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Jake Moskowitz and his guests take the 5G conversation out of the studio, into the marketing world.
Episode eight was recorded live on September 24 at Advertising Week in New York. This time, instead of going deep on a specific topic, the discussion goes broad. Jake and his guests cover a variety of marketing shifts that will largely be driven by 5G.
Jeremy Kaplan, Editor-In-Chief of Digital Trends, takes the moderator’s seat. Instead of asking the questions, Jake Moskowitz joins the panel and gets a chance to answer a few.
The conversation covers a lot of ground, including consumer expectations, privacy, data, programmatic advertising and challenges we’re likely to see on our way to the 5G future. Moderator Jeremy Kaplan designates the stage as a no-hype zone and reminisces about failed efforts to steer technology. Jeremy Lockhorn, 20-year veteran of agency Sapient-Razorfish, lays out a framework for thinking about marketing in the new era of high-speed 5G communications. Mike Moreau, Chief Operating Officer of Habu (a new marketing personalization platform), shares some frank thoughts about consumers, personal data and privacy. Jake Moskowitz emphasizes the big take-away for marketers about AI and explains why “5G” is a misleading, minimizing misnomer for the new mobile communications network.
Moderator: Jeremy Kaplan, Editor-In-Chief @ Digital Trends
Guests:
- Jeremy Lockhorn, Founder and Emerging Tech & Media Consultant @ New Media Geek Consulting
- Mike Moreau, Chief Operating Officer @ Habu
FIVE, The 5G Podcast for Marketers, is presented by the Emodo Institute and Ericsson Emodo.
Host
Jake Moskowitz, Head of the Emodo Institute at Ericsson Emodo
Producers
Robert Haskitt
Adam Kapel
Jake Moskowitz
Original Episode Art
Jeff Boese
Music
Dyaphonic
Small Town Symphonette
Transcript of Episode 8: FIVE Live @ Advertising Week
Mike Murrow:
I think the vast majority of consumers don’t care that much, but I actually think that marketers and publishers absolutely do care – there are real fines and real threats.
Jeremy Kaplan:
Hang on – despite the outcry here in the media, people don’t actually care about privacy?
Mike Moreau:
I don’t think most people care that much.
Jake:
Let’s talk 5G. Welcome to FIVE, the podcast that breaks down 5G for marketers. This is Episode 8: FIVE Live. I’m Jake Moskowitz.
This episode was recorded live onstage on Tuesday, September 24 during advertising week in New York. For this episode, we wanted to take the 5G discussion out of the studio, out of the single-topic format, to have a broader conversation out in the marketing world. As you’ll hear, we had some great guests with us. Instead of asking the questions this time around, I got a chance to answer a few. The guy wearing the moderator hat is Jeremy Kaplan. Here’s Jeremy.
Jeremy Kaplan:
Hi, I’m Jeremy Kaplan. I’m the editor and chief of Digital Trends. If you’re unfamiliar with Digital Trends, we’re a lot like Seen It, a technology review site, except for we’re Seen It’s younger, cooler, hipper cousin. We kind of came in from Europe and everybody liked him more, so he stuck around a little bit. Like Seen It, we review a lot of products. We help to clear the clutter and aim to cut through the confusion for people. We’re living in a very digital world these days. It gets to be really complex, and that’s what our expertise is in: cutting through the confusion and helping to understand things.
Nothing could possibly be more confusing than 5G, in fact. Quick show of hands: everybody’s probably got a cell phone on them, right? Everybody’s got a cell phone. I imagine one or two people are using two cell phones, or maybe it’s just me who is insane. Anybody using a 5G phone right now? Not so much. It’s an emerging technology, but I think one that is really transformative. It means an awful lot for a lot of different industries, including the advertising and marketing space, which is what we’re going to dig into on this podcast today.
To do that, I’ll introduce some friends of mine: Jeremy Lockhorn, former VP of Experience Strategy for Mobile and Emerging Technology at Agency Sapient Razor Fish; and Mike Murrow, the COO of Habu. Gentleman, come on out and join us, please.
