In an increasingly complex world, technology continues to significantly shape how we communicate and provides new ways to engage with different audiences. What are the significant developments happening in tech? What’s next for channels & media? What are the myths that we can debunk along the way?
There are some tech buzzwords that have garnered a lot of attention in recent times, namely ‘The metaverse’ and ‘Web 3.0’. Neither of these actually exist currently. The Metaverse is nothing more than a concept of what Mark Zuckerberg sees as effectively a 3D version of the web as we know it. Web 3.0 is no further along, and is effectively a superset of the Metaverse, with the additional feature of NFTs (non-fungible tokens, a form of cryptocurrency).
Despite the Metaverse and Web 3.0 not existing yet, the technologies that underpin the concepts, are real. Immersive technologies or extended reality, XR:
It’s a common misconception that AI is a new technology. It isn’t. AI has been around as a concept since the 50s and has been evolving steadily over the decades as the availability of computing power has increased. There are 2 fundamental use cases for AI:
With the latter, there is a process to train AI, called supervised and unsupervised. Supervised: feed the algorithm with lots of pictures of cats, so it knows what a cat looks like. Unsupervised: feed the algorithm with lots of pictures of animals and let it segment them into each group of animal, it won’t know that the groupings are cats or horses, merely that it can tell them apart.
AI itself isn’t intelligent, it’s just very good at identifying and indexing content very rapidly. Equally, AI isn’t always right, as it doesn’t have a reference point of what is correct. The same also applies to its impartiality or its ability to respect copyright.
What’s been really getting everyone’s attention recently is ‘generative AI’. Using the same concepts as previous versions of AI, but the output is newly created text, images and sounds. Generative AI is being used to create entire images, as well as ‘outpainting’ existing images. We’ve seen lots of examples of generative AI being used to write copy based on prompts. And as well as videos, sound and music are also being generated by AI.
To put these current tech trends into the context of channels & media, it’s worth looking back to acknowledge technological shifts in recent times. Setting metal lines of type, locking them up into metal frames and printing from them was the primary form of mass communication until as recently as the early eighties, shortly after which desktop publishing began to dominate.
But as digital tech pioneer Ian Rogers says “There are no new problems, just new solutions” – while the channels where we publish continue to evolve, the core challenges remain remarkably stable. But the rate at which the breadth of media is currently developing is unprecedented. A recent survey of senior UK marketers highlighted that keeping up with the speed of change is a major concern. And with a renewed focus on use of data and personalisation, there’s also a tension between the scale at which media now operates and the detail expected with every interaction.
Spotify leverages this tension by appealing to the ‘personalised’ nature of how their users interact with the platform whilst creating a global event in Spotify Wrapped. As the title of this section implies, the requirement to evolve with the pace of change, wherever you can, is ever more vital. Hubspot’s recent State of Marketing report sums up nicely with this TLDR conclusion – ‘get on social, …try AI and align your systems’ and we all need to seize the opportunities to do so in this era.
While it is interesting to look at a case study like Spotify’s, which relies on masses of data, it’s always useful to consider how those ideas apply on a smaller scale. How can we leverage channels and media in a way that doesn’t rely on data, tech and huge budgets?
Aldi have transformed their social presence in recent years, especially on Twitter, by carving out a niche in the way it piggy-backs on trending topics, even lampooning their own legal woes with their ‘Free Cuthbert’ content during a court battle with M&S. Smart-writing, witty commentary and use of meme culture has been a big factor in transforming them into the UK’s most famous and popular supermarket according to YouGov polls.
Of course, the ultimate bang for your buck on social is to go viral. Specsavers have been experimenting with the relationship between traditional OOH formats and social media for some time, setting up one-off physical advertising that encourages users to share – the viral nature of the content becomes the real campaign.
Some brands have even taken to faking the physical format and skipping straight to the highly shareable content, using CGI and AI to create a seemingly impromptu video. Resources are coming thick and fast to support greater use of video that further blur the boundary between fact and fiction.
Heinz won multiple creative awards in 2023 with a viral campaign that took the idea of AI imagery as a subject matter and brought it to life by exploring every possible angle across a multitude of channels and physical spaces.
So if it’s time to embrace AI, what does that mean for creative teams? The reoccurring theme in content such as this recent video from WIRED, is that AI should be thought of as less of a replacement for human input and more of a supplementary tool.
We used AI recently to create 3D models to serve as a reference for drawing logos, and we use Chat GPT to create long lists of headlines, but in both cases, it’s about creating a broad starting point to hone and craft from. The only way to make use of the burgeoning world of AI is to use the tools for yourself.
But where do you start? There are some free and easy tools like The Rundown AI that will help direct you to the most useful tools, and CRM platform Hubspot produce excellent documentation and guidance which is always worth downloading. And not all AI tools are for generating creative content – Gemini and Copilot are just two examples of integrated systems for scheduling, summarising and generally linking many technologies together
In 2002, researcher and lecturer Carlota Perez developed the principle that all tech revolutions follow these same five stages: Promise, gold rush, bubble, bubble bursts and only then will there be 30 years of sustained growth.
On that basis, we can expect all of the technologies we’ve touched upon to develop significantly in the coming years. Organisations like Meta and Accenture have produced some bold materials when it comes to imagining what the future will look like.
But, while this can feel quite overwhelming, it’s important to remember that this will happen over a long period of time. The important thing to focus on in the meantime is to embrace changes in tech and develop the skill of utilising them. As brand guru Seth Godin says “The opportunity for agile, smart people to take advantage of AI is huge. Use it every day to ensure you understand it!”
Don’t get too distracted by the tech buzzwords, focus on the technologies that can be utilised now. There have been other tech revolutions in communication, but the current pace of change is unprecedented. It’s increasingly important for marketers to build new technologies into their workflow and use them regularly.
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What should we take into 2025? What are the trends we should be aware of? And how do they apply to the world of B2B?
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