Following The Digital Catapult Centre Brighton Tech Beyond The Screen: Real-Time Place-Based Digital Marketing event held at The FuseBox on Wednesday 16th March, one of our guests Martin De Saulles Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton wrote this blog post on the content covered over the night.
"Brighton is blessed with a thriving digital media scene. As well as the job opportunities this offers to our graduates there are also lots of events where industry experts share their experiences and knowledge.
Last Wednesday I went to an event organised by Wired Sussex as part of the Digital Catapult initiative of which the University of Brighton is a key stakeholder. The event was titled, Real-time, Place-based Digital Marketing and brought together some leading thinkers and entrepreneurs to talk about the work they are doing and the future of digital marketing.
As the title suggests, the theme was how new technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and location-based services are changing the way marketers and advertisers connect with customers.
I found Dayoan Daumont’s keynote talk particularly interesting. Dayoan is Innovation Director at OgilvyOne Worldwide, one of the world’s leading advertising agencies. He showed us how some brands are using new technologies such as virtual reality to connect with customers but made the point that ultimately these technologies have to offer something tangible which the customer actually wants. For example, the Amazon Dash buttons aim to make the reordering of staple household items easier through the single click of a button. Although the Dash buttons are a relatively crude attempt to drive sales by Amazon, they point the way to how technology can become embedded in everyday items to remove friction from transaction processes.
Looking further into the future, Dayoan argued that artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives such as Google’s AlphaGo and IBM’s Watson will change how companies learn about our behaviour. It is likely that, based on the knowledge which Google is building up about our online and offline behaviour, we will not need to type or speak our search requests as the company will know what we want before we do. Whether this is something to look forward to or be worried about is another matter."