinks with the value system and ambitions of a human and does so at the speed of a machine, drawing on a data set that is much broader than any amount of swotting for exams can achieve.

Think back to the industrial revolution. A lot of back-breaking work done by humans was replaced by machines that didn’t suffer and that could be significantly stronger than any one human. One man can carry one brick for so many metres but a steam engine can carry many, many bricks for as long as you can feed it coal.

What you want to be in that situation is able to drive the train or perhaps to repair it.

It takes skill to get the most out of any device, and AI assistants are a perfect embodiment of this maxim. Consider a camera. The same camera in the hands of an experienced photographer and in the hands of a complete novice will not produce the same photos. Give me the full set of paintbrushes that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling with and I will produce an unholy mess that no pope would bless.

Embrace the race

Leaps in technology follow a pattern that echoes the one that came before. We’ve seen figures that show how long it took for radio to reach 80% of households and how that time was much shorter for TV, and even shorter for mobile internet.

And there is a pattern in the narrative, too. Early adopters tout a new tech as a panacea, gilding the advance with an unrealistic set of expectations of what it will do. Laggards and those afraid of change are vocal in their objections, with a handful of versions of ‘this tech will never catch on’ or ‘this tech is evil and should not be allowed’. While both positions are heartfelt, neither is entirely true of almost any innovation.

Photography purists are bemoaning the fact that some artists won photography competitions and immediately after they did, they admitted they’d created the images using Midjourney. What they’re angry about is that they didn’t have the ability to discern the difference themselves. ‘AI art isn’t art’ is an echo of the reaction that artists who had honed their skill at oils on canvas had when photography was invented. They argued that ‘photography isn’t art’ because photographers hadn’t bothered learning how to use a paintbrush. If an inkjet print of a photo fetches a couple of millions at the better galleries, why would an NFT of AI-generated art not do the same?

Midjourney won’t be replacing Saul Leiter’s colour work but it can already create passable street work that, at a glance, is coherent and convincing.

It is up to every one of us to land on the side of this story that is committed to history. A sensible place is to embrace the race, to get acquainted with the immense potential that these emerging technologies have to offer while being acutely aware of their limitations. This allows us to stretch the tech to its maximum, harnessing its power to make our lives easier and the output of our work even better. It also keeps us from falling into the trap of unrealistic reliance on a tool that has its inherent limitations.

Once again, this is an echo of past wins and losses with new tech. The ones who said new tech will never catch on died like Kodak did. The ones that put far too much faith in new tech died like so many of the tech startups at the dawn of the internet. The ones that embraced change and pivoted are still doing what they set out to do. We don’t think of IBM as International Business Machines any more but that’s what they are and they remained true to purpose. From cash registers when those were relevant to desktop PCs and laptops and all the way to Watson, they weren’t married to a specific technology but considered their purpose as delivering the machines that ran the business of the day.

We speak about being true to purpose at every opportunity. We also speak about business agility until someone tapes our mouths shut. But they are two maxims that have historically led to robust, sustainable business models.

Opportunity and agility

Opportunity lies in what you are already doing for your customers. Agility means you can remain valid to them, no matter what changes happen around you. Having your purpose clearly in mind means that you can be valid for as long as it takes us humans to evolve into a different species and that will take a while.

This means that to stave off redundancy, we need to be absolutely sure of what we are giving our customers. Let’s take Amazon as an example. They offer low prices, a wide variety of goods, and rapid delivery. Three fundamental pillars that humans will always want. In the words of Jeff Bezos:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’

And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two – because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.

It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible.

And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now.

When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

This could be one interesting approach about your business to keep in mind in the face of a sea of uncertainty: What’s going to be constant in your space over the next ten years? What fundamental human need do you serve? Therein lies your opportunity and it takes all the agility you can muster to dance to the changing landscape and keep your operation relevant.

What should we be doing about AI?

If there is something we’ve learned about tech it is to never say never. ‘Never’ stems from fear of change. It is a wholly unrealistic standpoint and this is more true today than ever. The money pouring into silicon that can think is staggering. The parties at play mean business – quite literally. The quicker we accept and move ahead at the right pace the better. You don’t want to be the company that said “We don’t need to be on Facebook because it will never catch on.” Neither do you want to be the investor who put all their eggs into MySpace. But you do want to watch this space with a healthy balance of caution and optimism. Caution about the unrealistic claims and optimism about what machine learning systems can bring to your business.

If you’re recruiting in areas that are repetitive, consider investing in tech instead because automation of anything we humans do more than once will come sooner than we think. This isn’t new – automation has been around for almost two centuries now – but now it takes a deeper meaning. It goes beyond a simple ‘if this then that’ and delves into repetitive decision-making within narrow or specialised fields, especially when this thinking involves drawing on an overwhelming dataset.

Whatever your area of practice, there are Machine Learning systems being developed or already deployed, albeit at varying stages of maturity. Seek them out. If they appear underdeveloped or the results are as yet sub-par don’t dismiss them. Use them for inspiration. Riff on them. Perhaps more importantly, learn about them while they’re still embryonic and allow your learning curve to naturally grow with the tech.

When those who have taken the option to wait for some unspecified time in the future to figure out where the dust will settle, you want to be miles ahead. You want to have found the best way for silicon brains to do your bidding. The prosthetic superpowers we were promised in sci-fi narratives since Jules Verne put pen to paper are finally within reach. We’d be fools to leave them to others.

All images were created using Midjourney.

Here’s a little exercise. If you’ve gone through the cycle of being amazed at what ChatGPT 3 (and now 4) can do and then realised that it’s writing is completely devoid of humanity, read a paragraph of this blog at random and try and spot what it is that makes you think it was written by a human and not by ChatGPT. Put a reminder in your calendar for one year from the day you read this. On that day next year, look up a handful of blogs and do the same. Odds are you won’t be able to make this distinction any more.

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Artificial Intelligence has the tech world in a twist.

It has those who are not in the tech world but aware of what’s coming in a pickle.

We’ve acknowledged that it is already changing the way we think, the way we work, and the way our jobs are going to be affected within a relatively short time.

Most people you know have at least one browser tab with an AI assistant running – ChatGPT, Notion with its ChatGPT integration, some form of stable diffusion/ midjourney… and we’re not even touching the AI that’s been running our lives as the fundamental underpinnings of Amazon, Facebook, smart banking, and all the other platforms that have deep neural networks integrated.

Just for the sake of clarity, in this article we’re dealing with the AI assistants that we mortals have the ability to speak to. The ones that have what we refer to as possessing a natural language interface.

The AIs that grew to run our world until last year (and continue to do so) needed people with deep knowledge of Machine Learning (ML) to wrangle the neural networks into submission. If you use Facebook, for instance, you may or may not be aware that it depends on ML for news feed personalisation, image and video recognition, translation, spam detection, prediction analysis, and much more.

And as dystopian as it sounds, the idea of an explainable neural network is still being discussed but we’re nowhere near there. This means that while those who build deep neural networks know what they’re asking of the machine and can see what it spits out, they have a very tenuous grasp on what happens inside. But that is another story for another day.

The dawn of the AI assistant

Let’s get back to the AI systems that you and I can easily use.

One way to speak about what’s going on is by drawing parallels with the history of the internet. If you’re old enough to have been there where it started, it will be easy to follow. If you’re not old enough, you’ve got a good handle on the early days of the internet from memes. We’re all good here.

To begin with, everything you’re reading is close to being outdated. By the time the pixels have dried on the last few words of this blog, things have changed. We definitely won’t be making any wild or speculative predictions. We know how that goes.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

“I think there will be a cyborg brain in every kitchen.”

Pulling comparisons from the early days of the internet and perhaps even later on in the history of this space is easy because it serves as a historical reference point, a nod to the fact that history tends to echo and reverberate. But history gets more expensive every time it repeats itself. The ones that lose out to this game will do so burning a huge ton of cash the likes of which were not being thrown around in the nineties.

Let’s take a look at the meteoric rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It took days for the news to spread and for a million users to flock to the chatbot, lured by the possibility of a genuinely useful artificial assistant. Within a week we’d found out the staggering depth of possibility it brought with it – it could write code, poems, university assignments, songs, stories and it seemed like we were only scratching the surface. And this is early days. Let’s face it – it is unlikely that even OpenAI had predicted the success. If you’re launching a product, one of the things you do is give your project a friendly name and ChatGPT isn’t exactly that.

We were also very quick to find its flaws. Of course, a large language model has bias inherent to the data set used to train it (and the humans who trained it).

Many of the perceived flaws were user errors. Those who failed to understand that we were dealing with a very specific language assistant and treated it as though an AGI had magically landed were disappointed. Why did ChatGPT suck at maths? Well, it wasn’t trained to do maths so placing an unrealistic expectation on it is the problem of the user not the machine. (Sidenote: WolframAlpha is great at maths but requires plenty of prompt jiggery pokery to be useful so bashing the natural language ability of a GPT-like language model with the mathematical wizardry of WolframAlpha is a matter of time or at least it should be.)

By the time we were happily using the bot for a handful of tasks, a number of things were apparent:

1. The training set was staggering in scope but ChatGPT4 was around the corner and will have a model that’s larger by several orders of magnitude.
2. The information it had access to seemed to encompass a history of humanity but the information sources ended in 2021 and the model had no access to real-time data.
3. The command of the English language was superb, even if the standard tone of voice is rather dull, but the bot started to break as soon as you tried any other language.
4. The speed at which the assistant operated was staggering but it quickly buckled under the strain of hordes of users hammering a machine with inherently finite resources.

A tiny technical detour

In the interest of brevity and to stay on topic, we’ll keep the technical aspects of these constraints out this discussion. But it is worth taking a brief detour to see how it takes sustained development and integration of systems to get where we are today and, a little later on this piece, what the immediate future could have in store.

AI got here in leaps. The history of machine learning seems to be characterised by cycles in which one giant leap that is followed by a long ‘winter’. That winter ends when the next leap happens, and so on and so forth.

Sometimes it is a hardware leap – the unexpected use of the GPU as a powerful enough processor to handle the immense needs of ML systems. Other instances are that of an advancement in the algorithm or neural architecture used, and other times we have access to new training sets. Back when ML was in its early days there was no internet so it is easy to see how much easier it is today to gain access to massive data sets we can use to train ML systems.

The transformation that the translator made possible

The most recent leap was the use of a language translator to translate from English to English – from words we speak as part of our day-to-day lives into a code the machine can understand and then back to English that we can read and understand. Hardware has been progressing steadily, leaving the venerable Moore’s law in its wake as it did so and AI models gobble up every ounce of processing power you can throw at them so the story of AI and that of processing power seems to be one that will be inevitably intertwined.

The tussle in the tech world

Back to the dramatis personae, the players on the scene this week and the ones that are shaping up to join the fray over the coming months. We’ve mentioned OpenAI and its wonderful ChatGPT. It has had university professors scrambling to prohibit it, others accepting it with open arms, and put Google into a veritable panic mode. Google actually used the term Code Red and ran back to its founders in an attempt to bring all human brains on deck as the battle with the silicon mind unfolded. And they’ve even rushed an AI event into our calendar during which they’re expected to launch their version of a chatbot. It will be live on YouTube tonight and we’ll update this when we know more.

What Microsoft is up to

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Microsoft snuck up from behind and integrated ChatGPT into Teams and into Bing. Much is happening in that sentence so let’s break it down.

Microsoft is putting a few billion dollars into OpenAI. Rather than buying OpenAI, MS invested in the company and gained access to a symbiotic relationship with the AI giant. Within weeks, they’d put the gargantuan power of the Large Language Model behind ChatGPT into Microsoft Teams.

This means that after every Teams meeting, participants have meeting notes, action items, and highlights. These are generated automatically – we’re not talking of a simple transcript here – we’re dealing with an assistant that took notes, understood the salient points, and distributed highlights and action items. During the meeting, Teams can show a simultaneous translation of what anyone is saying in almost any language. And while this was a pipedream six months ago, it is already available and included in Teams Premium for $7 a month.