So we’re going to dig into 5G. But before we do, why don’t you guys take a few minutes to introduce yourselves and tell us a little about who you are and what you do.
Jeremy Lockhorn:
Sure. Jeremy Lockhorn, formerly of Sapient Razor Fish. I was there for just over 20 years, and I left about a year about to started my own consulting business named after my Twitter handle, my long-time Twitter handle, New Media Geek. I’m running a firm called New Media Geek consulting. I’m doing a lot of work with brands around emerging technologies and what changes they need to implement in order to prepare for the disruptions that will be wrought by things like 5G, and also helping technology companies – start-ups and big companies alike – find a path into partnership with brands.
Mike Moreau:
I’m Mike Murrow, I’m the COO of Habu. It’s a one-to-one personalization platform for marketers. It enables the two-way communication between marketers and consumers. I’ve been in data for a long time. Prior to Habu, which is just formally launching now, I was with Crux for about six years. I’ve been really rolling deep in data for a number of years.
Jake Moskowitz:
And I’ll just add to a little bit of what I mentioned before: My name is Jake. I work for a company called Ericsson Emodo, which is a subsidiary of Ericsson. Ericsson is the major telecommunications infrastructure provider that enables the cellular communications of phones. 80 percent of traffic in the US on mobile phones runs through Ericsson equipment. Emodo is focused on monetizing the data that runs on those pipes to improve the quality of advertising and the marketing industry. I oversee data strategy and also the Emodo Institute, which is the thought leadership element of Emodo. That’s the area that produces this podcast.
Jeremy Kaplan:
So 5G, obviously, one more than 4G, so it’s better, right? But it’s obviously a lot more than that. There’s latency involved. There’s pervasive computing. There’s wireless this and that. Maybe you could take a few minutes to walk through exactly what 5G is. It’s more than just your cell phone, right?
Jake Moskowitz:
I actually think 5G is a terrible misnomer in some ways because of what you just said. People immediately assume the difference between 5G and 4G is similar to the difference between 4G and 3G. But really, 5G is a whole new way to think about how your phone communicates to the infrastructure because of the latency issue. It’s not really just about the speed; it’s about the responsiveness. That’s what is going to allow real-time experiences, which is what’s going to change what consumer experiences look like in the future.
Jeremy Lockhorn:
I think of 5G as sort of a three-legged stool. One leg being the speed, which is what gets most of the hype, to you point. The second leg being low latency. To get a little technical, the 4G spec hits around 70 milliseconds latency. The 5G spec is sub-one millisecond latency, so very near real-time. The third spec is calling for ten times the number of simultaneous device support, minimum. Every 4G node can support one device, let’s say. Every 5G node should be able to support ten simultaneous devices, and of course, those are just samples. When you put those three things together, it is much bigger than the change from 3G to 4G. It’s a different step change.
Mike Moreau:
For sure, and the number of devices that will be contributing data for marketers’ use is just exponentially higher. I think as we think about things like personalization, as all marketers do, the more data in, the more real-time quality data, the better. 5G really opens up a whole new door to marketers.
Jeremy Kaplan:
I’d like to add in, if I could; there’s a fourth pillar there, which is positioning and accuracy, which kind of gets overlooked in the entire picture because latency is important, speed is obviously transformative. For most experiences with your phone today, we rely upon GPS, and GPS is not very accurate. If you’re talking about 5G applications in vehicles, one thing that the industry is very excited about, you really need to know precisely where your car is in a lane relative to the vehicle next to yours, or else there is accident potential. Positioning becomes very important and it’s something we’re going to talk about here because, obviously, where exactly you are is a very relevant data point for advertisers and marketers.
Let’s talk a little about what you can do with 5G. My question is, is it even possible to predict where this technology is going? It is a very transformative, underlying technology, not just a cellular thing. If you hear the industry and you believe the hype, this is going to transform everything we do. I for one, don’t like hype, and there’s a lot of hype around 5G. Is it possible to predict, based on some of this hype and speculation, what people are going to start doing with 5G? What is going to mean?
