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Todd, Fraser and myself attended this year's Mumbrella 360 conference. We didn't get to see all the sessions, but here's a quick overview of what we think were the standouts:
From Storytelling to the New Age of 'Hypertelling'
Michael Yapp, Founder & Chief Creative Officer, The Zoo (Google's creative think-tank for brands & agencies
This was great, not only was it insightful from the perspective of people who get to visit the 'secret rooms' of google tech development, but it really reeforced that the strategy of engaging with your users, rather than talking to them, will be more important than ever with the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
With the emergence of Virtual Reality & Artificial Intelligence, the 'stories' agencies are used to telling will no longer be linear, and the user will be in charge of making your messages their reality. There will be no stage, no audience.
Some cool examples he gave of where the tech is currently:
"Carne y Arena" VR movie by Alejandro Inarritu
When World's Collide: The Impact of the Collision Between Martech & Adtech
Panel discussion
The focus of the session was: "the marketing department has been revolutionised by technology but marketers are still chasing the holy grail - a true single view of the customer journey. In this pursuit, marketing technology and advertising technology have moved closer together with widespread implications for marketing team structures and the agency landscape."
Interesting for us, given our agency focuses on assisting client's marketing departments with setting up the right platforms (CRMs, Marketing Automation platforms, various required integrations, POS, etc) for them to own their own data, their own client information & integrate with various advertising mechanisms (programmatic, for example. Which gets a bad rap largely because of lack of user knowledge or sub-par platform/integration).
The client reps on the panel spoke time and again at their frustration of agencies holding back on data, taking two weeks to provide reports, treating them as idiots, basically. The fact that agencies still behave like this baffles me...
Blurring: What Business Are You In Now? PwC's "Australian Entertainment & Media Outlook 2017-2021"
Some of the key takeouts:
- Generation Z will have multiple jobs at the same time, the gig economy won't daunt them, they're nimble multi-taskers, they're security conscious (raised by Gen X), their tolerance of advertising is extremely low, unless it's authentic & customised.
- eSports is more massive than you know, it's the blurring of interactive games, live entertainment, online video & sport. If you're not on the bandwagon, get on it.
- Virtual Reality blurs the lines between the content creators and the audience.
In case you’re interested in any of the other articles we posted today, here they are:
Building on Shopify
If you've ever worked with most of the e-commerce platforms out there, you'll know it's virtually impossible to get the design you want to work seamlessly with the platform. Here's an example of where we hacked the Shopify platform to do just that.
Map My Plan Case study
One of our clients won a super cool award! The term 'disruption' gets bandied about a lot these days, but these guys have truly disrupted the Australian Financial Planning market. Read more about how here.