How about Bing? What is Bing, you might ask. It is Microsoft’s search engine, their idea of a rival to Google search that is used by an estimated 4% of the internet. During an event that saw Microsoft and OpenAI CEOs on the same it was confirmed that Bing will be powered by ‘ChatGPT 3.5’ and will initially be available for a few users and on Windows desktop computers only and within Microsoft’s own browser. It stands to reason that one would want a test-bed before unleashing this kind of power to a wider audience. Once this makes it to mobile, there will be no turning back.

Let’s for a moment break down two behaviours. Let’s say you want to buy a car and know nothing about cars. You can run a Google search for cars you should buy, perhaps adding parameters like “small, economical city car”, and then wade through the first ten links on the page of results. Google has, by its magical set of algorithms, presented you with the top ten sites that are most likely to be useful to you and it’s your task to read through pages and pages of articles or watch countless videos hoping to form a useful opinion.

Which, let’s face it, is not a fair representation of our reality.

You have another option. There is someone in your immediate social circles who knows cars, loves cars, and occasionally won’t shut up about cars even after you’ve glazed over. But if you call this person you will save plenty of time reading about a subject you care nothing about in search of a product you happen to need. They’ll know what questions to ask, would have read all there is to know voluntarily, and will zoom in on the best couple of options for you within minutes.

This is what Bing should be like with ChatGPT integrated into the search. A chat-like interface that gives you the power of an advanced AI while being linked to the entirety of the internet for real-time information. Ask a question in natural language and get chatting. Bing should be able to ask you follow-up questions – just like your friend would – to learn more about what you’re after and give you a more useful reply to your question rather than a list of links.

Google has been working on this for a long time but they have been taking their time to make it to the market. They’ve acknowledged that search could be much more useful time and time again, creating BERT, MUM, and other translator-based engines but have been stalling until it’s perfect, ethical, unbiased… and possibly too late.

We’re not predicting the future but it does appear that this could reimagine or supplement the traditional Google-style search sooner rather than later. Those of you old enough to remember the early internet will recall Google turning the tables on those who dominated the search space. We don’t mention Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo, and Excite when speaking about search nowadays but they were the ones who set us up for a searchable internet and they did so by guiding us towards the most appropriate UI and the most useful search results. And Microsoft was clear about their intent:

“It’s a new day in search… The race starts today, and we’re going to move and move fast. Most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating again in search, because it’s high time.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, 2023.

Google is determined to stay in the game

Google is making all the right moves as well, with their AI announcement that speaks about them integrating their Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short) along with a whole lot of other news. That announcement felt so much like Google is really feeling the burn of the openAI launch and media buzz. They’ve been hacking away at AI for more than a decade now, their models made openAI work (remember it was their transformer that unleashed the beast) but they took the cautious route, concerned about a perfect product and an ethical approach. Google has more up its sleeves than anyone, and yet OpenAI simply made the news.

There’s much more to AI than the tech giants though. Anthropic AI is one of the smaller players. Or, to be a little more up-to-the-minute, Anthropic AI was one of the smaller players. It’s claim, one that hasn’t been updated in light of recent events, remains the following:

“Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Large, general systems of today can have significant benefits, but can also be unpredictable, unreliable, and opaque: our goal is to make progress on these issues. For now, we’re primarily focused on research towards these goals; down the road, we foresee many opportunities for our work to create value commercially and for public benefit.”

But Google just dropped $300 million into Anthropic so those down the road opportunities seem to have come to fruition rather rapidly.

But there’s more to tech than the giants

LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) is also currently steaming ahead with its open-sourced AI assistant and is actively crowdsourcing training efforts so that anyone on the web can contribute to an always-free model. For those of you old enough to remember MS Encarta, this is like Wikipedia is already in advanced stages of development and population before Encarta had progressed from beta. LAION are working on several models, including image generation models, and they’re all open sourced.

By now you will have noticed that many of the players mentioned were unknown outside tech circles just a few months ago. And the pace at which the new players gain ground is quite staggering.

The image generators

Just look at the image generators. DALL-E, another project by OpenAI, was impressive enough when the beta landed half way through 2022. By the end of 2022, we’d not only seen a flurry of stable diffusion models that put it to shame but also the commercially successful launch of the clearly superior Midjourney. In the space of 6 months we were introduced to generative models and went all to way to an ecosystem that is developing around some pretty impressive technology. There are already some artists selling courses in AI image prompts.

And most of these are still in beta. If you thought there was model bias in language models, you should give image generation AIs a try and prepare for some cringe. So, while we’re on generative models that have been trained on a massive data set, it is early days and we’re all using the same data set.

Hey Midjourney, how about a portrait?

No matter how many times you try, “the most beautiful woman on earth” is always white.

There are already versions of Stable Diffusion that anyone can download and run on their machine – provided they have the hardware to do the heavy lifting. Consider that the latest Mac Mini to hit the shelves of consumer stores has a transistor count that exceeds 40 billion and costs around $1300. That includes a 16-core processor dedicated to machine learning processing. Speaking of Apple and their ML hardware we can’t miss the forest for the trees. So far, their hardware tackles relatively simple stuff like Siri, image signal processing for mobile camera systems, and other relatively low-demand applications for this gargantuan processing power. But Apple is something of a dark horse in this arena. All that power is almost doubtless to be waiting for something significant. Their first all-hands internal in-person announcement since pre-covid happens next week and it’s been dubbed the ‘WWDC for AI’. We’ll update this space once we have more details.

In any case, the massive processing power available to mere mortals means that models, or image sets that can be used to train and generate your own imagery, are about to be a ‘product’ that has unbelievable room for customisation. We haven’t scratched the surface here yet but proprietary models are as inevitable as the stock photo library is. (Or was, depending on when you’re reading this.)

As with all new tech, the early adopters and those willing to put in the hours to learn how to optimise their interface with the tech are those who achieve the best results. But this does not mean that it will be the inevitable trajectory.

Looking back to peek ahead

Once again, we look at the past to hope to understand what’s coming. The early internet was for the tinkerers. It was for those who knew how to make the damn thing work and what port the internet box thing plugged into. That didn’t last long. Great technology is initially indistinguishable from magic. Then it becomes even better when we stop regarding it as technology because it becomes easy and pervasive.

This step has already happened. Writing this into Notion means we can hit /Help me write and ask for help with practically anything. MS Teams, whatever Google is coming up with next, and the tech that the rest of 2023 will bring will be instantly usable to everyone because it took all of six months for a natural language interface with AI to go from tinkerer-only to general public.

AI has the tech world in a twist but the tech world has always been in some twist or another. There have always been Kodaks and Nokias and Myspaces and Palms. What we can’t say is if there will always be Apple and Google and Microsoft and Meta.

That is up to us. We, the users of tech, get to pick what we want and it isn’t always what’s the best from a technical perspective (BluRay has much better picture quality than Netflix) because we adopt what’s convenient, is in the right place (usually our phone), does the job, is priced well, and doesn’t need much technical knowledge to use it.

We can’t possibly predict what’s next but we’re watching the space attentively. And we’re doing so from a number of angles. From the lazy/optimist perspective, we’re glad to have machines that will help us do the work we do, that can act as technological prostheses that carry on from the limit of our mental capacity and extend it beyond where we thought possible.

From an ethical standpoint, we do hope that the tools that are headed our way will be equitable in that they will be available to all. We mentioned Wikipedia as a great example of this, a sign of the internet times that is a shining beacon of crowdsourced and publicly available knowledge. We look forward to seeing the next evolution of AI inhabiting a similar space.

There will be winners and there will be losers.

We the users will be winners as AI becomes more ubiquitous, more useful, and dare we say, more open. The losers will be the tech giants that don’t play their cards right. Unfortunately for them, this game is one where the rules are still being written, where the dice have a constantly changing number of sides, and to which players can simply join unannounced and mid-game.

We just can’t wait to see how it all unfolds.

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The premise was this: following worldwide societal collapse, the protagonist spent most of their time escaping from their dismal reality into the Metaverse, a cornucopia of virtual delights where users control avatars -and they can be whatever they want to be. Your status in the metaverse relies on where you can go, what you can do online, and how your avatar looks. 

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter. 

The premise was this: technology has come far enough that we can do more than just use it, we can totally inhabit the internet as whatever we choose to be, do whatever we want to do, and participate in experiences that real life cannot supply. 

If it sounds familiar, it’s because this is the metaverse. 

And while it isn’t ready yet, this is the future that Mark Zuckerberg sees for his company – to the tune of a $3.7bn loss in the previous three months, and a total of $9.4bn since its inception: a loss that Mark Zuckerberg is happy to pay as an investment in an internet of the future. 

But the metaverse is here. You’ve seen your favourite companies engage in it, create activations in it, make their mark on it. 

It just looks entirely different from what we, and Mark Zuckerberg, expected. 

As a result, there’s a lot of confusion over what is, and isn’t, the metaverse. 

There’s a lot of confusion over whether this is a temporary fad, like 3D televisions, or something that will outlast us all, like Blu-Ray. 

And there’s a lot of confusion over how you even use something like the metaverse, and what it can do for you, your business, and your reputation. 

We get it. Every piece of technology we’re used to was new once, and these questions crop up when the cycle repeats itself, and something comes to the market that hasn’t been seen before – and it’s hard to understand it without someone explaining it to you, or doing a ton of research yourself. Nobody’s got time for that. 

We do. 

So here’s everything you need to know about the metaverse, and all the questions you have, answered. 

Let’s start from the beginning. 

What is the metaverse?

The metaverse is the internet, made three-dimensional. 

If you’re one of those people who game, you’re already part of a kind of metaverse: anyone who plays online with an avatar forms part of one version of the metaverse. Essentially, what Mark Zuckerberg wants to build is a giant playground where people can interact through fictional avatars. 

But it’s a little more complicated than that. 

The metaverse is real life. The metaverse is a fictional life. It is an experience. It curates the experiences for you. It sells products. 

There are products specifically made and designed to be sold by metaverse entities, which before the introduction of the metaverse, did not exist in the same permutation. 

The biggest comparison to the metaverse is Second Life or Playstation Home: online games where you are both yourself and better than yourself, where you can connect and interact with people on a global platform in a virtual space as though they are right next to you.

This is a reductionist’s view of what the Metaverse is actually supposed to be – but it is a very accurate read of what the metaverse currently is, and will remain so, for some time. To that end, we’ve already attained the idea of the metaverse, but not the idea of the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg debuted in his fantastical video way back in 2021. 

That has a few more years in development. 

So the metaverse is an online universe?

The idea of the metaverse can be split into two distinct categories: 

1. The true metaverse, or what Mark Zuckerberg proposed and has not yet been attained. 
2. The actual metaverse, or what we are seeing at this moment. 

To paraphrase Matthew C. Bell’s excellent work, the metaverse has elements of everything it’s been compared to. Like online multiplayer games, the metaverse is live, experiential, and persistent. Like social media, it has its own internal economy and content ready for plumbing. Like virtual reality, you can hop into any experience you desire and participate in events. 

This version of the metaverse isn’t yet something we’ve seen. It’s likely not going to be around for years, and for a few reasons. 

The true metaverse that Zuckerberg showcased in his debut video, and the one that Matthew C. Bell identifies, is more like a synchronous, infinite 24-hour cruise ship. Visit at any point and something is happening; need something at any point, and you can probably get it then and there. It’s a sense of place. It’s a sense of being part of something bigger than you. 

It’s a sense of never really missing out and being able – regardless of where you are – to take part in something greater.

Naturally, this makes it attractive for all businesses. 

But the metaverse we are currently capable of now is a much smaller version of what it’s supposed to be.

What’s the difference between Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse and what we have now?

The key difference between them is immersion. 

The metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg proposed will be fully immersive. Touch something, and you’ll feel it in your hand. Attend a concert, and you’ll get all the concert noises: the music, but also the people singing along to the songs next to you, or the press of voices. Go through a lobby, and you’ll hear people talking at different volumes depending on how close you are to them. 