Jeremy Lockhorn:
Having gone to big trade shows over the last three or four years, like Mobile World Congress and CES, a lot of the infrastructure providers at those shows have been demonstrating various use cases for 5G. A lot of what you hear in the hype – higher resolution video that downloads much more quickly, better augmented reality, better virtual reality, connected vehicles and smart vehicles – all of those things. When you really start to have conversations with folks at those companies and ask them, “Really, what does the future hold?” they recognize there’s that common set of use cases that are fairly obvious, but there’s a bunch of stuff that nobody has dreamed up yet.
We saw that same step-change happen again when we moved from 3G to 4G, and it just enabled all kinds of companies to disrupt businesses around the world, like ride share, for example, and streaming video over mobile connections. Yes, it was probably possible under 3G, but the scale and scope and better technology behind 4G really lit those things up. If you had asked somebody in the 3G days, “What’s 4G going to do?” I don’t know that they would have said, “It’s going to launch Uber.”
Jake Moskowitz:
Exploding ten-second videos.
Jeremey Lockhorn:
Exactly.
Efforts to steer technology often end up in failure. I was thinking back to when DVDs first launched, and one of the big features they had when they first launched DVDs was the ability to switch between multiple camera angles. So you’re watching “Pulp Fiction” or “The Usual Suspects” or something, and you could see it from a different angle, which almost never happened, and no one actually ever used, despite the fact that it was baked into the spec from the get-go. Maybe it’s just impossible to say what’s actually going to happen.
Jake Moskowitz:
I do think so, and I think part of the reason is because 5G is not going to fix problems on its own. It requires a lot of complimentary technologies in order to thrive. A 5G cell tower on its own isn’t going to make that much of an impact. It’s not going to make your 4G phone super-fast. You’re going to need a 5G phone. The website that you’re trying to access has to implement its infrastructure differently to enable the kind of latency that’s possible with 5G. You need totally new AR/VR goggles. You need AI models that leverage all those new data points that you mentioned, Mike. That’s the other thing. It’s especially hard to predict what 5G will do because it’s dependent on so many other technologies. In some ways, 5G is really just an enabling technology for these other technologies that may have been around for a while, but may not have thrived because 5G didn’t exist yet.
Mike Moreau:
Yeah. They have to be able to catch what your pitching. I think that’s always an issue when you have new emerging technology. Any of the legacy systems have to be able to process new data and really catch what you’re pitching. I think it’s going to take years for all of the existing industries to catch up, but it definitely opens up so many opportunities for new, innovative companies to come in and disrupt.
Jeremy Kaplan:
Let me just put a line in the sand here. One thing we could sit up here is hype for you guys what we’ve heard. A lot of companies hype for 5G and they say, “Well, it’s going to be transformative. You’re going to have these augmented reality experiences that will be astonishing! You’re going to have self-driving vehicles, and you’re going to be able to do whatever you want because you’ve got 5G in there and you can sit back and they’ll tell you about the things that you’re passing by, marketing direct to your car!” I don’t think it is very practical for us or for you to hear that. I’d like us to stay away from some of the pie-in-the-sky hype around what this stuff is and talk a little bit more about specific things. Because I think there are some very specific things that 5G directly enables which can be enabled today, and can impact the marketing and advertising experiences that we have.
One thing that seems really obvious is, we talk about the great bandwidth, delivery of video. Immediately, you could have that. What sort of impact does that have on the web experience? Right now you have a programmatic experience where there’s tons of pixels and a few seconds of downloads of just stuff, and I think 5G should eliminate all that and make a lot of our web browsing experience seamless. Is it going to do that? Is it going to improve things on that level?
Jeremy Lockhorn:
Not by itself. To Jake’s point earlier, yeah the bandwidth is going to be faster and yeah, the latency is going to be lower, but if we don’t adapt the infrastructure and reduce things like tag-load and the number of hops that an ad request has to go through, 5G is not going to solve that. it’s still browser processing time and all kinds of other infrastructure stuff that 5G isn’t designed to fix. I think we have to work together as an industry. What’s going to happen is the user doesn’t really care about the programmatic supply chain and how many hops the ad has to go through to get on the phone. They know they can download a 4K feature-length movie in, like, ten seconds. Why the hell is taking this web page three seconds to load? That’s just unacceptable. We’ve got to work together as an industry to address that.
