How soon? Apple and Meta have already undertaken years at great expense and singular efforts along these lines. Here’s what I see next in the pipeline and how it will change the future of marketing.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality glasses have the potential to be a huge attention market. Alphabet, back when it was still Google, made an attempt at it, but it might be Apple that might make it cool and stylish enough for the market to adopt.
In late May, Wired referred to a VR headset that “has reportedly been in development at Apple since 2015.” When the smart glasses go on, expect new opportunities for advertising to emerge as new eyeball space opens up—this can be everywhere you look when wearing AR glasses. Imagine looking at your sweetheart and seeing a reminder above their head to buy flowers for your anniversary.
Expect this ad space to be a bargain for the same reason Google and Facebook and other digital ad spaces were for so long. Opportunities to place ads will grow even as complacency, slowness to adapt, unwillingness to learn new interfaces and skepticism prevents others from seizing those opportunities.
Metaverse
Virtual reality is also a promising market, with Microsoft and PC gaming companies leading the way.
Famously, Facebook reorganized into Meta last year for a companywide prioritization of development to enter the virtual reality product market from a social media angle. They have focused hard on the business possibilities of the technology with virtual meeting spaces and virtual shared workplaces.
Other metaverses will continue to proliferate and develop immersive virtual reality hardware and apps, connected spaces, simulated environments, virtual worlds and a thriving digital economy.
I see the metaverse’s growth enhanced by things like high-performance graphical processing units (GPUs) and software support for photorealistic resolution, lighting and physics engines. This will help virtual spaces get wonderfully realistic.
There will undoubtedly be a rich attention market within a lush, immersive and multisensory virtual reality interface for any number of applications. Signs, sounds, placements and all kinds of other marketing possibilities await the marketing industry in the metaverses.
Voice Apps
Continuing the trend, our devices will talk to us more as we continue to talk to them, making us more reliant on these automated virtual assistants to listen to music, podcasts and other audio. Advancements in smart headphones and augmented audio have the potential to pave the way for real disruptive change.
Examples include headphones with outward-facing input mics and inward-interfacing audio monitors that can complete the augmented reality headset of the future as fully audio-visual.
Audio augments could include turning up the volume on someone you’re trying to listen to, turning the volume down on music or background noise, and making equalizer adjustments to voices or sounds to make your hearing experience more pleasant or comfortable.
You could also make the sounds suit an aesthetic flair for fun, translate foreign languages in real time and receive environmentally and contextually reactive and immersive audio advertisements.
Internet Of Things
A continuing bevy of new smartphone- and laptop-connected devices with various sensors, network connections and capabilities will be innovated in the years to come.
A few of them could reach sales approaching mass market adoption curve growth levels. These could help us by automating time- and effort-consuming tasks, freeing up more time for things like business or play in the metaverses.
With IoT, your fridge can automatically send an order for more milk when it runs out, and it can be based on the best deals in town or favorite advertisements. Commercial uses like remote asset monitoring and supply chain process automation will likely be massive global markets.
Blockchain
Blockchain has the opportunity to contribute in many ways to underpin and fuel innovation and interactivity on the internet.
This is so much so that its advocates on the developer and investor sides refer to it as Web3. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) could become essential to realizing, validating and verifying digital identity and private property ownership of digital assets. In this way, I think NFTs will become standard in the marketing tool set.
The big problem as all our worlds collide over the internet is one of organization. How can you authenticate and validate your identity and digital property to use it online?
How can you manage interoperability so that you can bring your identity and assets with you across platforms? An increasing number of features that solve these problems will work seamlessly with blockchain quietly powering them in the background.
Automation
My last prediction is that anything for which there is a total profit to automate in excess of the costs (including the expenditure of computer cycles, to acquire the pertinent data and to learn) will eventually be automated.
That means many of our technologies will become self-sufficient and self-acting as we proceed along the progression of Moore’s Law and an increasing sophistication and number of network connections.
While there’s no such thing as a button you can press that will tell you what you want and give it to you automatically, automation is profoundly changing the industry.
With the increasing number, quality and interoperability of digital tools for e-commerce, it is easier than ever to combine different services together into mostly autonomous e-commerce businesses that convert ad traffic from Facebook and Instagram to sales on Shopify and Amazon.
Closing Thoughts
Augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are wonderfully strange yet familiar. The business leaders that make the most difference as these technologies change the landscape will be those who don’t lose their heads for the fundamentals of sound business practice.
The technology is shiny and exciting, but those who profit from it will be those who use it the same way businesses have always succeeded: Envisioning, building and marketing outstanding products while taking good care of the customer.
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