Heading along to Skycity’s Convention theatre is always a great day out, but the Marketing Association’s Digital Day Out has got to be a favourite. With near 600 people and a sell-out crowd for 5 years running you know it’s the place to stay connected with your fellow marketers and get a steer of where digital is heading. And this year’s DDO18 did not disappoint. Here are a few takeaways from the conference that you will progressively see in the digital marketing space more and more.
Voice search is growing quickly – you write at about 31 words/min, you type about 70 words /min but you speak at 200 words/min. In our age of impatience voice will be taking us into the future. With the rise of ML (Machine Learning) using digital voice is improving its accuracy. In 2016 20% of search was via voice. In 2020 Google is predicting 50% of search to be voice search. Where is an example of the rise of voice today? Have a read of the NZHerald article about ANZ’s voice recognition security software which rolled out to Australian customers middle of last year and has just reached New Zealand shores recently.
The Age of Assistance – Martin Curtis, Head of Performance Agencies, AUNZ at Google believes customers are looking to brands for “helpful personal assistance”. Enabling brands to drive growth through anticipating and satisfying intent throughout the customer journey. Google is a major player in this assistance space with Google lens, Google photos, Google assistant just to name a few.
So what is the key take away here? Martin gave us 3 key points
- Show Up – What is the customer expecting and where? A basic example is Google my business the free business tool so your opening hours and contact details can be viewed and accessed easily.
- Speed Up – 53% of visits to your website on mobile are abandoned if it takes longer than 3 secs to load on mobile. How long does it take your site to load? Check out Googles free mobile site speed checker. Just so you don’t feel so bad with your sites ratings, New Zealand website average performance is 15sec, so as a country we have a long way to go! But don’t be discouraged, now you have that information, you can do something about it.
- Wise Up – Millennials spend 1 day a week on their phones. Where are your customers? You need to think about targeting based on intent. In the social space (#ideallife) people’s intent is completely different to their intent on google (#reallife). Are you catering to these different intentions?
MR Mixed reality
You might have heard of AI (Artificial Intelligence), AR (Augmented reality) but here is an another one for your repertoire, MR (Mixed reality). Wikipedias definition says “Mixed reality (MR), sometimes referred to as hybrid reality, is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time”. Mixed reality is all about infusing physical world with bits of information. MR moves away from device centric innovation to becoming instead info centric innovation. Watch this space!
AI
But maybe not as you know it….AI or IA that’s not Artificial Intelligence that’s Augmented Intelligence, or intelligence augmentation, it’s about Humans becoming faster and smarter at the tasks they are performing. There are some great advances in this space – here’s just one – Lifesaving medical deliveries by Drones in Rwanda.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Dave Wild (Smith and Wild) “The best way to predict the future – is to be the ones creating it”
If you want to continue the conversation, get in touch with us at Energise. We would be happy to partner with you and assist your brand to engage, surprise and delight your customers wherever you happen to be in this diverse and exciting digital journey.