Jake Moskowitz:
The thing that’s interesting is that, today, it is acceptable. People accept that, have come to expect that it takes three or four seconds for a website to load, and that’s what I think will change. The 5G will drive a change in consumer tolerance in the sense that people won’t put up with things in two years that they put up with now. There will be a real weeding out of the companies that adapt to that and adjust their infrastructure to keep up with the speeds that people will expect and those that don’t.
Jeremy Lockhorn:
To your point, it’s funny even today there are so many studies that have been published that talk about the fact that the patience level of a consumer on a 4G connection on a mobile device is three second. How many sites are loading completely in three seconds? Very, very few. To your point, 5G is just going to make that worse. It’s going to go from three to two to one, and we need to do more than just think that the bandwidth is going to solve it.
Mike Moreau:
Things like asynchronous loading, I think, you’ll see become even more important because content delivery seems a lot easier to solve, to me, than advertising, especially programmatic. It’s just too many people involved, too many companies involved, too many technologies, whereas content delivery, I think, you can realistically speed up. There will be a real impact on advertising. If you can’t return an ad quickly enough, they’re going to just not load it. That’s what will happen on an increasing basis.
Jeremy Kaplan:
There was a story in The Drum this morning that made an interesting point about this. It suggested that the world “download” itself is going to become obsolete, because there isn’t the time spent downloading anything. You push a button and it happens. What does that mean for consumers when that experience of downloading everything is just gone, when everything is just real-time?
Jeremy Lockhorn:
I use this framework to think about the impact of 5G that I call SICC. Four things. “S” is seamless, and I think that’s a combination of fast, fluid and friction-free. We’ve talked about fast already. Fluid is, “I want to hop from device to device, but I also want to have a totally seamless experience. By leveraging all the data that you know about me to deliver personalized experiences. Friction-free, there’s just all kinds of unnecessary friction in digital experiences today. One of the best examples of that is the retail space. The average checkout flow on a mobile device has 23 fields in it, which is just bat shit to think that people are going to take the time to fill out 23 fields. You look at leading retailers, like Staples, there’s five fields in that thing. It’s those things that are capturing basically the same data, but they’ve found a way to get it from 23 to five. It’s those types of things we have to do in the 5G world to make things more seamless.
Immersive is the “I.” This is AR/VR, higher resolution video, content that surrounds you and is intended to be more experienced than it is consumed. The first “C” is Clairvoyant. This is advanced personalization. Using all that data to understand what I want and deliver it before I even ask for it. This is happening already today. Specifically, our smartphones are getting smarter and smarter about our context and are beginning to prompt us before we even ask for certain pieces of content. I missed a phone call from my wife earlier today, and the next time I picked up my iPhone, there’s Siri saying, “Hey, do you want to call Kristina back?” Removing friction, but also predicting what I want.
The last “C” is collaborative. There’s two big pieces of this to me. The first is breaking down silos inside our organizations and in the resistance to collaborating with external organizations. The best example I’ve seen of this is the joint fund from Daimler and BMW, two fierce competitors who have agreed to jointly fund a one billion dollar – billion with a “B” – fund to help invent the future of mobility and transportation. When those kinds of competitors can get together and collaborate, it just speaks volumes to the pace of change and the changes we have to implement in order to address that pace of change.
On the other side of the collaborative piece, it also means humans and machines collaborating together in totally new ways. you’re starting to see that happening today, but when 5G becomes a reality, it’s going to increase the necessity of doing that.
Jeremy Kaplan:
Let’s dig into that piece, that’s fascinating. Machines and humans working together: you’re talking about artificial intelligence.