Some of these features have already been seen elsewhere. Skittish, the online meeting app, is no longer available, but it had audio that varied depending on how close you were to other speakers. Haptic feedback is likewise old technology. 

However, these instances of interaction are kept much smaller. When we see 3D audio or haptic feedback, it’s because we’re engaging in something that uses those features and plays out in the same way for everyone, such as a videogame. 

Zuckerberg’s metaverse isn’t a single unified experience. The metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg proposes caters itself to you, and the experience you engage in is also catered to you. This requires technology that hasn’t yet been perfected – full immersion hardware is difficult, and pricy, to create, despite attempts going back to 1968 – and therefore it isn’t widely available.

This means that the metaverse Mark Zuckerberg wants isn’t here yet. 

The metaverse that we have now isn’t as immersive. We have 3D spatial audio. We have the haptic feedback. We have a ton of little adjustments that you can make to cater a particular online experience to yourself – but at its core, it won’t be fully immersive if you don’t have the hardware to make it immersive. 

And with virtual reality headsets carrying a significant price tag, the hardware will need to become a lot more accessible before Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse is a reality. 

The metaverse Mark Zuckerberg envisioned is accessible. The metaverse that Neal Stephenson wrote about is accessible. A metaverse where only the people who can afford to pay out the prices to play is not a metaverse – it’s an exclusive club where the price of admission is a product in itself. If only people who can afford to pay participate in the metaverse, there’s no metaverse: there’s a paywalled internet. 

And that’s effective for anyone: for the consumers, for brands, and for the people who are building the metaverse. 

So—what’s the metaverse we have now like?

In a word: fractured. 

Although Horizon Worlds is one of the biggest metaverses available, there are several different ones that have cropped up to take advantage of the hype. 

Besides Meta, there’s also The Sandbox and Decentraland, a ‘desktop’ metaverse that ties in crypto and the blockchain into their foundation and don’t require a VR-headset to log on. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are also working on their own metaverse projects, though little information is available about them at this time. Other, smaller metaverses, like Illuvium, Sorare, Upland, and Somnium Space, are either in development or in early beta testing. 

More are on the way, and with over 500 companies throwing their hat in the metaverse game, we’re likely going to see a lot more of them develop year-on-year. 

Currently, the most popular platforms are: 

Horizon Worlds: 

• Meta’s VR-based social networking zone. 

• Available activities include small multiplayer games, building, or live events. 

• Mostly used as a kind of living Facebook, with people meeting up to talk to others. 

Decentraland: 

• Built to create and sell digital assets in the form of real estate.

• Do not need a VR headset to use but you do need a crypto wallet to access the full list of features.

The Sandbox: 

• Built to create and sell digital assets with a digital real estate component: each LAND allows you to build interactive experiences, creating a metaverse within the Sandbox metaverse. 

• Do not need a VR headset to use. 

Axie Infinity: 

• Breed, collect, and trade small creatures. 

• Requires a digital wallet to use. 

Ultra: 

• A digital asset marketplace and web3 gaming platform. 

• Also has a social component with livestreams, tournaments, and a dedicated chat service. 

Somnium Space

• A digital platform focusing on its own economy and currency, with its own dedicated marketplace, games, and social experiences. 

• Available on PC or VR. 

Illuvium: 

• Auto-fighting roleplaying game with play-to-earn mechanics.

• Avatars double as NFTs to be sold and traded on the marketplace. 

Wait, platform? What’s the difference between the metaverse and a metaverse platform?

Think of it like a housing estate. 

The metaverse itself is the estate: an encompassing environment and a set of ideals. 

A metaverse platform is one of the houses making up that estate. You can only have one metaverse, but several platforms can form part of the metaverse. 

So it’s not just a Facebook thing?

Meta’s idea of the metaverse is the most well-known, but it’s neither the first nor the only company that’s working on the next stage of the internet. 

Other companies have their own idea of a more immersive internet. Other companies have started making the technology that you can use to fully engage with metaverse platforms. 

And other companies have started creating activations or events online that are inspired by or have elements of the metaverse. 

Decentraland, one of the primary metaverse platforms available today, was launched a year before Facebook became Meta, and has been in development since 2015. 

The metaverse is not just a Facebook thing. 

And other companies have started creating activations or events online that are inspired by or have elements of the metaverse. 

Besides games, what can you do in the metaverse?

Games are a big part of why the metaverse has attracted so much attention: besides the actual games on various metaverse platforms, there’s also the fact that a lot of what happens on the metaverse is gamified in a way that will appeal to wider audience than just those who enjoy videogames, especially with the focus on integrating blockchain technology within the metaverse.

However, not all metaverse platforms are created equally. 

Take Horizon Worlds. 

Horizon Worlds has less of an emphasis on NFTs and blockchain technology than some of the other metaverse platforms mentioned before, such as Illuvium or Decentraland. Part of this is due to the fact that Horizon Worlds is intended to appeal to children as well as adults, and though the app says that it’s only for kids aged 18 and up, kids younger than that have still hopped onto the platform. Additionally, Horizon Worlds is created solely as a way to interact with people across boundaries. It’s a pandemic product that was released after the notable interest in experiences and connections that didn’t rely on physical time and place.

Other metaverse platforms have a greater emphasis on trading, NFTs, and creating an experience that’s a little more like real life. With Horizon Worlds, the lure is connection. With platforms such as Decentraland, part of the lure is monetary: what can you get for what you invest. 

Virtual art galleries where you can click and purchase any NFT you like, provided you have the money. Concerts with real artists that take place on a stage floating above the heads of the crowd. Games where what you win can be found in real life. 

The limitations of the metaverse platforms are obvious. 

But so are the possibilities. 

What does the metaverse have to do with NFTs?

You can have the metaverse, and NFTs, as a separate concept. 

But they work better together. 

In the metaverse, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on who you are: what you like, what you don’t like, what you support, what you own. 

Especially what you own. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s idea of the metaverse hasn’t introduced the idea of digital asset ownership yet, but it will. Other metaverse platforms, like Decentraland, are built around the idea of ‘you are what you own’ – whether it’s virtual land, an in-universe representation of a brand you really like, or something that you can only get online. Like the real world, owning the digital idea of something has inherent value, and it’s one of the things that the metaverse can do with aplomb. It might not be on the level of NFTs, but digital ownership in metaverse platforms is the clearest indication of status in-world that currently exists. Those who shell out real money for digital assets showcase their worth in ways that are impossible to ignore. Others, who prefer not to, will stand out precisely because they do not stand out: they’ll become a crowd of people who opt for the free assets or prefer to only look, and not participate, in the metaverse platform culture. 

And given how people like to stand out, this is where digital assets will prove their value. Those digital assets are solely theirs: they can trade them, resell them, build on their capital using them, invest and re-invest to grow their fortune. The scarcity of these assets is built into them – once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. 

This develops a demand for them. It develops a need to make your mark. Call it FOMO. Call it investing in the future. 

Whatever drives people to purchase online assets, it’s powerful. And while not everyone is sold on owning things digitally, there are enough who are that it has become the core of several metaverse platforms. 

Is the metaverse good for business?

Yes, provided that the business investing in the metaverse understands that this is a long game, and not one that they’re going to see a massive profit from until it’s refined a little further. 

This doesn’t mean that there’s no profit to be had. 

Do you remember when the internet was new? When the idea of advertising online – not on billboards, prints, television, or radio – seemed ridiculous and a waste of money?

We know today that that thinking is flawed. We know that the internet ushered in an age of globalisation that companies are still trying to catch up to. 

The metaverse is a similar situation. Advertising on the metaverse now isn’t going to give you a wider audience or a more global presence; the fans of your brand that might also be interested in the metaverse will be a much smaller subset of your already-existing audience. 

But they’ll be an important part of your brand’s early adventures into the metaverse. And once the metaverse becomes more prevalent – because it likely will – they’ll be the catalyst that will help you grow your audience in the metaverse. 

Just like the first fans on your Facebook helped grow your Facebook page or found you again on Instagram. 

Is the metaverse necessary for business?

Not yet. 

Think of it in terms of audiences. 

Say your brand has 10,000 die-hard fanatics: the kind of people who buy every product, follow you on every social media, and attend every event. Of those fans, perhaps only 1,000 will have the capacity and time to actually hop onto metaverse-themed events. If those events require products that they don’t possess, such as a crypto wallet or a VR headset, that number will reduce further. 

If your concern is purely getting more people invested in your brand, then getting into the metaverse from this early stage might not necessarily give you what you need. 

However, if you’re playing the long game – and we always suggest playing the long game when it comes to advertising – then it’s necessary to start investing, and if it’s not investing in the metaverse, it’s investing in activations that go online, activations that partner with videogames, and activations that turn your brand into something people can experience beyond boundaries. 

What if I don’t want to invest in the metaverse?

That’s still an option for you at this  

Later, it depends on what the metaverse will turn into: if it will follow Mark Zuckerberg’s vision, or the present reality. 

If it turns into a version of what Mark Zuckerberg envisioned – as an experience, rather than as a giant marketplace – then there’s no reason why interacting within the metaverse should be something that brands avoid, provided that there’s an understanding that their service or activation within the metaverse should be offered freely. 

The state of the consumer as we’re looking at today is increasingly bombarded by constant incentives to spend. There are few opportunities for consumers to entertain themselves for free, and it’s very likely that as 2023 plays out, we’re going to see an even bigger decline in those services. This means that brands offering entertainment for free, or at a freemium, will see a marked interest in those consumers who don’t want to be left out, but can’t justify the cost. 

Is the metaverse why Meta has lost so much money and laid off workers?

It’s a part of it, but it isn’t the underlying cause.

At this the metaverse doesn’t really exist the way it should. To make his vision a reality, Mark Zuckerberg not only needs to develop the metaverse itself, but the underpinning technology that can support the metaverse. 

To do that, you need to invest money: money that, at this point, is not coming in from other avenues. 

But the metaverse investments alone aren’t why Meta is struggling. The layoffs from earlier this year highlighted an interesting aspect of Meta that gets forgotten underneath the latest round of Facebook controversies: as a company, Meta has had a long and storied history of starting projects that are later shelved or put on hold indefinitely. The people hired to pioneer those projects have – up until last year – remained employed at Meta, so while the layoffs are a significant number, it’s not a surprising number for a company that has hired on staff for projects without then reassigning them other work when the projects are rescinded. 

As the post-pandemic then brought Facebook’s profits to a screeching halt – in addition to yet more controversies and EU law headaches – Meta had no choice but to overcorrect its hiring procedures by culling 11,000 of its staff members. 

This is not because of the metaverse initiative. This is solely because Facebook itself has grown too large, and it’s part of a larger tech-based movement where layoffs have become the norm. 

Will the metaverse end up shelved like Libra, Shops, or other failed Meta products?

The metaverse is happening, with Mark Zuckerberg’s influence or without. Despite the financial dip in 2022, Meta is still committed to seeing its ‘embodied internet’ become a reality, and is increasing the investments into Reality Labs, the branch of Meta that focuses on creating the hardware and software for the metaverse.

But the metaverse – or the idea of the metaverse – is bigger than Meta. 

And it has already started gaining the kind of widespread investments that make it an eventuality, regardless of whether Meta stays their course or not. 

Why is it taking so long to see an actualised metaverse?

Mostly: the technology isn’t there yet. The pricing for the technology isn’t widespread enough yet. The logistics haven’t been decided yet. 

The metaverse is a completely different reiteration of the internet. Do you remember the beginning of the internet, and how long it took to go from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0?

20 years. 

Up until 2005, we still had the ‘read only’ web that Tim Berners-Lee created. To get to the interactive, social-media-based web we have now, it took twenty years.

It won’t take twenty years for the metaverse. The metaverse is already here. 

However, the technology that props up the metaverse – the VR headsets that push the immersive aspect – might well take that much. Before we can have a fully actualised, fully immersive VR experience, the headsets need to shrink, need to run on stronger batteries, and need to take up less space. 

