Why is it that yesterdays view of the future is more exciting than the reality?
With uncanny prescience, The Jetsons predicted a world of sun beds, flat screen TVs, doggy treadmills and smart watches; futurist Ray Kurzweil, Googles Director of Engineering, not only predicted an astonishing array of technological advances he invented a significant number of them too; while early sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein anticipated the Cold Warand water beds.
There are so many wonderful things being created and conceived every day what fascinates me though is what the world looks like when they work together. When they integrate seamlessly into our lives, what are we, as marketeers, missing? What more can we do with the data that we create and control?
For starters we need to deliver on some of the promises made by big data and cloud computing. So lets take a look at the near future, but focus on something specific, something common and convenient to almost all of us on-demand TV.
For someone who travels a lot, much of your info will already be in the cloud. With Google Diary synching your flights, it will also integrate your entertainment into your work schedule, downloading things you havent yet watched or caught up on in anticipation of that mid-week networking trip so you can just press play after a hard day and be served not only content you want, but also contextually relevant advertising.
Much of this is already possible, it just doesnt work yet. For the first time ever, your broadcaster knows more about you and your home life than your bank. It knows what you watch, when you watch it increasingly even who you watch it with.
Imagine if all advertising could be made that smart, telling you about take out deals when youre enjoying family time or shopping deals near you when youre on the move. Mass marketing is already on the way out the sledgehammer is no longer effective. The next trick will be to see who is handiest with a scalpel.