Jeremy Lockhorn:
Yeah. AI for sure. One example that I saw of this that I like to talk about when I talk about the SICC framework is what IBM did with their booth at Mobile Congress a couple years ago. Show and Tell in Barcelona, the biggest wireless trade show in the world. There is a Spanish architect by the name of Antoni Gaudi who is pretty much synonymous with Barcelona. His work is all over Barcelona. One of his most famous buildings is Sagrada Familia, a beautiful cathedral in downtown Barcelona unlike anything you’ve ever seen. To celebrate Gaudi and Barcelona heritage and architect, IBM fed Watson a bunch of Gaudi’s work, his preferred materials, photos of his stuff, some of his designs. Watson came back with a bunch of ideas that they then handed to human architects who took those ideas and designed the final installation that hung over their booth in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress. You could see the characteristics in Gaudi’s style represented there, and it was a really fascinating collaboration.
Jeremy Kaplan:
I said I wanted to dig into some of the realities of what we’re talking about with 5G here today. One of you said 5G is one of several transformational technologies that is going to emerge over the next couple of years. Artificial intelligence, AI, we’re really just on the cusp of where this is going. 5G that is coming out in 2019, but it’s really going to explode in 2020. these are emerging technologies, but that said, there a lot of realities around what you can do today. The merger between existing AI and data is going to be a fascinating one. I think that’s something that marketers can tap into today. Are there guidelines or advice you offer to people looking to figure out what they can do with 5G today?
Jake Moskowitz:
The one thing I want to make sure we do, when we hear about advertising, I want to make sure we’re very clear about suggested take-aways for what advertisers can actually do. To your point about AI, to me the big take-away for advertisers is that we encourage advertisers to rethink the relationship between probabilistic and deterministic data. Historically, advertisers have viewed deterministic data as superior and are generally in search of the emos deterministic data they can find. I think in 5G future, we will look for other criteria in determining who to work with and what data to use.
Probabilistic will become way better because of the better inputs that Mike mentioned earlier because of all the new devices in a 5G world. Because it’s so much better and because of the need for speed, the need for media properties to be responsive in a low-latency world, artificial intelligence will, I believe, be more important than deterministic. The winners will be those with the best AI, the best inputs to create the best AI, and the best implementation of that AI close to the consumer to respond really quickly. We encourage advertisers to rethink how much they value deterministic and to think about what is going to be valuable in the future when thinking about how to leverage ad tech infrastructure for their marketing needs.
Mike Moreau:
I agree with all of that. My concern is the next step. I definitely see more data, more quality, better data fueling AI. With improving AI, I think really interesting insights and great decisioning can be made. Advertisers and marketers will certainly benefit from all that, but what I’m seeing is a big gap between that phase and then what you do with it and doing it in an automated fashion. That’s where it tends to break down with advertisers even today when it comes to AI. Lots of great insights, lots of great instructions, but the connection from AI to execution systems – whether it’s advertising or anything else, could be email – there’s just that big quantum gap that has to be closed over the next few years in order for marketers to really benefit from 5G.
But I completely agree about deterministic versus probabilistic and the shift that will happen there.
Jake Moskowitz:
I think some of it is because platforms haven’t need to be that responsive, so they can depend on a tag-based, post impression measurement framework, whereas in the future the need for latency just won’t allow for that type of implementation. You’ll have to pull everything into true real-time and into more real pre-bid, bid-level AI. that’s how you’ll be able to be responsive enough.
Jeremy Kaplan:
I read this fascinating case study a few months back. As a preamble to that, I think we’re also going to see a need for more creativity – and this is a very creative industry by definition so that shouldn’t be a challenge – but because there are these new pools of data and vastly more of it, what you can do with that pool of data becomes the real challenge for the marketers.
For example, I read that Clorox was using data off of smart thermometers, which weren’t even a thing until a little while ago. All of a sudden we have smart thermometers that can tell exactly who is sick where. If you pool that in the aggregate, you can say, “This is a community where there are instances of the flu. We should be advertising toward this group.” A crazy use of data that did not exist before, but how do you find those pools of data and identify them and then go after them? That’s a real challenge.
Jake Moskowitz:
It will be really interesting for anyone: how do you source all this great data? There is so much data that’s going to be possible for new devices. In some ways, it’s not just a race to build AI, but it’s also a race to tap into the highest-quality most valuable inputs to your AI models. That will be a decider between who’s successful and who’s not, and who can make sense of that stuff, and who can figure out the privacy ramifications for different types of data.
