Editor’s Note: This event offered a window into how major companies are enhancing success by improving how they forecast, showcasing leading-edge techniques that strengthen predictions.
Future Trends – Emma Chiu, Creative Innovation Director, The Innovation Group, JWT Intelligence
- Xennials: Big differences between older millennials & younger millennials. Xennials is defined 30- to 45- year olds. Their key priorities: Wellbeing; Experience; Self-improvement.
- Example, Xennials want the brands they buy to be sustainable, ethical, transparent, and have a sense of purpose.
- Internet of Eyes: the use of facial recognition to replace passwords, unlock screens, and even provide access to cars.
- Internet of Ears: reflects increased use of voice technology to get information and make purchases. Note – when asking a brand a question, the brain’s emotional activity is twice as high when a question is spoken, rather than typed.
The Future of Culture/Work – Candi Castleberry Singleton, VP of Intersectionality, Culture, & Diversity, Twitter
- Intersectionality’s primary focus is to build skills to foster healthy conversations, create diverse human connections, and encourage respectful interactions.
- With the aim of building a more globally diverse organization, Twitter looks at four areas: Me (supporting individuals), We (how these individuals can feel connected and respected as part of a team), Us (Twitter as an organization), and World (Twitter as a global platform).
- Diversity is not just about the workforce, but extends to people, geographies and partners as well.
The Future of the Insights Function: Digital Transformation – Bernard Brenner, Senior Director, Advertising, Social and Retail Effectiveness Research, Microsoft
- Using social data to understand what people may talk about after a launch – Instead of the typical study that takes a few months, the team looked at social data after just a week. This insight could be shared with engineering to influence the roadmap, with marketing to inform communications and with PR as a caution.
- The team also retooled its driver’s analyses, allowing anyone on the team to adjust levels around certain features to see the expected impact on product satisfaction, i.e. scenario planning on the fly.
- AI is helping to break down ad pre-testing. Advanced techniques are being used to understand the variables that drive strong creative.
- Why take these small steps? The digital transformation does not just impact the computing industry as a whole. Organizations need to undergo the journey as well.
A Future Beyond Facebook & Google – Matt Ochsner, Principal, Internet & Digital Media Investment Banking, Needham & Co.
- Metrics to watch include: User growth, daily active users, and monthly active users as well as time spent on platforms
- The discrepancy between time spent offline versus online still exists, but the gap is now where people are spending their time and where budget is being
So, What Can a Good Marketing Dashboard Do For You? – Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing, Inc.
- An older ARF survey found that CEOs were disappointed in marketing’s ability to prove their value. Unfortunately, this situation has not changed. A study highlights the disconnect between what marketing is measuring and what the c-suite wants.
- We have access to more data than ever and can analyze data faster than ever before.
- Despite this abundance of measures and metrics, they can be the wrong ones. “It doesn’t do any good to be efficient if you’re going in the wrong direction.”
- CEO mindset: Standing still is riskier than change; but they are willing to experiment and accept failure as a condition of success; fast failure is okay, but marketers tend toward analysis paralysis; the future is more important than the past; they want to know what the next move is and what opportunities can be pursued and created.
To access full presentations, videos, and more in-depth FORECASTxSCIENCE takeaways, click here.
Source: The ARF FORECASTxSCIENCE Event (2018, November 14). The ARF.