Sanei sat down with media update’s Adam Wakefield at the IAB Digital Summit to talk about why gamification is important, and why the ‘hyper’ of modern society must form a critical part of how a business thinks.

Why should marketers be talking about gamification, and why is it so important, especially when dealing with customers?

The truth is we all inherently love playing games, as human beings. The psychology behind it is inherent. That’s one. Two, with computing power and platforms starting to do the job for us more intelligently, we are able to apply it to every touch point.

As an employee, I can have a gamified reward and platform that measures my behaviour, and the fact that I’m being watched changes my behaviour in itself. Because of the computing power and the growth of it, marketers need to really start waking up and say, “How do I bring gamification into how I get consumers to be enticed to work with me and to want to become super fans of my brand?”

By me recognising them, rewarding them, and bringing them into an ecosystem that I can’t get out of. I can’t get out of Discovery [for example]. You’ve got to bring me something unbelievable for me to get out of Discovery.

On top of that, employees, and that’s not marketers. That’s everybody. As employees, we need constant, instant gratification and somebody saying to us we’ve done well. Even weekly appraisals are starting to become something a bit too long. Millennials are suffering from total instant gratification disease and it’s not even millennials. We are. I’m an X-Generationer, and I’m also starting to have that sort of scenario around it.

At the summit, you spoke about Internet Protocol 6 and quantum computing. The sort of touch points you were talking about included having contact lenses with screens. Can you tell us more about this concept?

Look at how screens have evolved. Our grandparents used to watch cinemas, and then we got TVs, and then TVs became cellphones. Cellphones became iPads, iPads become glasses, and glasses become contacts. It’s a progression in the interactivity and engagement of what’s going on, on screens.

I reckon, if we think about our great grandfathers and them thinking we had TVs in our houses, they would think, ”This is shocking. All that rubbish. When do we talk? Family doesn’t communicate” and it’s just a layering on that and the truth is, for me, as human beings, our needs are shifting, our expectations are changing. This hype for recognition is something we’re all suffering from.

Quantum computing and all these things that are coming are feeding into our new need state, otherwise we wouldn’t adopt them.

What has pushed our need state to evolve? Technology has made life quicker. Instant gratification. Is that why we want to be rewarded more?

The five needs that we are starting to see grow really quickly: hyper personalisation, hyper trust and hyper convenience. Uber use those three. If you had a 15-year-old daughter, you wouldn’t put her in a normal taxi but you would put her into an Uber. You don’t mind.

Hyper personal, hyper convenience, hyper trust. The other two are hyper transparency and hyper recognition. Those five are becoming imperative.

Let me ask you a question: when was the last time you picked up the phone and phoned Mr Delivery, asked them to place an order for you, then, for them to take your order, phone the restaurant and then … that is ridiculous, right?

That was six years ago. Now, order in. Push a button. The meal is at my house before I get there. Look at what’s happening. It’s our expectations of how I want to interact. Even booking a restaurant is a chore. Why I can’t I just press two buttons and get a booking?

I don’t want to keep using it, but unfortunately I can’t stop: the Uberfication of everything is alive.

Is that what businesses are facing today? If you don’t stay with it, and stay with the speed of the modern world, represented by the ‘hyperness’ of everything, you’re risking the future of your business as technology comes to overtake it?

Because our needs are changing, what we deem as luxury has changed. For example, I worked with one of the largest diamond businesses in the world, and they asked me to come innovate downstream diamonds, which is retail diamonds.

We realised that the question they were asking was wrong. The question they should be asking is the future of luxury, because the future of luxury for a huge number of the Earth’s population is not diamonds anymore.

It is experiences, so what businesses need to start doing is getting out of their comfort zone and asking questions. They need to be bolder and more courageous in order to give the consumer of the future the expectations and needs that they have, no matter what industry you’re in.

For more information, visit iabdigitalsummit.co.za.

At the IAB Digital Summit, Huffington Post editor-at-large Ferial Haffajee spoke about how journalism, and South African journalism, is changing. Read more in our article, Ferial Haffajee on South African journalism and the future of journalism.