That hasn’t been developed yet. Once it is, there is a wider conversation about pricing to be had. As we stated earlier, a metaverse that only the ones who can afford it can play in is not a metaverse: it’s an exclusive club where development will stagnate over time. For true innovation, and to realise the metaverse that is posited by the same companies who are building it, the metaverse has to be open to all – and it has to be accessible to everyone. 

And then there’s the logistics to work out. 

Who are you in the metaverse? Are you signing on with your Meta account, or your Roblox account? Do the platforms interconnect? Would it unduly strain servers, or is there a way of spreading out the presence of several thousand people trying to connect all at once?

That is a lesser problem – but it’s still a problem that has slowed down development. 

How will the metaverse help brand-consumer connections?

In theory, it will narrow the distance between brands and their consumers. 

Social media already does some of this. A social media account for a brand can go a long way towards building a consumer-brand relationship that thrives in spite of brand behaviour – to a certain extent. 

Brands still need to hold themselves accountable for their actions, after all. And building a relationship with your consumers goes beyond just social media. 

But interacting meaningfully with consumers online is difficult. Social media can narrow the distance, but it can’t fully close the gap between brand and consumer. 

The metaverse can provide ample opportunities to limit that distance. Activations built for die-hard fanatics. In-universe events that you have to be there to reap the exclusive benefits. A way of seeing a different side of your favourite brand, without leaving your house, without paying out a lot of money for the benefit, without worrying that you’re going to miss out. 

Theoretically, the metaverse is limitless. Theoretically, any consumer that wants to connect with their favourite brand during an activation can do so. Theoretically, a relationship can be built through that, nurtured through that, made stronger through that. 

It will take some time to get to that point – but there are already brands that have put on metaverse-lite applications. 

The results are very promising. 

What does the metaverse mean for marketers?

Immersion. Connection. The opportunity to experiment with your brand. The opportunity to be perpetually active, and to build a presence that goes beyond image, text, and video. To bring the brand to life. 

To have that life be accessible to an audience that is captive. 

For marketers, the metaverse is a new avenue of opportunities. It’s a way of thinking outside what advertising is, a shift on the level of moving from billboards to online messaging. Other forms of advertising won’t be obsolete, but everything that happens in the metaverse will push those efforts far more than marketers are used to – and have ramifications on what will become the expected brand experience. 

This means more time spent planning that brand experience. It means nailing down what the brand means, and how people can approach it, and maybe figuring out anew which part of the brand experience is the most fundamental to bring forward. 

Furthermore, it means changing the way that brands communicate again when marketers have only just become attuned to communicating on social media. 

It will take a little time. 

But as more brands turn into the metaverse and create their own little worlds, the absence of a brand on the platform will make it more difficult for that brand to connect with its audience. If most brands create valuable experiences online that allow consumers to interact with and achieve a connection with their favourite brands, then those that opt out of the platform will constantly play catch-up to what is an immersive all-hands experience that consumers will seek out because of sheer innovation. 

However, marketing in the metaverse is likely not going to become the only way of marketing. Marketers will still need to hone their other channels, to opt for marketing outside of the metaverse, and to recalibrate what they know about their audiences. As with any other new platform, the metaverse isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation for brands: rather, it depends on marketers to identify what platform is going to suit their needs best. 

At the moment, there isn’t much variation between platforms. Those that skew towards younger audiences, such as Horizon Worlds, have to lean into the age-appropriateness of that platform itself, even if it includes the digital ownership aspects. Those that cater for more adult pursuits, such as digital ownership, bring forward a different audience segment to monitor. 

None of this is new. Marketing on social media took similar steps and the rewards it reaped had similar benefits. 

For marketers, the metaverse is opportunity to start communicating with an audience in a new way. As social media and the internet become increasingly inundated with chatter, the metaverse offers a chance to try again, and at its current stage of newness, conversations happening online are amplified. The widespread appeal isn’t quite there yet. 

But it will be.

And marketers should start preparing for it from now. 

Look at your brand. See what’s available out there. Start planning. The stories that you have to tell on the metaverse are more than the stories you can tell on social media: they’re three dimensional, living experiences. 

What does the metaverse mean for consumers?

There are three different ways consumers approach the metaverse. 

Ownership

For consumers who are interested in digital ownership, the metaverse is an opportunity to get in early on investment opportunities and to acquire capital that they can then reinvest, sell, or trade, a little like the dotcom and social media investment cycle. For this subclass of consumers, ownership is the primary force behind any experience they have in the metaverse, so brands will need to keep in mind that their presence there is tied into something tangible, such as an exclusive skin or a limited edition artwork that is only available for certain individuals who meet specific criteria for ownership. For these consumers, their presence in the metaverse is intrinsically locked into what they possess, and they’ll build their collection online with fervour – though it does mean that brands who don’t opt for digital exclusives might not be able to retain this consumer class’ attention for long. 

Think of the same people who invest in NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and who keep a thumb on the pulse of what’s going on on social media. They’re highly dedicated to the possibilities of the metaverse, and will serve as the vanguard for the metaverse: most of them have already started dabbling in one or all of the aforementioned activities, and associate the ownership of digital assets with their own identity. While this audience can definitely elevate a brand’s positioning in the metaverse, they’re highly susceptible to brand-jumping, and keeping their ownership will tie in with other forms of communication and the perceived rarity of the products you put out on the metaverse. 

Entertainment

The other aspect of the metaverse for consumers is much simpler: entertainment. These people don’t really care if they have the latest digital asset or if they’ve managed to fulfill any criteria to own a specific item, and they’re unlikely to spend the same amount of money as the audience above in order to use the metaverse. Their purpose is simpler: they want entertainment, and the metaverse promises a form of entertainment that is easy to get into. It doesn’t require any practice or any previous experience: the metaverse is as plug-and-play as you can get for people who had no prior interest in playing videogames or online communities. 

This audience skews a little younger, and a little more on the side of the metaverse as a platform for fun rather than the metaverse as an investment opportunity. They’re easier to hold onto, but similar to the audience above, they’ll brand-jump from one activity to another to find something that will truly captivate their attention. That said, if you do create an activation that will hold onto their interest, it’s likely that they’ll revisit it more than once, and while their price-consicousness is a key aspect of this audience, it’s a limit that can be overcome with the right brand and the right messaging. 

Connection

The rarest of the audience segments, connection-driven audiences use the metaverse as a big chatroom, and a way of forging new relationships in a space where you can put the best aspect of yourself forward and meet as many new people as your internet connection allows. This audience is rapidly growing with the onset of remote working, and while brands are going to struggle to address this audience specifically – as they might not really care about brand experiences unless they provide a way of connecting with others – they’re a valuable audience segment to keep in mind. This audience are the ones who’ll encourage others to hop on and try an activation; they’re the ones who will populate the metaverse without having a specific driver to hop into a particular brand’s world, and the ones who can be swayed into an experience based on whether or not it sounds like a good time. There’s a lot of overlap between the entertainment and the connection audience segments, however it’s worth keeping in mind that this particular audience will skew older than the entertainment segment. These are working professionals who don’t have the time to hop on and invest, or the interest to hop between activities. Their interest lies in relationships, and in creating their own circle of connection online, a little like early chat rooms and forums. Given enough time, this audience segment will create its own tribe, which can then be a little more amenable to attending different activities – but before then, they’re the audience who will be the hardest to approach within the metaverse. 

What else do I need to keep in mind for the metaverse?

This is a lot of information. Most of it is speculation and research. 

So our final note on the metaverse is this: at this nobody know what the final product is going to look like, and nobody knows when it’s going to actually happen. Real life circumstances will wax and wane, and the metaverse’s progress will similarly wax and wane, so while we can consider that the metaverse is an experiential platform, the way that experience will play out is going to be very different from the final product. 

When we think of the internet, a lot of us think of the early days of the internet: AOL chatrooms, geocities websites, AskJeeves, private forums. The ones that came after us, who created social media and who built an internet that runs on interaction and connection and conversation, will think of Instagram, reddit subformums for every concievable hobby, and the astronomical rise of fanworks and their presence in pop culture and entertainment. 

Those two internets coexist. 

The early metaverse that we have now and the final product that we’ll see later on will also coexist. It will give us an opportunity to rediscover what we loved about being online in the early nineties: the beauty of logging on to a world that was unlimited by anything but your own knowledge. 

And it will give us an opportunity to create our own presence online, build our own entertainment, make our own mark, like what we loved about being online in the early 2010s. 

But anything beyond – and besides – that is unknown. 

What we know concretely is this: the metaverse is going to happen. It’s best to start thinking now about the way you want to approach this platform, to figure out the story you want to tell, to identify where that story is going to take you. 

And if you need help with that, we’re here. 

And we’re always happy to help. 

The post The Metaverse, Explained appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

When you think of a brand, what do you think of?

Visuals come to mind. The components of the brand’s visual identity. We think of music associated with it – McDonalds’ ‘da da da da daa’, Burger King’s big booming sweep of neu-jazz, the reverb in Apple’s Macbook Air reveal. 

Put it down to a vote, and people will tell you a brand is made up of its colours, its logos, and the latest advert that they remember. Some people might go deeper, tell you that the sum total of a brand identity is what it stands for: the morals it aligns to. 

All of those are good answers.

But one of the most crucial aspects of branding is how the brand sounds. 

A brand sound isn’t exactly the tone of voice. 

It’s related to that, and to personality, but a brand sound is how your brand approaches communication. It’s how your brand looks at the message it has, and how it crafts it to appeal to the audience that it wants to cultivate. 

It’s how the brand talks. 

It’s how it thinks. 

And it’s critical to creating a brand that stands out from the rest. 

World Snapshot 2022

There are an unprecedented number of brands all active today, and all of them are talking at the same time, on the same platforms, and, often, to the same small slice of the world. 

In theory, modern technology should be a boon to any communications agency since it allows them to tap into audiences around the world instead of focusing on small, and local, community ties. 

In practice, because there’s so few lines of separation between brands, the conversation has frothed into incomprehensibility. 

Here’s a question for you. 

When was the last time you heard a brand slogan and remembered it not because it was bad, but because it was good, and memorable? Because it had personality? Because it made you think?

Because it made you laugh?

If it’s hard to quantify, that’s understandable. There’s a lot of brands talking to you now, and their voices get muddled in the message – but that’s part of the problem. 

There’s a lot of brands talking now. 

Their sound doesn’t differentiate them from other brands. 

Therefore it’s harder to pick them out of a line-up. 

And so they need to do more to stay relevant. 

Copywriting should help with this, but a lot of modern copywriting has gone the way of modern design: safe, clean, and with absolutely no nuance that could be misunderstood. Part of it stems from the fact that the internet is poised to strike at things that it doesn’t understand – a complicated message or a tone of voice that doesn’t fit the zeitgeist, and it can do just as much harm as it does good. 

Part of it is that the widescaling of marketing needs to break somewhere, and where it breaks is normally the sound. 

But there’s a way of changing that. 

Sound of the Brand

When you think about your brand, how does it sound?

Does it like to talk at length, or are short sentences more its style? If you had to pick between two words, one complicated and one easy, which would your brand pick? What sort of references does your brand use? Who is it talking to? What is it saying, and how?

Brand sound takes all of that into account. 

It looks at what kind of brand you have. It looks at the personality. It looks at your audiences, who you’d like to communicate with more, who you want to keep loyal. It looks at what your brand knows, and how it would respond to external stimuli: current events, a joke, a meme that’s trending on Facebook. 

The sound of the brand fleshes your brand out like a real person. It works the personality and the brand identity into a formula that can talk for you – and a formula that can stand out. 

All brands have a sound. Whether you’re aware of it or not, there are reasons behind why you use the language you do, why you structure the way your brand talks the way you do, why you have that sound in your head. 

Let’s go deeper. 

Switch: Sound of the Brand

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve probably noticed that the way we write our content has changed. 