Jeremy Kaplan:
Parsing through data is going to be the new challenge in this era.
But let’s talk privacy, because that is a hugely important factor as we are talking about location-based data. The phone that knows precisely where you are at any given second. To what extent should marketers be aware of that and tread lightly, or do people actually care about privacy at all? What do you all think?
Mike Moreau:
I think the vast majority of consumers don’t care that much, but I actually think that marketers and publishers absolutely do care – there are real fines and real threats.
Jeremy Kaplan:
Hang on – despite the outcry here in the media, people don’t actually care about privacy?
Mike Moreau:
I don’t think most people care that much.
Jeremy Kaplan:
There’s like a daily drumbeat of stories of complaints and whining of, “Facebook’s doing this with my data.”
Mike Moreau:
Yeah, I don’t know. They still seem to be doing okay. I really don’t think people care. There are some who do, and I do think privacy is incredibly important. It is something that every advertiser absolutely needs to pay attention to. Those fines are real. I think it’s going to become a lot more difficult to manage privacy with all the local legislation: city level, state level, country level. You have to be able to manage all of this as a marketer and you have no choice but to do so. it’s going to be a really rough few years ahead, I think, for marketers who haven’t figured this out. By the way, I don’t really know many who have figured this out.
I think they care more than consumers, to be clear.
Jeremy Lockhorn:
I agree with you by and large. I think there is a groundswell of people who are becoming more aware of all of the use cases of the data that they are casting off into the world. They’re making decisions. A lot of people, to your point, don’t care. Some do. But I think they want the ability, the transparency, the choice and the control over that. That leads directly to your point. It’s not just about the regulations, its about finding ways to make sure we’ve got that 100 percent consent opt-in. It’s not that hard. That’s not difficult to achieve.
As 5G continues to roll and we’ve got all these new sources of data, we just need to make sure that we’re doing it in a privacy-friendly sort of way.
Mike Moreau:
But it is difficult. If the CCPA and back to that Clorox example with the smart thermometers. If Clorox is the one that actually captures that data and then, to Jake’s point, those who have the best data and the best inputs will win. Obviously not one company is going to have all the data sources, so you are going to have to source it from somewhere else. With CCPA, you have to be extremely specific with the consumers of, “here’s exactly what I’m doing.” I’m not an expert in this, but my understanding with CCPA is Clorox couldn’t sell that data to Walmart and then Walmart sells it to P&G, some other company. I don’t think you can have that extra hop. It is going to be really interesting to see how companies actually manage around individual users, individual pieces of data. it’s going to be gnarly.
Jake Moskowitz:
It’s also important to think about the move to 5G and simply the new regulations that already exist that impact how data will be treated in a 5G world. For example, 5G, by definition, runs over cellular network. So if devices are connected over the cellular network in ways that they might not have in the past, if they are running through Bluetooth or WiFi, that inherently is a difference because now that data is passing through a carrier and carriers are regulated by the FCC, whereas publishers are regulated by the FTC. FCC regulations are more stringent than FTC regulations, and therefore simply by the fact that it’s running through a different network, the same data point will be regulated differently.
Another example is, you mentioned earlier how location data will become far more precise from a cell tower network. That, in and of itself, can change how that data is regulated. Today it might not be considered personally identifiable, but if it gets down to a foot or two feet or a couple millimeters, that can be personally identifiable, so by definition, it simply changes the regulations that already exist and how it will impact data in a 5G.
Jeremy Kaplan:
It’s also just the implementation, too. If I said to you, Microsoft is tracking your precise location, that’s an outcry, right? All of a sudden there are stories, “Oh my gosh, Microsoft is following my every move, my every footfall.” Then you take a service like Tile, this little module you stick in your suitcase, and it knows exactly where I am at every given second and “Thank God for it. I am glad that it knows precisely where I am.” So it’s really about how you spin that product or that service at the end of the day.
Do consumers even care about their privacy at the end of the day, or is it just an artifact of the media?
