Agencies - Say No To Making An Apple Watch App.

Agencies are not important enough to take a hippocratic oath, if we did, in our version we should promise to act around our clients interests not our own.

If we were acting around our clients interests, there would not be 3,000 Apple Watch apps in the App store.

There are some people who believe that innovation comes from focus groups, there are others ( Steve Jobs famously) who think they don't work because people don't know what is possible.

I think in truth, it's reasonable to perhaps give 90% of our time to what people want, and 10% to what they don't but we think they should. It's this 10% that explains the car not the faster horse, the iPad, fruit smoothies, Red Bull.

Likewise we have the same spectrum with technology.

Do we speak to people, find their problems and use technology to solve these pinch points.

Or do we find a technology and then magically work around it to see what's possible.

I think again a 90:10 answer is correct. Let's totally understand what is possible, but let's focus on what is wanted.

Let's look at some of the big successes of the modern age.

• Facebook isn't a result of mindless application of a new technology, it was using old technology to solve the human need to be part of a community.
• Google wasn't an mindless applications of new algorithms, it was a group of people ceaseless working to solve the problem of finding things online.
• Self driving cars solve the very real problem of car crashes.
• Uber solved the problems of Taxi's being terrible in every way.
• Apple made the iPhone to solve the problem of every smartphone before being a total dog to use.
• Amazon found the technology to make buying things online easy.
• Kayak found the technolgy to make comparing flights easy.

It's hard to find examples of technology working when it became the ideation stimuli and there are many examples of it demonstrably failing.

• 3D printing isn't taking off because nobody knows yet what to do with it.
• Drones are sitting in ad agency cupboards with dead batteries because they are currently awaiting a purpose.
• iBeacons are uniformly hated by people in the real world, because they don't yet help anyone in any way.

So while I have a lot of admiration for the Microsoft Band, my Withings Activite, the Apple Watch, I'm so far aware that they've so far had limited application to my life.

Every agency on this planet right now should be playing with the Apple Watch.  They should be aware of every Apple Watch app out there, they should intimately know what is possible and what is nearly possible. They should above all be considering it a data input device, not a display based media.

But they should be spending 90% of their time not working around what this makes possible, but establishing Clients business problems.

- Perhaps the Apple Watch can aid input of data to make insurance premiums lower?
- Perhaps the Apple Watch can make checking into a hotel or picking up a rental car easier? 
- Perhaps the Apple Watch can show key contextual nudges that make your experience of an airline better?

But please please please, whatever you do, ideate around business problems, not what is now possible.

It's possible for a 15 year old girl to get a breast enlargement, it's the job of a decent surgeon to say no and understand what the real problem is and assure them that just because something is new, easy and cheap, it's not the obvious way to be a better person. That waiting to see how things go is a good idea.

Next time our clients call and want instant surface level improvement, we should act with the same decency and get to the heart of the problem and act responsibly. 

Above all else:

• I firmly believe Apple has not sold more than 2m watches globally so far, I think all "analysts" were pulling data from their asses for the opening weekend. 
• I think in 6 months time, 1/2 of all Apple Watches owned will sit in a drawer somewhere.
• Perhaps in 6 months time, with a daily user base of 3m people globally, mainly of geeks, we won't have a particularly desirable user base.