Here’s a paragraph from an old blog: 

Outrage marketing builds on the fervour that social media can ignite when a cause people feel strongly about is brought under attack. It’s a way of flipping over the table, drilling buckshot through it, and trying to attract like-minded people to also flip over tables and pump it full of buckshot, because your business keeps it real.

And here’s a paragraph from a blog written a few weeks ago: 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s same old, same-old on hellsite high, and that’s what’s bringing money in. 

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence.

There’s a big difference between them – and that’s deliberate. Between 2018, when the first blog was written, and now, our brand changed. The way we looked changed. How our goals aligned changed. How we worked changed. 

The way the brand sounded had to change too. 

It’s not to say that the first excerpt is wrong. At the time, Switch had a different personality and a different tone of voice: light, irreverent, larger-than-life. You can see it in the phrases we use, the run-on sentences, and the very liberal peppering of slang. 

Compare it to the second one. 

There’s space to think. Switch 2.0 is frenetic; there’s no room to stop and absorb the information you’ve just learned – that comes later. What it does ask you is that you hold onto the sentence as tightly as you can, and go along for the ride. 

The new brand voice has space. Between one sentence and another, you can sit with what you’ve just read. It’s not rushed. It isn’t asking you to speed ahead. 

There’s more. Run-on sentences work for brands built on urgency; brands where the information they tell you doesn’t need to be absorbed and kept. In 2018, we wrote blogs to talk about things we find interesting. 

We still do in 2022. But we want to explain why we find these things interesting. 

Run-on sentences don’t work for that. You can only keep track of so many words before the beginning of the sentence no longer makes sense, and for Switch’s rebrand, we wanted to make sure that whoever was reading our blog would stay with us to the end – and would understand what we were getting at. 

To that end, there are few run-on sentences in the new Switch sound. 

But there is flow. 

Flow is tricky. It’s not necessarily something you’ll run into in billboards or online ads – though you might, if they bring back long-form copy (here’s hoping). In longer works, like blogs, flow is how the sentences work together; how they lead into each other. 

For Switch’s rebrand, we wanted to mimic music. 

It’s an old writing trick. Varying your sentence length makes your writing infinitely more interesting – and makes it read a lot more naturally than if you kept to a certain sentence structure. 

Let’s take the second excerpt. 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s same old, same-old on hellsite high, and that’s what’s bringing money in. 

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence.

Look at the first sentence. It’s six words. 

The second one is twelve, more than double. 

The last sentence is five. 

It follows natural progression. The first sentence hooks your attention and posits a theory. 

The second sentence expands on the argument. 

The third sentence ties it together. 

Most of Switch’s blogs are written this way: short sentences, long or medium sentences, and short sentences again. The idea behind it is that short sentences are near impossible to lose track of, and once you’ve read to the end, it’s easy to keep going, easier to understand, and it makes sense to your brain. 

When we say, vary your sentence length, we mean ‘write like music’. 

Let’s rewrite the excerpt to six words only, each. 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s the same-old, same-old. 

This is how Hellsite High brings money in.

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence.

Short sentences work for brands whose speed is their biggest asset. It makes for quick reading, if not necessarily interesting reading, and it can be worked in ways to make it interesting. 

For Switch’s sound, though, it doesn’t quite work. The sentences are flatter. It’s harder to keep track of what you’re reading. There’s a clear line between sentence one and sentence four, but it doesn’t compel you to keep reading. 

Most of all, it doesn’t sound like Switch. 

That’s the other thing about brand sound. Your brand sound sounds like you. 

Switch’s sound is its people. None of us are brief people. We like to talk, and we like to talk at length, and we use difficult words and throw in oblique references. When it came to making Switch’s brand sound, we wanted to bring that to the front. 

Is a brand sound necessary?

No. The same way a logo, colours, or a brand image aren’t necessary, a brand sound isn’t something you have to have. 

What we can say is that a brand sound is cohesive. It makes you memorable. 

As we said at the start, there are thousands of brands out there today, and all of them are talking to the same audiences. They’re using the same collection of colours. 

They have, if not similar logos, then logos that blend. 

How do you stand out?

The way you sound. 

Language is limitless. The same sentence can be reworked and broken into a thousand different ways, all of which will differ. It’ll read different to the audiences you’re speaking to. 

It’ll sound different to you. 

Think of Nike’s ‘Just Do It’.

It could have been ‘do it now’. It could have been ‘just start’. It could have been ‘the first step is now’. 

All of those sentences mean the same thing – but the first one is strict, for professional athletes only. The second one is encouraging, for those who don’t have the experience to work out; it’ll never be a professional brand. The third one makes you think of a self-help line. 

Nike’s ‘Just Do It’, as it is, unfilled, is tough, but not impossible. When you see it, it makes you want to try. 

It’s the same with your brand. The words you choose, and how you use them, will change your sound. 

And your sound will stand out. 

How do I start with brand sound?

Go back to personality. 

Look: brands all have a personality. They have a way of speaking. Sound is correlated to that. 

When we talk about brand sound, we look at the brand personality first. Is it kind? Is it brief? We look at industry. We look at who the audience is. We look at everything that has come before. 

Think of a make-up brand. The audience is primarily, for this brand, teenagers; it’s not a professional tool, it’s for teenagers who want to start out using makeup. When you write that brand, the sound has to fit – it’s light, it’s bubbly, the sentences are longer rather than shorter. It references music and universal experiences. Words are easy to understand. Complication is low. 

Now think of a professional, luxury brand. It’s the same tenet: you want longer sentences, to evoke that luxury, but you can go deeper than the first. Use the sentences as an extension of senses. Talk about scent and feel. Go for multi-syllabic words that sound like velvet. 

Sound. 

It’s an incredibly evocative sense, and one that translates to words beautifully. If you’d like to see how, look at our work on Tepia. 

And if you want your own sound, drop us a line. We’re always happy to talk. 

The post You know what a brand looks like. But what does it sound like? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Click below for a free PDF version of our overall 2022 marketing trends report.

Intro to Consumer Behaviour 2022

When we talk about trends, we’re really talking about people. 

What did they like this year? What did they hate? What were the apps they spent the most time on? What did they buy when everywhere had to lock down? How did they spend their free time? Which brands did they buy from?

What changed?

Marketing and advertising is storytelling. 

But who you’re telling that story to changes dramatically, sometimes within the same stretch of a year, sometimes not for a long time – and keeping track of how people are changing is important. 

Your story has to hit the right mark. 

The key to that is knowing what marks have been left open for you. 

And to know that, you need to know people.

A Global Snapshot

To use everyone’s favourite lockdown email opener: we are living in unprecedented times. 

Technology has reached a point where those early sci-fi movies now look like a real possibility. We can connect with others in the time it takes to blink. There’s never been more ways of finding out the answer to a question you have, and that’s not taking into account the internet. The internet is alive, a bubbling forum of voices. We have entertainment on demand. 

The edges of everything have been smoothed down and softened for convenience and comfort. 

Also: there are a lot of angry people waiting for brands to make their lives better. 

Consumer Behaviour in 2022

People fundamentally don’t change.

What changes is how loud the conversations they’re having are. 

We’ve heard of cancel culture and ‘you can’t say anything anymore’ and big brands raked over the coals for ‘it was fine back in my day’. This isn’t something surprising: it’s the way the social-media-isation of the internet is supposed to work. Everyone’s voice, all at once, talking. 

2022 is not different. 

For the coming year, we’re set to see more talk, more voices, more conversations happening than anyone can track or analyse. We’re set to see a global population splitting the differences, combining and connecting with disparate people located all over. 

We’re set to see untrackable conversations, places where brands can’t follow, and a population that increasingly knows how to turn the marketing tables back onto the marketer. 

This is going to be the audience that’s hardest to connect to. 

After a global pandemic, when everything was online and ads were everywhere and all the conversations happening online were ringed around by ‘buy this’ or ‘this will fix your life’ or ‘here’s another string of bad news’, the same normal patterns of conversation and connection no longer apply. 

And that’s fine. This has happened before. 

What we do now is figure out a way to talk to these people, in this moment, with their history in mind, with what they want and what they like and what they crave to understand. 

Here’s the consumer behaviour trends for 2022. 

Trend 1: Master of My Own Fate

• 60% of consumers are interested in tailored shopping content¹.
• 72% of consumers will only respond to personalised marketing messages. 
• 91% of consumers will only purchase a product or service after reading at least one review.                                                                                                                                                                        

So much of 2021 was out of anyone’s control.  

Between the ongoing problems from the pandemic, a rising climate crisis, sham elections, skyrocketing prices and a complete overhaul of the way people live and work, it’s not surprising that the 2022 consumer needs stability and focus – and the way to give them that is to let them tailor their experiences. 

Trying to meet everyone on their own terms is impossible. Consumers who have spent most of the past year indoors or fluctuating in and out of lockdown are used to their own comforts and familiarities, and anything outside of their worldview is a hassle and an effort. 

It’s not worth the time. 

There is a global burnout. People are tired and don’t want to work for gratification or base-level comforts. Brands who can meet them on their level and allow them to tailor their experiences right down to how they choose to shop are going to see that change immediately.

Personalisation is on the rise. Personalisation has always been on the rise, but there’s been a global shift now towards ‘I know it can be done, so why aren’t you doing it?’. 

People who spent the previous year living in the fog of the pandemic are especially susceptible to tailored marketing campaigns. They spent so long on the sidelines of what was happening that any message that reaches out to them directly is bound to have an impact. 

Especially if it offers a way to customise their shopping experience.

2022 is going big on personalisation. From the way you view the app to the way that the product makes its way to you, to any freebies you get with it, consumers want brands to come down and talk to them on an individual level. Brands who give them that level of customisation will see a difference. 

Brands that don’t might have to find a different way of individualising the consumer, and a way of addressing them that emphasises their individuality. 

How to capitalise on this trend

Your audience categories aren’t what you should be talking to: they’re a guideline. Stop considering your consumers as members of a cohort, and think deeper about what they like, what pushes them to buy your service or your product, and what you can do to support them. 

Case Study

Spotify has personalised marketing down to an art-form. Their annual ‘Wrapped’ campaign takes over social media every year, but for 2019, Spotify went a step further. 

To celebrate the end of the decade, Spotify went back into its data and created a custom record for the decade tailored to each individual user. Besides analysing the change in their music taste over the past ten years, each user also received a link that would take them to a playlist that allowed them to relisten to their old favourites. 

They also released a ten episode podcast to go with it that examined one year of pop music from 2010 – 2019, with commentary from critics, comedians, and music journalists.  

In the first week of the campaign going live, almost 90 million users engaged with the in-app story feature. The Wrapped digital experience saw 60+ million visits, as well as 5+ billion views on Tik Tok.  

Trend 2: Money On My Mind

• 56% of global consumers consider themselves more price-conscious now⁴. 
• 68% of consumers worried about the rising prices⁵. 
• There was a 10% – 26% increase in savings for consumers in America and Western Europe⁶. 

The biggest worry for 2020 was financial. 

COVID-19 put a lot of pressure on businesses to shut their doors and mitigate the spread of the virus. As a consequence, some people lost their jobs, and their savings plummeted, and the measures implemented to tide them over weren’t always enough to make it to the next month. 

Things are better now but we’re not out of the woods. And economic recovery is still on a very uncertain timeline.

So, for the foreseeable future, consumers will still be money-conscious, price-oriented, and worried. 

And brick and mortar stores are the ones who are going to feel the pinch of this trend. With online stores offering discounts, free shipping, or other incentives to push for purchases, consumers are going to opt for the place that gives them the better bargain, regardless of quality or convenience. Consumers who live in areas that are still being battered by the pandemic are especially concerned about price, and more likely to try and save their money than splurge- no matter what the bargain is. 

How to capitalise on this trend

If you can’t lower your prices, you have to offer something more: free information, advice, user guides, a link to your consumers’ values. Consumers are going to want to know that what they’re paying for is what they’re going to be worth the money, in whatever way possible. 

