Recently I attended an Agency Management Institute (AMI) conference on Technology Trends to discuss with other agency owners how technology is changing consumer behavior and how that impacts the marketing and advertising that we see and create for clients. The conference was two very full days of insights from, dynamic speaker and technology mastermind, Christina Kerley (CK). A forerunner in tech revolutions, CK enlightened us about the top 10 next-gen technologies that are transforming our world today and reshaping the customers, products and business models of tomorrow. We discussed everything from Mobile, Wearables, The Internet of Things, and Robotics to Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Health, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Holography. It’s clear that The Jetsons was clearly not a cartoon of the 1960s but rather a prediction of the future. A future that we are currently living in 2016.
By now we’ve probably all seen the SuperBowl commercial about Amazon’s Echo product we call “Alexa” that allows you to talk to a device in your home and ask questions or automatically reorder products, giving Siri a serious run for her money. Echo is a perfect example of a connected device (The Internet of Things or iOT) and also a great illustration of how technology is changing the way we buy the things we want and need. While scrolling through Facebook early this morning I was served a sponsored post in my newsfeed about a special pair of leggings that you can put on and within seconds the built-in sensors send your exact measurements to the partner app on your mobile device or tablet that helps you to find a pair of jeans promised to fit you “like a glove“. Now, they don’t sell custom made jeans. The Like A Glove folks are just a resource to help you buy jeans from the brands you already know and love. When the app receives your measurements, it pulls up jeans from respected brands like Gap, Lucky, Levi’s, etc., and tells you which styles of their jeans are the perfect fit for your shape and size. Pretty amazing stuff, since blue jeans are nearly impossible to purchase confidently online as sizing isn’t consistent from one brand to the next … and even sometimes from one pair to the next, making it tougher and tougher for retailers to shift sales of jeans from in-store to online. These “smart garments” aren’t available quite yet but they’re taking pre-orders now and shipments are expected to go out in May 2016 ($69.00 with the FB promo of 45% off). Have the Like A Glove folks gotten the jump on the blue jean manufacturers or are they just making a dime themselves and helping both consumers and the big guys at the same time? Check it out!
This is just one small example of a connected device or iOT but others are already part of our everyday lives and new ones are popping up all over the place with the promise of solving a problem or creating convenience for us as a consumer. What have you seen lately that changed the way you live or the way you buy products? I’ll continue to share other examples of Technology Trends and how iOT and other trending devices and advancements are changing the way we buy and how we market to consumers.
