CES_2015EIGHT_TRENDS _FOR_2015
SUMMARY_Just two words dominated CES 2015; “smart” and “connected,” and despite 20,000 products on display, these two terms united almost everything.
This is the proof that “the internet of everything” is coming, a new ecosystem around us where digital becomes the connective tissue of everything. Sensors record and share what’s happening, devices respond intelligently, our world becomes a smarter, adaptive environment around us.
When things get smarter, when data becomes more abundant and intimate, and where decisions are outsourced to algorithms, what impact does this have on marketing? When big data becomes intimate data, what happens?
The internet of things is currently about possibilities, but how do we focus on the opportunities? To find out more about the threats and opportunities at CES in 8 separate themes, read on.
01NEW MOBILITY
NEW MOBILITY 01
The way we move around is changing, CES saw the introduction of a plethora of new ways that challenge our assumptions about personal movement. From electric scooters that fold to motorized unicycles, from what looks to be a new Segway to the world’s first electronic skates, mobility is about to change; welcome to a new era in transport.
Cars are also changing fast, from rapid developments making electric cars more affordable, to self driving car technology coming from all major players. With the arrival of platforms such as Uber and the growing app based car clubs like Zipcar and Hertz offering short-term use, one-way rental, we’re seeing changes in car ownership patterns. It’s not a huge leap of faith to imagine a world where owning cars, and cars even looking like cars, is a distant memory.
New mobility impacts marketers in profound new ways. The car is creating a new media environment, now that you no longer need to pay attention to the road. With this comes new advertising opportunities like promoted routes, real time special offers, map based advertising, all taking advantage of your cars’ larger digital screens.
NEW MOBILITY 01
The Mercedes F015 Concept, where the self driving car becomes a living room.
NEW MOBILITY 01
Rollers invent electric rollerskates.
NEW MOBILITY 01
Gogoro has revealed the "world's first Smartscooter,” an electric scooter.
02SENSORED SURROUNDINGS
SENSORED SURROUNDINGS 02
CES shows that the sensor economy is expanding and becoming even richer. The technology is extracting and analyzing data, making improvements to everyday life everywhere. Big data is even bigger now, yet becoming more intimate. From meditation devices to baby monitors, portable 3D scanners, to more advanced wearable health trackers, to fully connected homes, welcome to an age where everything is monitored, recorded, shared and analyzed.Brands can now have access to data they never thought possible. Knowledge of what consumers are doing, feeling, and even thinking becomes possible as sensors surround our bodies. An implication for brands is using this data extraction to create the next wave of products and services. Predictive analytics afford us the opportunity to influence or predict consumer behaviors favorable to brand initiatives. In an aging population, it also allows for consumers to monitor their loved ones from afar and ensure that proactive measures are taken.As you can imagine, the possibilities are infinite and the CPG, retail and restaurant categories are prime first-movers for this trend.
SENSORED SURROUNDINGS 02
Ampstrip, a thin, sensor-filled strip you wear on your torso all day, every day to monitor your vitals.
SENSORED SURROUNDINGS 02
Zensorium’s “being,” a wearable that records your mood.
SENSORED SURROUNDINGS 02
Scio allows you to scan practically anything — foods, drinks, pills, plants, and more — and get detailed
information on the object’s chemical makeup.
03RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS 03
If CES is about everything being “smart” and “connected,” then sensors become the foundational element. Everywhere we look, we see new types of sensors, new ways to process data and new things to control. From homes that unlock as we walk towards doors or cameras that keep tabs on who is home, to lights that adapt to our needs and to fridges that order food for us, we’re soon to be surrounded by connected devices that work around our needs.
Behold an age where cars drive us around, where televisions suggest content we may want to watch, where our belts tell us how to behave. We could call this the connected home or smarter living, but really this is about reducing the thinking we have to do every day and about accepting key contextual suggestions that come to us. It’s about us at the center of a life that just works around us, with technology moving into the background to become ambient and assistive.
What’s most interesting about this is what this means for marketers. If machines, algorithms and our toothbrushes are making decisions for us, what does the role of advertising become?
RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS 03
The Netatmo Welcome is a connected camera that can actually recognize who's home using facial recognition.
RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS 03
The Parrot Pot, a Bluetooth-connected flowerpot with a built-in reservoir to automatically water your plants for you.
RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS 03
Samsung and Smart Things offered a vision into the future, lights changing color, fridges ordering groceries.