Case Study 

Reformation is not a budget-conscious brand, and it’s not luxury. It sells limited edition clothing made out of deadstock fabric and repurposed vintage tailored to their individual consumers. 

The design team has to work with the fabrics they were capable of sourcing, with the materials they have available, and with a conscious effort to educate their clients on why they made those choices. Consistent pricing has also kept their stock selling out within 38 days. 

Trend 3: Digital Dreaming

• 62% of global shoppers are going to increase their use of digital shopping channels in the future⁷.
• 39% of global consumers will shop more online for things that they used to buy in store⁸. 
• Over 80% of global consumers shop online⁹.  

Since 2019, the digital landscape has changed completely. What was created out of necessity due to stores shutting down and consumers locked inside has now become a way of life that no one wants to leave behind.

Groceries online. Entertainment on demand. Consumption at scale and delivered in bite-sized portions to the people who need it most. Accessible, digital spaces that leave no-one out. 

When there was nowhere else to go during lockdown, the digital became a refuge for everyone, no matter what hobby or niche interests they had, and brands had to pivot to address them on their own terms. Now that the world is opening up, consumers don’t need to be online as often – but they still want all the perks that come with living digital-first.

Brands that can keep the way they worked during COVID-19 active while they are transitioning back to greeting customers in real life are likely to see the benefit in maintaining their digital presence and keeping the same rate of accessibility for their consumers. 

The fundamental importance of a digital presence cannot be understated. Brands who want to capitalise on conversations with their audience need a digital presence that can serve as a connecting point with their audience. Regardless of whether or not they sell online, digital has become the go-to way for consumers to learn about a brand – and brands can’t do anything but go online. 

How to capitalise on this trend

If you don’t want to set up an online storefront, you need a social media platform to use as your primary method of communication. We’ve covered some interesting social media trends for 2022 that can help you start to make sense of what you can do on social media. 

An important point to keep in mind is that your social media shouldn’t – and doesn’t – have to be corporate. The digital world is for having fun: that means connecting without necessarily having to adhere to strict guidelines, and working out what, and how, your brand should behave online.  

Case Study

Nutella wanted to increase their online traffic and increase their sales. They printed unique codes and placed them on their Nutella jars, pushing consumers to access exclusive content on the website, with 20 participants selected to win a prize every week for four months. 

The website also included a dedicated page full of recipes based all around Nutella. 

Trend 4: Accessible Eco-Conscious

• 80% of consumers say brands need to be transparent about their environmental impacts when it comes to producing their goods and services. 
• 44% consider sustainable products as too expensive. 
• 82% see climate change as one of the biggest challenges the world will face within the next 20 years. 

When it comes to the climate crisis and sustainability, consumers want their brands ready to put their money when their mouth is. 

And no, it doesn’t mean greenwashing your products to look better. 

Companies that want to commit to making a difference for sustainability also need to take the additional measure of making that sustainability accessible – especially now that people are worried about the ongoing post-pandemic financial crisis. 

People want to do better. 

They need help to be able to do better. 

And while brands can easily put down sustainability efforts as one of those subcategories that consumers want, but don’t really want, sustainability is a very real value for a lot of consumers who are willing to pay more for the peace of mind that comes with doing what little you can. 

This also extends into public awareness. Brands need to stand as educators on sustainability, not just the company that brings sustainability forward. The real value for consumers is not going to just be in purchasing the product, but in understanding why they’re purchasing what they’re purchasing, and how it makes a difference.

Information is power. And brands have information to spare. 

The brands that can capitalise on this trend stand to build more than revenue. 

They can become brands whose word has power.   

How to capitalise on this trend

Brands are well-positioned to lead in this area without cutting into profits, but they need to start talking to their consumers with transparency. Any effort to connect with their consumers on the level of what their products and services actually cost in terms of environmental impact will see brands develop a strong following, but there has to be total transparency. Obfuscating the truth behind claims is what leads to greenwashing in the first place – and as we can see now, that didn’t turn out well for the brands that pioneered it. 

Case Study

Abinbev, an Anheuser-Busch InBev product, was developed to be America’s first mass-market organic beer, addressing a gap in the market that should have been promising – but they fell at the first hurdle. Only 1% of US farmland is organic, which made finding the base products for their beer difficult. 

Michelob Ultra decided they wanted to help. 

They created a campaign where they offered in-depth training, over 25% premium for the transition period, and to become a farmer’s first customer once their training was complete. 

They saw 175 farmers sign up for the programme, an 18% increase in sales, and predicted that the amount of organic barley will triple by 2023. 

What happens now?

2022 will bring some of the biggest behavioural shifts. 

And it’s only partially because of a post-pandemic reality. 

Every trend that we’ve examined so far points to one thing: that the world we know now is on its way to becoming completely unrecognisable. Technology has already changed the way many of us work and the way we interact with each other, and the virtual has become the norm, not the exception. 

We were always headed this way.

The seismic shift that was the COVID-19 pandemic only shifted the goal posts forward a little bit, and now consumers are maintaining the pace. 

We’re looking at a new way of being: of connecting, to brands and to each other; of learning more than we had access to before; of being able to make a tangible difference. 

Of needing to make that difference. 

There was a period of time before 2019 when marketing and advertising didn’t address people; it addressed ideas. Generation gaps. Boomers, Gen Z, Gen X, vegans, digital natives. 

At the time, that thinking was necessary. Those labels are still useful. 

But they’re no longer useful to communicate to. 

Not now that we have the technology and the space to personalise our offerings, and not now that consumers are expecting more for their brands, trying to eke out a little more value for a little less money spent. 

Every brand wants to be seen as individual. 

Consumers are the same. 

How do I—?

Our consumer behaviour guide is only the surface. 

Trends appear differently in every facet of marketing, from web design to digital marketing to the way that consumers want to shop, everything in this blog is only really where it comes from. 

To see where these trends go, you have to dig deeper. 

Fortunately, we’ve written those articles, too. 

The shifts that we’re seeing into 2022 are shifts we’ve watched come into their own from before. They’re trends that were ‘eh, maybe’ at the beginning of 2019, taking greater shape in 2020, unmissable in 2021, and ones you can’t do without in 2022. 

Consumers want your brand to stand for something more. They want more sustainability. They want knowledge. They want to know the brands they frequent see them as one person, not a cohort. 

They want better. 

And while they’ve been wanting better since 2019 and the age of the ‘glass box’ brand, now it’s crucial. 

Now is when your brand has to make a decision on how it wants to keep going. 

Business as usual, lower profits, safer margins all around?

Or business out of the norm, deeper dives, more risk and more reward?

We can’t make that choice for you. 

What we can do is guide you – to tell better stories, make better choices, and be a better brand overall. 

Want to read more marketing trends for 2022?

Here are a few more resources we’ve put together, with more on the way:

Marketing Trends 2022: The Year of Conflict

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

Web Design Trends 2022

Social Media Trends 2022: The Year of More

Seven Regional Marketing Trends We Want To See More Of

B2B Marketing Trends 2022

Sources

Trend 1: Master of My Own Fate

1. ‘Industry Perspective: The Evolving Customer Experience’, Facebook IQ, 2021. 
2. ‘Privacy and Personalization Report’, SmarterHQ, 2020.
3. ‘The Impact of Customer Reviews on Decisions’, Bizrate Insights, 2021. 

Trend 2: Money on My Mind

4. ‘The Global Consumer: Changed for Good’, PWC, 2021. 
5. ‘Global State of the Consumer Tracker’, Deloitte, 2021.
6. ‘The consumer demand recovery and lasting effects of COVID-19’, McKinsey Global Institute, 2021. 

Trend 3: Digital Dreaming 

7. ‘The Future Shopper Report 2021’, Wunderman Thompson Commerce, 2021.  
8. ‘The Future Consumer Index’, EY, 2021. 
9. ‘Worldwide share of consumers that shop online’, Statista, 2021. 

Trend 4: Accessible Eco-Conscious

10. ‘The CEO Imperative: make sustainability accessible to the consumer’, EY, 2021.
11. ‘The Global Consumer: Changed for Good’, PWC, 2021. 
12. ‘McCann Worldgroup Report upends conventional wisdom about consumers’ environmental concerns’, Adweek, 2021. 

The post Consumer Behaviour in 2022 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Innovation isn’t easy. What’s much easier is finding an excuse to leave it until another time. And in many cases, that other time is when it is too late. When it’s too late to innovate we end up with one of a handful of outcomes:

• Innovation comes at a massive cost and leads nowhere (Every Google social network)
• Innovation comes at a massive cost and turns to gold (IBM)
• Innovation doesn’t actually happen, advertising does (GAP in the UK)
• Innovation happens in product but not in strategy (Kodak)

There’s a myth around despair and innovation – the one that says that the best ideas are born out of despair. In some cases it does but in most cases it doesn’t. Then there is the truth that the market shares with us every day – when innovation is strategic and born out of predictable patterns in consumer behaviour, that innovation usually succeeds.

Of course, not all market behaviours form predictable patterns that can make the next innovation patently obvious. If this were the case, innovation wouldn’t be exciting or profitable. But take a look at ideas like the car and air travel within the context of when they happened and we can see that humanity was on the cusp of this need, even if it hadn’t yet conceptualised a future that included the new tools, nor had we acquired the language to articulate it.

Amazon’s Kindle isn’t a thrilling, adrenaline-inducing, superbowl-ad toting product but it did bring innovation to reading that hadn’t happened since the first ‘talking book’ was committed to vinyl. Dyson’s blade-less fans, the little Jarkey that helps open vacuum-sealed jars in the kitchen, the TCP/IP stack, Sir Issigonis’s Austin Mini, and the zero gravity toilet are all examples of innovations that solved real-world (or off-planet) problems, with varying degrees of fanfare but reaching the lives of practically everyone who could benefit from them.

When accompanied by storytelling magic, that innovation remains seared in our memory, often decades after the product itself has morphed into so many iterations that the OG is now nothing more than a museum piece.

Think of Apple and the iPod (1000 songs in your pocket), Nike and its Air sole (It was either cushion the entire planet or just your feet), Toms (We’re in business to improve lives), and whichever truly new product happened to be relevant to you such that you recall its launch decades after it happened.

This sounds daunting. It appears as if business innovation must succeed on three main fronts – we need to have the product, we need to have the look, and we must have the story – and even then a commercial win isn’t guaranteed.

In reality you can afford to do any two of these well and remain in business for a good, long while. There is an objective ugliness to Birkenstocks, for instance, but they have the product and they have the story so the look is one we’re prepared to, well, overlook or pretend to embrace. Most luxury tech tends to win on look and story, so even if the product does not represent bleeding edge innovation, it scores well with its audiences for doing two out of three really well.

Let’s simplify your market for a moment. Let’s say you have a competitor that wins on look and another that wins on story. No matter how great your product is, if you’re doing nothing to innovate on at least one of these fronts you are, in reality, sliding backwards. There is no real standstill. You’re forging ahead or slipping behind.

But Marmite, you might exclaim. Guinness. Coca-Cola. What about the products that are a century old and never change. Well, the product doesn’t change but the way the story is told does. Kinnie hasn’t changed since 1952 and we love it for its heritage. When we started our journey with Kinnie we wouldn’t dream of suggesting a change in product but we did have a situation on our hands where the average age of the audience was as old as the product itself. The story of the product remained the same but the way we told it had to change and it had to do so consistently and over a long time to attract younger adults. The product was there, the look was there, we needed to reinvent the story.

Innovation might sound elusive, mainly because we don’t know it until we see it. And even when we see it, we might doubt its potential for success. When Bell invented the telephone he could easily have left it running around on a workbench because he had no one else to call until he made at least a second phone. And even then, he must have known it would take several decades for the critical mass it sometimes takes for an innovation to penetrate the hearts and minds of a paying public.

