4 top trends that are disrupting digital

In her previous post for .rising leaders, Jodie Hopperton, Managing Director of the Institute of Promotional Marketing (IPM), told us how she was looking forward to chairing a conference exploring disruptive of tech within marketing, alongside heads of digital and marketing at leading brands, including Samsung, Westfield, Ogilvy, Blippar, and Google.

Here Jodie takes us through some of the key things she took away from  the conference, sharing her thoughts on some of the hottest new developments when it comes to digital.

 

4 top trends that are disrupting digital

At the recent IPM conference, Digital Disruption: The Union of Marketing and Technology, I learnt a lot from agency and tech experts about what us marketers should be thinking about over the coming months.

Here are my key takeaways from a day full of inspiring ideas, along with examples of some of the great campaigns out in the market:

1. It’s not actually about digital disruption, it’s about collaboration.

OK, it’s a bit about disruption; that’s often where brilliant new projects start, and we’ll continue to talk about it and keep an eye out for what’s coming next to disrupt the whole scene. But the successful disruptors are few and far between. Where the majority can succeed is through collaboration. It’s impossible to stay ahead of the curve on everything, so working together within our relative areas of expertise gets the most dynamic results.

One of the best all-round examples I’ve seen recently is Uber. Firstly, they disrupted the taxi market, meeting consumers’ needs more than anything currently out there. Now their recent stroke of genius in opening their API to allow businesses to build the Uber app into their own apps means seamless integration for the consumer. For example, I recently searched for an address on my Google Maps app to see that I could order an Uber car in virtually one click. Brilliant.

2. There’s a lot of opportunity around joining the physical with the digital.

The message is: consumers want and need retail experiences, so let’s get smart with technology to maximize their encounters on the high street. Retail certainly isn’t dead; it’s changing, and we’re going to need be a lot more exciting about how we use spaces to attract consumers. Some great examples of how retailers are getting smarter about the interaction of digital with bricks and mortar include Westfield’s discussion around the ‘retail revolution’, Argos’ concept store (left) and some of the innovative augmented reality from Blippar.

3. The consumer journey is changing, becoming more diverse by the day.

Get excited about the technology by all means, but make sure you understand the potential impacts on those all-important customer journeys. This is a huge area, especially for digital marketers.

I’ll talk more about creating real loyalty with consumers in my next column for .rising, so watch this space.

4. It’s all about wearables.

‘Red hot’ I believe is the expression CCS Insight expert Ben Wood used.

Personally, I’m interested to see what the pairing of the tech and fashion houses produces (see, there’s that ‘collaboration’ again). After six months of wearing a Fitbit I realized that my phone, which is always with me, could track pretty much the same detail without me having to wear the (slightly ugly) rubber band around my wrist.

Wearables are a bit more tempting now that they can do a bit more – quick email checks, answering the phone to save me rooting around in my bottomless pit of a handbag – and if they can look good too, well, I can see my credit card coming out.

Overall, the Digital Disruption conference left me wanting to go and play in a lab.  And I mean really – many of the top agencies and large organisations now actually have ‘labs’ where they test new technologies and drive innovation.

The last time I went into a real lab was when I worked at the New York Times. I was talking about it for months – sure it’s work, but it’s oh so much fun. I’ll definitely be tapping up some of the agencies we heard from at the conference to go and see what they are working on over the coming weeks.

If you want to learn more about some of the ideas explored at the conference, summaries of the sessions can be found here.