Mike Moreau:
I think they do. I don’t want to seem that people don’t care, I just don’t think the vast majority don’t really care. I think there are some, and there are very vocal pockets, and they should be concerned. I think they are right to be. But most people, I don’t think care.
Jeremy Kaplan:
I’m with you 100 percent. I don’t think people care at all. I think people like getting outraged, but then at the end of the day, I think they like checking in and seeing their friends on Facebook. Those two things are diametrically opposed, and yet, people are perfectly fine with it.
We only have a few minutes left, but I do want to dig a little into personalization, because we haven’t really touched on that too much. The fact that we have all this data in real time, the fact that we have this location-based service in real time, I think enables a lot of opportunities for marketers. What does that look like? What does that mean for a marketer?
It’s a big huge question, I don’t know if there’s an easy answer for that.
Mike Moreau:
It’s funny. 5G opens up the opportunity to move from segment-based personalization where it is more about relevance than true personalization. When you get to this level of data, down to exactly what aisle you’re in in the grocery store, doing that without all of the beacons and that sort of thing, you can start to have true personalization happen. I don’t think marketers are ready at all.
I just see today’s personalization efforts. Some companies do it well. The vast majority do not, and it’s because of that human element. there’s actual heavy lifting that has to be done to make this real. I haven’t seen many scale it out. Maybe with the exponential growth in data, maybe it’s actually enough for marketers to take real personalization seriously, the AI component. There are real opportunities to innovate here and automate and make personalization real. This might be the trigger that actually makes it happen, but I don’t think it exists at scale today.
Jeremy Lockhorn:
I totally agree with you. I think there are some outliers that are starting to figure it out and get the infrastructure in place. It’s a massive undertaking, to your point, particularly when you talk about the breadth of data that’s out there, and what data matters and which data can I really use to tailor a personalized experience.
The one brand that has impressed me over the last five years is Nike. it’s an easy one to point to because everybody talks about Nike for a lot of reasons. What they’ve done – here’s a brand marketer that has built that brand on the back of brilliant, award-winning TV spots and creative and general brilliant advertising. I feel like they’ve become a data-driven marketer just over the last three or four years. It probably started with Nike Plus, however long ago that was. Now that they are getting more and more data about their users through the apps, when you go to make a purchase in a physical Nike store, they ask you if you have a Nike account, and they scan your bar code if you have it, or log you in somehow. They’re tracking your purchase history, they know how much you run, they know how much you work out. All that is starting. You can see it in their apps and in their retail experience. it’s starting to deliver a personalized experience. I don’t even think they are there yet, but they are probably closer than many.
Jake Moskowitz:
There are a couple of emerging, scale-able, dynamic, creative technologies that we’ve looked at. This conversation make some wonder if that’s one of the other complementary technologies that may already exist but maybe hasn’t had its heyday because 5G hasn’t been there. Add that to the list along with AI and AR and VR and also edge cloud computing is another one we haven’t touched on. So maybe add that to the list as a scale-able dynamic creative. Maybe the data isn’t there to leverage it today, but maybe 5G will enable it to really have it’s heyday.
Jeremy Lockhorn:
That’s the really interesting thing, for me, about 5G. When you ask the question, “What are the implications for brands and marketers?” I think you’ve got to take a step back and recognize that it’s not just 5G. It’s all these things we’ve been talking about and all those things that you’ve just mentioned that are going to hit over the next three to five years. 5G is an ingredient to a lot of those to make them better, but the questions is not just, “how does each one of these discreet technologies transform my marketing initiatives?” It’s how do they all together enable me to think about these things differently.
Jeremy Kaplan:
And with that, I think we’re about out of time here, plus I know there are some drinks upstairs so I don’t want to keep you form that. Thank you guys very much for joining me. A round of applause for our panelists. If you have any questions, we’ll be sticking around for a few minutes, so please come up and approach us. Thanks again.
Jake Moskowitz:
The FIVE podcast is presented by Ericsson Emodo and the Emodo Institute and features original music by Diaphonic and the Small Town Symphonette. This episode was produced by Robert Haskitt, Adam Kapel, and me. I’m Jake Moskowitz.