TECHNOLOGY in marketing and communications—including public relations—is accelerating in high speed. And technology and the impact it creates to our personal and professional lives is here to stay. Whether we accept that technology has changed the PR practice for the better—or for the worse—it will undoubtedly play an aggressive role in the profession’s evolution. Keep our seat belts on. There will be more twists and turns coming.
PR Matters has shared several articles on digital technology and its impact on business and life. This column adds to the list the Augmented Humanity Report released recently by Isobar, a leading global digital agency under the Dentsu Aegis Network. It is an exploration of five digital advances that investigates the extent to which humanity will work in harmony with technology to expand and enrich life in 2019 and beyond. Written by the innovation and strategy experts across Isobar’s 85 offices in 45 markets, the study builds on the examination of the changing nature of the interface of human relationship with technology: from how we work and play to how we travel, shop, spend our leisure time and engage with brands.
The report is centered around a belief that technology augments our experience of the world, allowing us to work more efficiently, to live healthier lifestyles, to make better human decisions and to expand our creativity. It explains why this is an important moment in human history, outlines some of the myriad opportunities that these technological developments open and shine a light on some of the challenges posed by digital disruption. The five key outlooks are:
1. The evolving interface
How the intersection between humans and technology is changing. Developments in voice (talk) and gaze (use of the eyes) as human machine interfaces allow people to go hands free when interacting with machines. The removal of this physical layer reduces friction, which opens the possibility that you can access information as quickly as you can think about it. It has been impossible to avoid talk of voice technology in 2018 and there’s no sign that this development will slow down in 2019. The popularity of technologies, such as Alexa, Google Home and Xiaomi’s Xiao artificial intelligence (AI) smart speaker are starting to make voice assistants a common feature in many households across the globe. This trend requires a new way of thinking about brand identity, and calls for a new level of creativity in voice search.
A key advancement in this space is the way in which personal data is now used across the health and wellness sector. As innovations in digital technology have transformed the health sector’s ability to develop services designed to inspire behavior change, new entrants, often more associated with the tech sector than health care, have entered the market. Google and Apple are increasingly seeing health as a growing area of their business and bringing disruptive thinking to the sector.
2. The human algorithm
How data can help us to better understand ourselves and enable better decisions. The use of personal data also has the potential to transform our experience of a range of services we use in our daily lives. As a result, we’re seeing service providers across a range of sectors offering services tailored to an individual level based on our behavioral data. What we’re seeing in this trend is the ability of consumers to take control of their health data to make more informed decisions about their personal care.
More and more people are taking their own personal health seriously, and using technology and the Internet to bypass doctors. The future will see chronic health problems being solved by rigorous accession of data which will encourage changing health habits, diets and exercise routines, the lowering of stress and the ending of addictions—which people often don’t even know they have.
3. The fluid versus the collective self
How the digital world enhances personal and collective experiences. A feature of the development of digital technology is the extent to which it has enabled different realities to flourish. Humans can now enjoy more and more choices in almost everything they consume. From products to music, we are now able to choose at the click of a button the things which previous generations would have to work hard for to hunt down in the physical world.
A knock-on effect of this is a growing interest in personalized products, services and experiences which is driving a movement away from the mass production which drove the industrial revolution. Instead we’re moving toward a future of bespoke production at scale. Because of this drastically expanded range of choices, we now can behave in much more fluid ways—making us increasingly hard to categorize and therefore hard to target.
4. The trust paradox
How technology can help—or hinder—our understanding of the increasingly complex world around us. The rise of fake news and content alongside developments like deep fake technology and advanced audio spoofing is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the fake and the real. To help humans decipher the truth in the future, machines will need to assist humans by augmenting our own ability to recognize the small details that make us human—identifying patterns that act as signals of a false reality that perhaps we can’t identify ourselves. As digital technology has made it possible for us to manipulate the truth, so we will also need to use it to verify the truth, leveraging machines to see through the false veneer that has been delivered as a mask to false realities.
Advertising is all about building myths; Like the idea that buying a certain deodorant would make us more attractive. We are still prone to buying into these myths—but only until we can prove them to be objectively false. Digital technology gives us increased ability to lift the curtain and see the truth behind these myths. After all, we live in a world of online reviews and platforms such as “Trustpilot,” which offers quick access to opinions.
However, just as we live increasingly in a world of fake news, the problem of fake reviews is growing just as fast. In an increasingly connected world, a brand’s advertising and PR supports, products and services are now more and more interconnected and, as a result, our relationships with brands have changed. Brands are now more than what they say. Brands are what they do.
Consumers are now more cynical about brands—and the stories that they tell. As a result, the brands that will flourish in the future will be those which move away from unattainable mythology and instead focus on purpose to create experiences that talk meaningfully and truthfully about the brand. To ensure authenticity and truth in the digital world, we’ve come up with mechanisms to keep us honest and leveraged new concepts such as digital certificates of authenticity enabled by blockchain to do so.
5. The transformed experience
How augmented humanity enables us to feel and experience the world differently and in deeper ways. Beyond the practical applications of technology which help make our lives easier, there are very real—but harder to quantify—impacts that technology can have on the way that humans experience the world. We will also see technology playing a bigger role in enabling and improving real world interactions, a decentralized shared economy for real life activities such as meeting new people over coffee. The company’s stated goal is to tackle social isolation by connecting people in real life.
Another key area of future development will be in the telepresence and copresence space. As barriers to international business continue to be broken down, the need to communicate more effectively across continents and time zones has become ever more urgent. As a result, the two technologies are developing dramatically, allowing individuals to be “present” in multiple places at the same time.
“Technology today plays a key role in driving relevance, scale and elevating human experiences. It is our job to harness its wonderful power and the potential for businesses and brands, in serving people better in the age of augmented humanity,” said Jean Lin, Isobar’s Global CEO.
We indeed need to embrace the power of technology. Today, we are on the threshold of a boosted era where technology is delineating the prospects of what humans can genuinely be adept at. The next chapter of transformational technological advances—wearable and embedded devices will unfasten human potential by tapping into almost all our day-to-day activities. We shall witness how digital is going to be ubiquitous and voice will be the lead game changer in the marketing and communications arena.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the United Kingdom-based International Public Relations Association (Ipra), the world’s premier organization for PR professionals around the world. Bong R. Osorio is a communications consultant of ABS-CBN Corp., SkyCable, Dentsu-Aegis Network and government projects among others, after retiring as vice president and head of the Corporate Communications Division of ABS-CBN.
We are devoting a special column each month to answer our readers’ questions about public relations. Please send your questions or comments to askipraphil@gmail.com.