By Adam Wakefield
The first part of Robinson’s presentation revolved around a statement made by Lyft CEO, Logan Green, who said “Flexibility is the new stability”. Businesses that were used to operating in a certain way, such as Kodak and Mxit, market-dominant at their peaks, had fallen by the wayside because they recognised too late the need to change with an ever-evolving marketplace.
“It’s not about digital marketing, it’s about digital business,” Robinson told the audience. “Disruption is everywhere.”
He named the likes of Facebook, Uber, and Alibaba as companies which were the largest in their respective markets, being content production, taxi, and retail respectively. However, Facebook did not produce any content, Uber does not own any taxis and Alibaba does not own any stock.
They had entered markets which operated in a certain way, and through the use of digital technology, fundamentally altered the way businesses functioned in those market places.
He then touched on five trends within the digital space worth noting in 2015, being mobile first, me-casting, wearable technology, information and data, and augmentation and AI.
Starting with mobile first, Robinson said it had demonstrated 89% percent growth in 2014 alone and was expected to continue growing a-pace. An example of the disruption he earlier referred to was the statistic that 10% of all photos ever taken were taken in 2014.
The rise of the camera phone, and digital juggernauts such as Instagram, had fundamentally altered the landscape for camera companies, who 10 years ago might have balked at the thought of their biggest threat in the future being from mobile phones.
When it came to me-casting, broadcasting apps such as Meerkat or Periscope posed challenges to rights holders. An example Robinson mentioned was the recent Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao boxing match, where pay-per-view viewers used the likes of Meerkat and Periscope to broadcast the fight they had paid to watch to app users who had not done so.
On wearable technologies, Robinson said the wrist is where companies such as Apple will look to target as sales of wrist devices far outstripped those of other devices such as eyewear and clothing. As wrist devices become smaller, more powerful and have better battery life, Robinson suggested the market for such devices would grow substantially in the next few years.
Moving onto information and data, Robinson quoted senior vice president of IT research company, Gartner, Peter Sondergaard, who says; “Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine”. Raw data is all well and good, but without interpretation and measureable outcomes, it is just numbers.
Lastly, Robinson touched on augmentation and AI, with the convergence of technology and humanity posing challenges to businesses and marketers.
The second, and last part of Robinson’s presentation focused on marketing in the digital space, with the NativeVML co-founder mentioning several principles to think about.
These were the power of the individual, purpose-led marketing, integrated story-making, creating content instead of advertising, integration being the future of creativity, and companies looking internally before marketing externally.
Customers are becoming smarter and, now more than ever, think about how a product came to be instead of simply thinking about the performance of the product.
For businesses and marketers alike, while this in itself was a disruption, it also creates opportunities for new approaches to old or familiar questions.