04PERVASIVE SCREENS & VIDEO
PERVASIVE SCREENS & VIDEO 04
Slowly every surface around us is turning into a screen and every form of content is converging to become video. Soon, from digital signage, wearables, smart TV’s, connected cars, to projected walls, everything is becoming a place for moving images, and our real life is being augmented by another layer of ambient information from the internet.
We have non linear TV and Over the Top (OTT) delivery of content breaking down the traditional linear TV model and putting the consumer in the driver’s seat of how they view and engage with content. Content packages are being developed for the cord-cutting generation. The world is now cross-screen, which has implications for greater content and messaging flexibility, and where multiple touchpoints and sequential storytelling (a sort of flow advertising) can provide richer messaging to consumers. With this opportunity comes greater measurement and consumer insights across all synched devices vs. channels for a holistic consumer picture vs. a siloed view.
Within this world, we need to stop our obsession with the digital divide and focus on the implication of marketing when everything is digital and everything is video. In this landscape the concepts of TV versus video, online versus offline, mobile versus desktop have zero meaning. There are also huge implications to marketers on their marketing mix and insights into effectiveness, given availability of new data.
The Whirlpool kitchen of the future projects messages, recipes and even next steps on to your kitchen work surfaces.
04PERVASIVE SCREENS & VIDEO
DISH’s Sling TV $20/month unbundled video package announced.
EVERYTHING BECOMES A SCREEN AND VIDEO 04
Smart TV’s now incorporating their own OS systems, soon TV discovery become unbundled from the pipe.
EVERYTHING BECOMES A SCREEN AND VIDEO 04
A smartmirror, part of a whole new generation of digital surfaces to enter our lives.
EVERYTHING BECOMES A SCREEN AND VIDEO 04
One of the many Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality devices around CES. The notion of what is
real, virtual and blended is blurring.
EVERYTHING BECOMES A SCREEN AND VIDEO 04
05HUMAN TECHNOLOGY & VANISHING
INTERFACES
05HUMAN TECHNOLOGY / VANISHING INTERFACES
We’d imagine becoming a cyborg would have looked a bit more futuristic than purple smartwatches, bluetooth headphones and Fitbits. But slowly and surely we’re augmenting our being with a variety of electronics that makes us a little bit superhuman. We’ve got wearables becoming popular by morphing into potentially luxury fashion items, ceramic necklaces that beam notifications on your skin, t-shirts that measure our vital statistics and smart belts that judge your food intake beyond the likes of any judgmental friend. If that doesn’t work, we can place Thync’s electrodes on our head and let restful pulses “induce a preferred mental state.”
We’re also getting closer to technology with the way we navigate content and control devices in more tactile, natural and gestural ways. Amazon Echo was the first device to bring voice activation back in trend, but now we see small startups such as Cubic trying to bring technology to life using our voices. Whether it’s the variety of eye-tracking companies such as Tobii, gadgets such as Ring that let you point and control using fingers, or Myo and Bitbrick the trackable armbands, or even the beloved Leap Motion, technology is becoming more physically bound to us.
Marketers need to be open to new ways to make immersive products, to explore new UI's and find new ways to create richer buying experiences and remove barriers to purchase.
Thync, a mysterious wearable that uses “neuro-signaling to induce a preferred mental state.”
HUMAN TECHNOLOGY / VANISHING INTERFACES 05
French company Cityzen Sciences has developed a smart t-shirt that measures statistics including your heart rate.
HUMAN TECHNOLOGY / VANISHING INTERFACES 05
Belty, the world’s first smart belt can track your waistline over time, keep tabs on your exercise, or check how
much you sit and suggest you take a walk.
05HUMAN TECHNOLOGY / VANISHING INTERFACES
Ring, the smallest, most human of all gesture control devices at CES.
05HUMAN TECHNOLOGY / VANISHING INTERFACES
Lechal’s smart and connected insole relays directions via vibrations and provides fitness tracking.
05HUMAN TECHNOLOGY / VANISHING INTERFACES
05HUMAN TECHNOLOGY / VANISHING INTERFACES
Tobii makes one of the most advanced eye tracking devices that allow you to control computers with
your gaze.
KID TECH
06
KID TECH 06
All parents want the best for their child and new tech advancements showcased new ways to be even smarter and more involved from health to education. Many tools were present to help with monitoring such as the re-imagined pacifier (Pacif-I) updated to pair with a phone sharing a child’s temperature and location; and SleepIQ, a bed that has sensors monitor breathing, movement and heart rate.
Improving literacy, math, and science was also a focus for technologists this year. Innovations such as Ozobot, Dash and Dot teach kids basics of programming in order to further develop logic and critical thinking.
