5 Emerging technologies in marketing

Brands know that they must prepare for technology upheavals in the year ahead and build an emerging tech roadmap. Here’s a deeper aspect about leading emerging technologies & how marketers should incorporate them into their brands.

Smart Agent: - Smart agent is everything which recognises its environment, takes actions independently to achieve goals, and will improve its functioning with learning.

IBM Watson, Google Alexa, Apple Siri & Chatbots are cases of smart agents as they use sensors to recognise a request made by the user and then automatically collect data from the internet without the user's help. If you look around new age customer service, will find yourself surrounded with conversational AI like chatbot. The smart customer care bot can answer up to 70% of simple, FAQ-oriented customer questions or direct customers to find additional information on your website or app. Brands must embrace smart agents, including chatbots & Voice skills, to keep pace with how humans are using technology. Another way to get started is by developing a voice skill on smart devices. TED talks have developed a voice skill where influential videos from expert speakers on education, business, science, technology are available on Alexa & allows users to play the latest TED talk, play random TED talks, or search for talks by topic or by speaker name. They can also play talks that are funny, inspiring, persuasive, courageous.

Although smart agents are designed to communicate with humans right now, in future next 5 to 10 years they’ll be able to communicate with each other’s & build an ability to generate human-level language, that would make it possible for them to generate infinite sentences and structures just like humans.

Smart Interface: - Smart interfaces combine the latest in human-centred design techniques with technologies such as computer vision, conversational voice & augmented reality & virtual reality.

One of the top examples of smart interface is Metaverse. As per McKinsey & company bottom-up view of consumer and enterprise use cases suggests metaverse may generate up to $5 trillion in impact by 2030, equivalent to the size of the world’s third-largest economy today, Japan. It’s also pretty interesting to see that a lot of brands are creating hybrid projects, making a bridge between real life products, services and events and metaverse. Brands like Disney has already begun integrating the physical, digital, and virtual worlds to help its customer navigate Disney properties and platforms. Disney is building its own metaverse & filed a patent for a “virtual-world simulator,” which reproduces one of the company’s theme parks into a 3D realm. Users could then move in highly immersive individualized 3D virtual experiences without requiring those users to wear an augmented reality AR viewing device.

Smart interface like metaverse will not be a replacement for the real world but it will help us our augment the real world. It is a virtual world where people can socialize, work, shop, and play. It is not a single platform, there are many platforms and approaches that creates metaverse. In future Metaverse will evolve from metaverse to multiverse to omniverse.

Smart Technology: - As business become more globalised having effective smart technologies like blockchain is becoming increasingly important.

Blockchain is a decade old technology but infamously associated only with cryptocurrency. While blockchain is most famous for its role in helping the rise of digital currencies, there are many other non-cryptocurrencies uses for this technology. Blockchain is also bringing much-needed transparency to the government & ensuring that every government's action is visible. This will create a system of answerability where wicked activity can’t be overlooked. Indian govt has already implemented a pilot by building land registry using blockchain technology for the city of Panchkula, in Haryana, India.

Brands are using blockchain for transparency & secure financial transaction. Export & import business can do end to end payment & tracking via smart contract. For instance, if you agree to release a 40% payment to your supplier after delivery procedures are completed, 50% after delivery and 10% after checking the parts for quality. Companies can feed these business rules to the blockchain technology which will monitor the progress, verify, and enforces the fulfilment of the contract. After the supplier completes each of the tasks, the payment is automatically released to them from your digital assets attached to the contract.

India has all the potential to become leader as MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) has suggested setting up a National Blockchain Framework with three types of participants- confident user of technology (application developers), provider or operator of technology (infrastructure and services, Blockchain as a service), and complete technology stack builder (IP creator). In future blockchain technology will resolve many limitations, such as scalability, privacy controls, and interoperability.

Smart Things: - When things in an Internet are powered by Artificial Intelligence, then it is known as Internet of smart things like wearable devices, self-driven cars Drones & NFT.

Drones’ adoptions are growing rapidly among companies & government. US military recently used Drone for precision strike in Kabul & killed a terrorist. Google powered company called “Wing” is in a drone delivery service in partnership with FedEx and Walgreens. Companies are using Drones in multiple sectors like media and entertainment, defense, e-commerce, agriculture, construction.

While in consumer electronics sector next big thing is wearable technologies in form of watches, glasses, smart rings, smart clothing, head mounted display like VR headset. Brands like Mercedes has collaborated with Pebble Technologies to develop the Digital DriveStyle app. The system will tell its wearer where the car is, whether the doors are locked and if it needs fuel. Inside the car it'll alert the driver to potential hazards coming up on the road, while making functions like re-routing the nav system, controlling the audio system or activating Siri that much easier.

Wearable technology already creates a huge amount of data on the wearer, the more we embrace wearables, the more data will be available about us which will help brands build personalised solutions for consumers.

Smart Security: - Smart security involves integrating a variety of technologies to look for irregularities in data from multiple sources to identify security threats or frauds.

Every organisation is being targeted by cybercriminals & as more & more consumer purchasing online and cybercrime becomes more sophisticated, now is possibly the time for brands to adopt smart securities. As per PWC report there was 100% increase in cybercrime & report suggested that companies should utilise only secure access mechanisms for remote access, implement strong password policies and two- factor authentication for all remote access, and use geo-restrictions and login velocity restrictions. After the cyber-crime, digital ad fraud is possibly becoming second largest organized crime. mFilterIt, a global digital brand safety and prevention platform, predicts that ad fraud is estimated to cost advertisers and brands $44 billion to fraudulent activities by 2022. Lucrative payout, limited penalty, insufficient information & relatively no law drives fraudster with their malicious intentions. Fighting Ad fraud is therefore mission critical for advertising industry. Brands should use verification and ad/cyber fraud solutions that confirm that booked ads are being served in the targeted location and environment, and on the targeted device.

All the above emerging technologies are at nascent stage and has a lot of scope for evolution in the coming future. Navigating these technological changes will certainly challenge brands but by keeping an open mind to the possibilities, they can chart a path and capitalize on these emerging technologies.