Luckily, we have a ton of tools at our disposal and an ever-shrinking planet within reach. We have the ability to test our innovation with small, ring-fenced audiences. We can listen to the market with objectivity and take the time to tweak and optimise. We can test every aspect of the innovation chain, from story to product to channel. Or we can be brave enough to believe strongly in what we’re up to and just present an unsuspecting market with it.

Unfortunately, innovation has many enemies. I once worked for an organisation that refused proposed innovation on the grounds that, “we haven’t done this before.” It might sound like a joke but inertia is one of the chief innovation killers. The organisation would have benefited from a Chief Officer of Innovation more than it was making good use of its finance people. And they are not alone. Familiarity, stasis, fear of the unknown, routine, and habit are there to pour a truckload of cement onto your novel ideas.

There are more insidious enemies. One of them is success. If we have a successful set of products, why should we innovate? The other is accountability or ownership. Every change carries risk and we often encounter fear of owning the novelty.

Here’s a typical pathway for heinous crimes against innovation. This one is called ‘Murder on the Boredom Express’. 

A good idea is presented by a young and keen mind within a large organization. This bright mind was employed with the intent of having their dynamism influence an ageing mindset. They were told, during their first week, that they should present new ideas that would be relevant to a younger audience and to help tap into spend that was going elsewhere. Brilliant premise, delicious murder-story setup.

They think and they research and they team up with other sources of inspiration. Eventually, after analysing a hundred decent ideas and shelving 99 of them, they present the one good idea. This idea is presented one step up the corporate marble staircase. It is received as a good idea but, they are told, the decision needs to be pushed further. As the idea is pushed upwards, it is met with skepticism and fear and beady-eyed resentment for novelty.

No one wants to adopt the idea, no one wants to kill the idea, and everyone wants to have a go at it. So, step by step, the idea is modified by everyone who is meant to approve of it, stripping the greatness from it and slowly slaying it by a thousand damp lashes of corporate insipidness.

There is no inquiry. There is no investigation. The murder of the good idea is simply swept under the carpet and possibly blame is passed onto the young genius who dared propose that a successful organisation should change anything. How dare they? They’re just kids out of school. They are not privy to the bigger picture. They haven’t experienced the three decades of political jostling that one needs prior to be entrusted with a decision of this importance. Ever thus to deadbeat ideas, sighs the boardroom in unison, as they move to approve the quarterly accounts.

Then there are organisations that have engineered their product core to be driven by innovation. The ones that have had the foresight to structure their product cycles around listening to the market, analysing trends, working with young innovators, and funneling resources into multiple innovations – these are the ones that know that some ideas will be rubbish but that it takes many bad ideas to allow one brilliant one to shine through. Autodesk comes to mind, with their academy that is designed around permanent innovation. Vitra have for decades kept a keen eye on the way we live and work to develop products that are relevant to our times.

But one does not need the might and the muscle that large organisations like these have. There are relatively tiny outfits that thrive on constant innovation cycles. Often it takes one instigator and teaming up with the right partners to achieve simple innovation that can change lives for the better.

Ultimately, innovation is a mindset. It takes the will to venture into the unknown, to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, to have the patience and the staying power to follow an idea through, and the ability to listen to what might initially sound like nonsense. We need to have the power to ask the right questions, to ask what the real-world benefit is (we don’t want innovation for the sake of it), and to create an environment that allows people to have many, many bad ideas. An innovative environment is encouraging and forgiving. It resources plenty of ideas.

The innovative environment is rewarding. The brands you admire are innovative. We all want our brand to grow into Apple, Nike, or Tesla or even AirBNB, Uber, and Headspace. We admire their ability to deliver on innovation and we envy their massive return on innovation. 

So, next time you think of ROI, think of it as return on innovation. Don’t question your brand’s ability to innovate, question the mindset of your company. If you feel it could do with a change in mindset, do something about it. You don’t want to be the one who could have instigated change but grew into a corporate dinosaur while you weren’t paying attention.

The post My brand is too [excuse] to innovate appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

For the sake of this blog, let’s start with a quick description of the term brand and how it will be interpreted – even before we get to brand communications and audience engagement. One of the easiest ways to go about it is to say what a brand is not. A brand is not your visual identity – it does not reside within your logo and end there.

A brand is the set of perceptions that your audience forms about your brand. They form these perceptions as they experience your brand – mainly a result of the brand’s behaviour but also thanks to the stories your brand tells in the form of brand and promotional communication, pricing, product offering, packaging, and all the other touchpoints your brand uses to come in contact with the world outside.

Of course, your logo and visual identity are essential. They are the quickest way of jolting an individual’s memory and call up all the perceptions that person has about your brand. They will recollect what they think your brand stands for, its reason for existence, its values or principles, and a clear understanding of its personality.

With a strong brand, one look at your logo and the person viewing it will recall a very defined set of recollections. Strong brands are consistent in their behaviour, have the ability to focus on what they represent and differentiate themselves clearly from the competition. They are charismatic to the point where they are believed to be unmatched in their category and their personality is unfalteringly clear and defined. They can change significant portions of their identity to suit the times they’re in without denting their brand value.

Apple is a strong band where consumer electronics are concerned. Asus makes an even broader set of devices than Apple does and competes in the same markets. The Asus brand is worth a respectable $1.7 billion. Apple is worth 154x that at $263 billion. Yet Apple’s products are not 154x as good as those made by Asus. And if Asus had Apple’s logo, I bet the figures would be exactly the same.

If we acknowledge the monetary value of brand equity, an even more solid argument in favour of a brand’s behaviour and personality is a comparison with Samsung, the electronics giant that produces a staggering spread of consumer devices.

Samsung, while undoubtedly manufacturing excellent products, has a deeply boring persona that’s punctuated by one or two very glitzy campaigns every year. Love it or hate it, you have a clear idea of what Apple stands for. Do you know as much about the story of Samsung and would you even care?

Brand behaviour vs Brand Communications

As humans, we decide who to trust based on people’s behaviour and not their words. When is the last time you believed a stranger who said, “Trust me.”? 

When brands speak and when audiences listen are very often disconnected. Just as we gain significantly more information during a conversation from non-verbal cues than we do from the words actually spoken, our own personal relationships with the brands we know and love are built on our experience of the brand and not their overt communication.

It follows that brand behaviour is significantly more important than brand communications. A brand’s audience is, by definition, getting more savvy and better connected every day. One person’s experience with your brand can travel far and wide. And that experience is a well-informed one to begin with, with audiences making increasingly high demands of the brands they choose.

Luckily for the market, brands can no longer make claims they cannot possibly uphold and are called out for aligning with a cause that’s purely self-serving. Luckily for good brands, there is a very rewarding audience out there, willing to reward the brands that behave according to a sound set of principles with their cash or their crypto.

[Example: Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It is built on one of the first blockchains that doesn’t support any of the fancy stuff that the new ones do. It is also an expensive one to run, with newer blockchains having significantly lower overheads. But Bitcoin has a strong brand. It is worth almost half the entire cryptocurrency market capitalization. One bit of advice to anyone with a good idea is that no matter what we say about brand, first-mover advantage remains one hell of a driver.]

In essence, brand thinking must originate from behaviour and brand communications should be crafted around this behaviour. This validates brand communications and adds significant value to them. The audiences that sit up and listen when certain brands speak are those that know the brand to follow through on their communication. This consistency of premise counts. Our audiences will forgive a font that’s slightly ‘off-brand’. I’ve looked at brand communications, horrified that the designer had used Arial instead of Helvetica. Seven other type nerds noticed. No one else cared.

Communication is, of course, part of a brand’s behaviour. The messages a brand decides to send, the way in which it reaches its audiences, the personality with which it communicates, and the values it upholds are all being assessed, consciously or unconsciously, by a brand’s audiences. The more behaviour and communication are one, the more likely an audience is to engage with the brand.

Why do brands communicate?

Brands communicate to inform. They use this opportunity to express their core beliefs and, while they do so, they inescapably betray their personality. If the personality is true to their fundamentals, then it is one we believe and engage with. So when brands inform us about something promotional, a new product offering or a pricing update for instance, the audience is also assessing the brand’s personality.

Whether we like it or not, we form an opinion heavily based on the personality of the communicator. Quite why brands separate ‘brand communications’ from ‘promotional communications’ is often puzzling. You’ve seen promotional communication that violates a brand’s core values for the sake of a quick sale. It is a wasted opportunity, a case of marketing spend that could easily have been marketing investment.

Very often, too often really, brands speak because they want to say something and not because they have something to say. These tend to be the ones that audiences stop listening to. They are the ones that complain about low audience engagement on their social feeds.

This does not always stem from a desire to be every-present. Many brands make the mistake of originating communication based on their activity rather than on what audiences want to hear. It is easy to assume that if you’ve spent a lot of time, money, and effort doing something, then your audience wants to know about it. Sometimes, all it takes is to ask an appropriately cynical audience about whether the public will care about this piece of communication before spending a ton on spreading the word.

There are exceptions of course, those brands that are so innovative (or traditional) that their process is an integral part of the story. It takes cunning or humility to know whether the brand you represent is one of these or not. For every story told that we don’t want to hear there is probably an interesting story that the brand hasn’t thought of telling.

“We’ve spent a million refurbishing your favourite clothes store.” No one cares.

“Now even better tasting.” One should hope so.

“We understand that you want [this] so we’re giving it to you.” Mildly condescending, wholly untrue, and no one cares.

We’re all guilty of this behaviour. We’ve all had budgets to spend, campaigns that must go out by a specific date because it’s back-to-school or just-before-summer or those awkward shoulder months. It is an inevitability but one that can be mitigated by a degree of empathy with our audiences.

Brands that see most reward from their communication, the ones that drive sales through deep audience engagement, do so by cleverly putting themselves in the shoes of their audiences. They take the time to understand the specific profile of their carefully defined audience. They are ruthless at eliminating all the stuff that audiences don’t care about. Even if they are itching to scream about some obscure feature because it took them two years to get it right.

These are brands that don’t sacrifice their ideals because of the nature of the opportunity to communicate. A 2-for-1 sticker at point of sale is as important as any other piece of communication and it deserves to represent the brand with respect. In the eyes of your consumer, how a brand does anything is how a brand does everything.

What kind of communication do audiences relate to?

To answer this question, we need to ask ourselves the same question about a brand that is very far from the one we’re working on. We need to find a brand from a completely different category, one that makes us happy to be its audience, and analyse the nature of that communication.

If you were a member of that audience and were given a chance to ask a brand to speak to you in a specific way, you’d be well within your rights to tell the brand, “Tell me what I want to hear and not what you want to say.” 

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask yourself: “What will I feel as a result of interacting with your brand?”

Communication that audiences will listen to is:

Human. Brands are owned and run by experts in their specific industry. The people who own the brand know how their product is better than that of their competitor’s because of some obscure technical feature. They know the industry language. They know the internal politics of the company. And they make the mistake of thinking their audience cares. Communication that starts from the inside and works its way out is destined to fail. Every time.

Real. We allow brands a little wiggle room for overstating or dramatizing their products. We know the burger on a fast food restaurant photo is not what we’ll unwrap when we buy one. But that’s as far as audiences will forgive. Brands that make unlikely claims and that pretend to be something they’re not are inevitably called out. Sometimes a simple “Would I fall for this?” would suffice before approving that piece of collateral.

Relevant. Useless brands die. Useless products by useful brands die as well. Brand communication is relevant to the time, the place, and the audience that consumes it. Converse is irreverent, very street, and wholly of today. So they still sell sneakers from the seventies. They don’t speak about their heritage overtly and they are relevant to three generations of humans who are connected by little else than their desire to be of today. Even better, speak to me about how your brand is going to make my future better.

Ask: “How will my life’s story be better with your brand in it?”

Concise.

Unusual. The creative conundrum is always where to err. Too close to what’s familiar, and it’s boring. Too far from what we know, and it’s detached. In between these is the playground of brand communication – unusual enough to stand out while retaining the right amount of familiarity to draw me in. Like every good creative endeavour, there is bravery involved, the potential for failure must be there as we release communication. If you feel entirely certain that it will ‘work’, it will do just that – it won’t offend and it won’t excite. And if it doesn’t excite, we relegate that communication to our working memory, the bit of our monkey brain that we purge when we go to sleep to make room for exciting stuff that’s about to happen tomorrow.