This is a new and developing area in which media opportunities will emerge. For now, it appears key partnerships with tech developers would be advantageous. Opportunities to understand the needs for smarter parenting by brands to provide solutions could be largely successful. Imagine a pharmaceutical company partnering to provide medicinal solutions to child or parent in times of need.
Pacify-I, the world’s first smart pacifier that monitors a baby’s temperature and transmits the data to an app on
a parent’s smartphone or tablet.
06KID TECH
Vigilant Rainbow, the first smart toothbrush for kids and one that gamifies brushing.
06KID TECH
With Dash & Dot, kids learn how to program toy robots which makes coding fun using apps.
06KID TECH
07EVERYDAY ROBOTICS
EVERYDAY ROBOTICS 07
Robots have been around for many years now, but always behind the scenes in distribution centers and factories, hidden away from most people. CES this year saw a whole new range of robots that are designed to aid our lives in more personal ways than ever.
We of course saw a huge range of drones, but most differentiation was by size and little else, and we don’t see much in the way of real life problems they can currently solve, at least not until regulatory controls and battery life improve.
Home robots saw most of the coverage, from a range of personal robots designed to aid our everyday lives, to a much greater array of machines that excel in single purposes. From floor to grills, solar cells to gardens, it’s hard to find anything that can’t be cleaned by a robot, but even harder to find a robot that can do more than one thing well.
Robots in retail seem to be the most obvious new frontier for robotics in business, but how many people would prefer the human touch? And what are the longer term implications for the labor force when everyday tasks become automated?
OSHBOT, the retail robot developed in partnership with Lowes, is already on the shop floor.
07EVERYDAY ROBOTICS
The Furo-i home, a wheel-mounted smart tablet holding robot can take voice commands and connects home
networks and devices.
07EVERYDAY ROBOTICS
Budgee, a robot with one thing in mind, helping the elderly move large and heavy items around.
07EVERYDAY ROBOTICS
08DEMOCRATIZATION OF CREATIVITY
DEMOCRATISATION OF CREATIVITY 08
We’ve never been more empowered to make things for ourselves, what we consumed was once dictated by expert strangers, they’d decide what media we could consume, what products we could buy and makers were selected by editors, A&R people and design committees. Now we’re empowered with 3D printers, additive printing, cheaper professional cameras, 3D scanners, home recording studios; we’re now all able to create on a level playing field.
Along with the hardware comes the software and services, from online destinations to upload patterns for the maker movement, for parts makers and concepts like Arduino. We’ve also burgeoning distribution channels like Etsy or Quirky and funding infrastructure like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, today it seems like truly anyone can make it, so long as they can make it.
The effects are considerable: We once relied on middle men to control, publish, replicate, distribute and sell to use, but now everything is disintermediated. When anyone can make anything, in any quantity, when people can sell direct to the masses, when success becomes truly democratic, how can retailers, brands and media owners embrace this new dynamic and become enablers of creativity?
Ultimaker 2 Go, it's the hobbyist's ultimate dream. The $1,450 printer is small, compact and portable.
DEMOCRATISATION OF CREATIVITY 08
Go Pro Hero 4, now putting 4K high frame rate capture in anyone’s hands for less than $500.
DEMOCRATISATION OF CREATIVITY 08
SENSORED SURROUNDINGS 01
Sprout by HP, the world’s first PC with 3D scanner, perfect for creative endeavors on the desktop.
We’re about to enter the next stage of the internet -‐ the "thinternet," if you will.
Here, the internet becomes a thinner, more pervasive, more tactile, ambient layer that surrounds us. It connects us to everything, while becoming predictive and personalized. In this world everything is digital, so let’s shift to think about contexts not pipes.
We’re about to enter an age where Everything Becomes Smart. Our fridges, TVs and watches all make decisions for us -‐ or at the very least they make key contextual suggestions. What can or will become of advertising when we, individuals, are no longer in as much control?
We’re about to enter an age where everything around us collects our intimate data more abundantly than ever before. The question for brands, advertisers and consumers now becomes "If my watch knows where I am, what I am doing and how I am feeling, what new targeting opportunities come about?"
FINAL THOUGHT
WRITTEN BY:
KEVIN HUNG SHAUN FARRAR TOM GOODWIN@kevinhung @shaunfarrar @tomfgoodwin
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
GREG JAMES.CHIEF STRATEGY AND DEVELOPMENT OFFICERHAVAS [email protected]
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