Mildly unpopular. If your brand is universally popular, your brand sucks. We are tribal creatures. We love to stand for something. “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC”, “Take the Pepsi challenge”. Even in products as generic as colas there exist fans. Brave brands behave in a way that acknowledges that they’re not for everyone. The brave brand that’s smart about its communication makes sure that it speaks the way it behaves. It identifies its audience and says, “This one’s for you. It’s not for everyone.”  

Respectful. Don’t tell me too much. My most precious resource in a post-consumerist world is my time. I won’t grant you much of it. Just enough headline will intrigue me, particularly if it is slightly incomplete and can be completed by me and something from my life experience. If I care enough, I’ll dig deeper, I’ll look you up, I’ll follow your communication funnel all the way to ‘add to cart’. 

Consistent. Once again, your audience doesn’t want on-brand communication to have the right colours and fonts. For an agency guy this might sound strange – what I’m saying is that if you have the right agency this isn’t something to worry about ever again. Your audience wants consistency of premise. Why does the brand wake up in the morning? What are its values or behavioural principles? What’s it promising me? What do I want to feel as a result of connecting with this brand?

In essence, do what helps you get to know your audience because it will enable you to craft the right message and use the right channels. And that’s the way you can speak to an audience and have them listen.

The benefits of relatable brand communication

Money can’t buy us love. The Beatles made that quite clear. But the goal of a brand is not directly to make money. Rather, the better a brand behaves, the more money will come in as an inevitable consequence.

[Money is the desired consequence only for commercial brands. Martin Luther King is an example of a strong personal brand that had a cause rather than profit as an intended outcome of that brand’s efforts. Analyse his brand in terms of focus, charisma, unwavering purpose, audience engagement, and many other brand performance indicators and the strength of the brand is undeniable.]

Powerful brand communication knows who it is speaking to and, just as importantly, who it is leaving out. It is better to relate strongly with your audience than attempt a weaker bond with a larger audience that will most likely never care about your brand anyway. An audience that knows it is being addressed specifically is much more likely to be properly attentive to messaging. Think of the tortuous path to accurate generational communication and you will see how hard work when addressing audiences the right way can pay off in spades.

Relatable communication tells its audience that the brand gets it, that while the brand could just get on with stuff and show us a product and a price it is willing to go a step further, speak our language, respect our time, and make the effort to earn my attention.

We all know one of these brands. They are the ones that, in our personal lives, reach for that magical bit of money we are prepared to spend irrationally out of love for that brand. They are inevitably the brands that have, over time, paid attention to our emotions and behaved in a way that earned our loyalty and trust.

Emotion in a single piece of communication does not do this. The brands that create a beautiful piece of emotional advertising once a year, for Christmas, become those brands that we can depend on for a beautiful piece of TV around Christmas. They do not weave emotion into their everyday behaviour and we don’t engage emotionally with them every day either. They remain brands that we are largely indifferent to. Coca Cola is the kind of product that has linked emotion to its product every single day for well over a century and it is one of the most loved drinks on the planet – so much so that we don’t stop to assess the product for what it really is.

In effect, brands that communicate in a way that truly relates to our state of mind are those that speak to us about an outcome, rather than a product. 

“1,000 songs in your pocket” was the line that created the iPod

“Open happiness” doesn’t speak about the product at all.

“Because you’re worth it” places self worth above product features or benefits

These are the brands that realise that their audiences are made up of actual humans who will only lend a moment of their time to a brand that addresses their state as a person rather than a brand that is conceited enough to think a person cares about their product. Of course, the product is at the heart of brand communication but we are drawn in with a promise of an outcome to ourselves as a human rather than the specific action of purchasing a product.

Brands that understand their audiences and create relatable and respectful communication with relentless consistency are the ones that audiences grow to love and brand live runs rings around the spark that surrounds a single transaction. And brands we know and love for a long time are the ones we are prepared to forgive for an occasional transgression.

And soon, brand love turns into the profit margin we call brand equity – so perhaps love can earn us money, even if the reverse does not apply. One way of considering brand equity is the monetary gap between the price of our brand and its equivalent generic. Ask: “Do you want your brand to be generic, in nature and in pricing?”

In conclusion, brand communication that leads to deep engagement is led by behaviour first – it is the communication that is true to a brand’s purpose and values. It is also communication that understands an audience and relates to it by being respectful and promising a desirable outcome. If a brand’s behaviour and communication is consistent with these fundamentals it can build a life-long, value-based relationship with your audience. And isn’t that the ultimate goal of any brand?

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Generations are a complicated issue. While it is very easy to assign generations to specific dates of birth, there are massive differences between each and every one of us, so when you plonk several billion people into one category you’re bound to be painting with a very large brush stroke.

Marketing to different generations is even more complicated because it keeps changing. Even if you subscribe to the fact that a generation is somewhat homogeneous, you still need to keep the context of the generation evolving as it becomes affected by the things that happen to it. Take Millenials. While we were all trying to understand Millennials, they went and grew up and are having kids. They’re settling down and becoming the generation that’s looking back to see what’s coming up behind them.

While it’s difficult to shrink a group of people with wide-ranging experiences into a single generation, when we talk about boomers, millennials, and Gen Z, we’re talking about a general mindset that reaches across age-groups. We’re talking about the ‘okay, boomer’ mentality of the millennials; about the ‘lazy, entitled millennials’ attitude of baby boomers, about the ‘stupid teenagers’ idea obfuscating Gen Z. 

For brands, audiences are typically made up of one or more generations, and understanding what drives them is the key to tailoring content that’s relevant to what they want to know about. 

We’re always talking about the three key components to growing a successful brand, and they’re relevant here as well: 

1. Talk with purpose. 
2. Know your audience.
3. Only deliver high-quality content. 

Your audience is not going to care about the same things, and that’s fine. Some of your messaging might distance your audience away from you, and that’s fine too. You might not be able to address different generations, but by understanding who your audience is, you can avoid alienating your target audience and communicate about things that interest that particular niche. 

Here’s an easy guide to audiences to start with: 

Baby Boomers

• Born 1940 – 1959.
• Key context: Baby Boomers were born and raised with the frugality and rationing of World War II and post-war economic booms, particularly for the boomers that were born in America. Following the victory of the Second World War, there was a short-lived period of time where jobs were plentiful and goods easy to get. As they aged up and out into this time of prosperity, Boomers expect the world they’re in to remain unchanged and have a sense of ‘I’ve suffered to get this far, and therefore I deserve this’. 
• Baby Boomer movement in a nutshell: Consider Brexit the baby boomer experience – eager to bring back the England of their youth, their idealism typically leads to restricting their perspective to what they deem to be right. This can be anything from having a person on the other end of the line when they call a shop to demanding a service that is no longer offered and getting annoyed when it isn’t provided. 
• Consumption patterns: typically, boomers will spend their money on material goods only when they have some relevant link to their experiences, such as movies and vinyl records. They are careful about what they spend their money on and will look for the best or cheapest bargain, however, strike at something that they’re interested in, and they can pay good money for it. Similarly, they will also put money behind something if they believe in it – be it religion, political parties or ideologies. 

Gen X

• Born 1960 – 1979. 
• Key context: The feverish pitch of the 60s would’ve affected their youth: think doomsday preparations, the Cold War, and the revolutionary wars going on in the Eastern Bloc, Vietnam, and the Middle East. They grew up with the influence of war on their friends and families, so they are mostly a peace-loving generation who grew up watching countries finance weapons and economics, they experienced the first real boom of capitalism, and their generation saw the explosion of wealth-based meritocracy. They also saw the rise of the ‘self’ movement: increasing divorce rates and changing ideas of society meant that this generation saw less adult supervision than in previous years.
• Key movement: the rise of grunge, heavy metal, and the first start-up wave, including the founding of Google, Youtube, Amazon, and Wikipedia; it’s the music that’s particularly indicative of the Gen X outlook of cynicism and disaffected youth growing up being told they would never amount to their baby boomer parents and having that child-centred focus of the ages circumvented into greater economic programmes for the elderly. 
• Key purchases: Gen X will opt for materials that have a visible wealth to them, particularly for cars and name brands such as Chanel, Dior, and Apple. While they are materialistic, Gen X also strives for a sense of individualism and will pay a lot of money to reflect their social status while also maintaining their individualism, such as brightly-coloured or limited edition phones and cars. 

Gen Y (Millennials)

• Born 1980 – 1994
• Key context: the creation of the internet in this period of time means that they’ve grown up in a world that’s changing faster than previous generations had to contend with. Most millennials grew up in the between-period of internet development – most remember dial-up internet and getting off the phone for a better connection, and while they’re often touted in marketing as the ‘young’ generation, this is no longer appropriate. Comfortable around technology and social media, millennials have seen technology develop and grow up with them, and have also seen the after-effects of it: facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and the bombardment of advertising messages in all mediums. 
• Key movement: The Women’s March and #BlackLivesMatter movements are critical features of the millennial generation; their mobilisation and championing of political rights and human rights, in particular, makes them a formidable force. Similarly, over the last few years, the rise of #MeToo, and online shaming has also been paved with millennial intentions. Their goal is a better, fairer world for all, now that globalisation and economic stability have been more or less attained for most of the first world. 
• Key Behaviour: Millennials are global villagers who aren’t content with what they’re told. They seek their own understanding of their position in the world, and don’t want to be seen as a generation; they want to be seen as individuals. 
• Key purchases: Millennials are all about the experiences – they value festivals, travel, and memories more than other purchases. 

Generation Z

• Born 1995 – 2010. 
• Key context: born in an internet era, there’s no society that Gen Z knows that isn’t hyperlinked, hyper-realistic, and digital. They’re the children who grew up watching their friends and family put up youtube videos, in the era of on-demand services like Netflix and Uber, and with the pervasive connectivity that is social media. They are also bombarded constantly with the idea that their society is slowly eroding: climate change, declining wages, job scarcity, and the rapid escalation of war efforts and fake news have created a world that’s moving forwards at costs that seem extraordinarily high. 
• Key movement: The School Strike for Climate movement captures the energy of Gen Z really well: angry, scared, and incredibly agile, these teenagers know how to make content go massively, massively viral, and how to use it to their advantage. 
• Key behaviour: Generation Z is a frightened generation; their social media is constantly barraged with bad news, and their hyperconnectivity makes it difficult for them to get away. That said, they don’t want reality to be glossed over, but they do want to talk about it, and talk about everything online, from the latest fashion trends to institutionalised classism, with equal zeal. 
• Key purchases: Whatever Gen Z is going to purchase, it’s going to be unique to them and be in line with their morals, whether their morals are to go green for the good of the environment or to refuse to use online retailers with a history of mistreating their workers. 

Why is this relevant?

It’s relevant because, at the moment, there’s a chaotic intersection of all four generations of consumers and the workforce present at the same time, and presenting opposing views in equal strength. Just looking at the ages, there is about 3-6 years’ worth of Gen Z operational in the workforce, and about 5-10 years’ worth of Baby Boomers still working their jobs. If you’re considering the presence of generations online, the overlap is even bigger – baby boomers account for ⅓ of global internet usage

The problem for marketers now is to figure out how to communicate to all four generations active without alienating one or more of them — however, typically what Baby Boomers support is anathema to what Gen Z is willing to think about, and vice versa, so finding a balance of communicating with all of them can be complicated. 

This has happened before with the rise of the millennial; all of a sudden, brand strategy and marketing stopped working as millennials became the largest consumer sector. Now, as Gen Z is poised to account for over 32% of the global market by 2020, it’s happening again. 

Come back next week to learn all about marketing to Gen Z. You can also read our thoughts on Consumer Behaviour in 2021 or take a look at the latest viral marketing Twitter event.

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