Future Narrative: No Joking Matter

The book is dead, long live the book! The film is dead, long live the film! Attention span is dead, long live social! I could go on, but no genre would be dead and no new platform is without its merits.

I watched the movie ‘Joker’ at the cinema last month. Yes, the cinema. Another one of those outdated platforms that apparently no one considers any more. The two dimensional film, shown in a darkened room with zero distraction or interaction was a masterpiece of storytelling. I respected the creative content – written and directed by Todd Phillips, memorably performed by the film’s sole lead – Joaquin Phoenix, and there was no denying the impact of the powerful cinematography and the dark oppressive soundtrack. But I didn’t really enjoy it.

And that’s my choice, it’s everyone’s choice. I love the beauty of narrative, the long winding journey it can take each and every one of us on. No matter how a film, TV series, book or play is presented, they are open to personal interpretation and what you as an individual take away from them – like art, because that’s what they are. A living, breathing art form.

Some have said Joker is not a superhero movie. I beg to differ, because it features Batman’s nemesis – The Joker – and Batman himself, albeit in the pre-superhero guise of a young Bruce Wayne. Many have insisted the film is about mental health. Yes, it tackles this issue by default because the central character is deeply psychologically disturbed – but he’s hardly the poster boy for mental health awareness. Unless everyone currently jumping on this particular bandwagon is suggesting individuals with ‘issues’ end up like Arthur Fleck – a delusional gun-toting, knife-wielding homicidal maniac?

If cinema isn’t broken, how do we approach future narrative? In 2018 the global box office was worth over $40 Billion and has increased year-on-year for over a decade. It shows no signs of stalling, with ‘Avengers: Endgame’ taking $2.8 billion in cinemas – a new all-time high. Is ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ set to round off the decade with the highest earnings ever?

This leaves future platforms with a tough fight on their hands when trying to convince marketing teams to invest their money in untried and untested technology. When you include home entertainment revenue, the global film industry is worth an additional $100 billion, so audiences are spending a lot of money viewing content on other devices too.

This figure naturally features TV sets, smartphones and tablets. For future audiences this will undoubtedly include VR headsets, AR glasses and autonomous vehicles.

The thinking behind the latter is illustrated by Renault’s 2017 acquisition of a 40% stake in the Pedriel Group, the publishing house that produces the weekly business magazine ‘Challenges’. They clearly recognise the future potential for published content within self-driven mobility. If we’re not absorbing written or audio material, the car interior will offer a multitude of digital surfaces to begin, continue or conclude the narrative of film and TV viewing. Are you all ready to Netflix and chill as your car makes all the decisions for you?

However, future platforms aren’t simply there to provide the same type of material but on a different device. They will inevitably offer this, but where they excel is in adding value. In its simplest terms, a smartphone can provide second screen conversation – leveraged by shows such as BBC’s ‘The Apprentice’ or ITV’s ‘Love Island’ and ‘I’m A Celebrity’ across social channels to drive conversation and generate further awareness and reach.

Others championing new storytelling are Nesta with their ‘Alternarratives’ challenge and Ford’s Developer Programme, looking to innovate the future of the car with ‘Music That Moves You’ in partnership with Capitol Records – leading to some amazing potential for storytelling around music artists and genres.

Many Futurologists or Tech Pundits will talk the talk without ever having walked the walk. I have been fortunate to push boundaries my whole career and with some amazing clients including Warner Music Group, Disney, Apple, BBC, Scientific American, Smithsonian Enterprises, Renault, Pottermore, Guinness World Records and Mark Staufer’s ‘The Numinous Place’. Together we have explored some of the possibilities for future narrative. There are many more to come.

All new forms of digital and physical storytelling should be explored as we don’t yet know where they will lead us. The impact of horror in a VR headset. The ability to bring elements of a story to life seemingly in the world around us through AR. To use Artificial Intelligence to extend and personalise narrative. All have enormous potential for a diverse cross-section of audiences, but they don’t offer replacements, they provide depth, understanding and new creative challenges.

I’ve said many times before, if the opinion that all narrative evolves into something else held water, this would have left books, radio and theatre dead long ago. They’re far from that. In a world of digital depth and diversity – they’re actually flourishing because they bring the focus back to great storytelling.

Without that story and an engaging narrative we would live in a world of meaningless words swirling past us in a fleeting moment, we have Facebook for that.

Despite what you may have been told, the future of narrative isn’t about the technology that surrounds us, it is about the thing right at the centre of everything – the human. If you never lose that focus, you’ll never lose your audience.

Let’s Talk About Sex

Actually, we’ll get back to the headline in a minute. For now, let’s talk about techs. Rolling into 2018 and everyone is asking the usual question – what’s the next big thing in tech? An easy answer is Artificial Intelligence, but ironically it’s not an intelligent answer, because it’s the wrong question.

AI will deliver unprecedented pace of engagement, hyper-accelerated data management, offer decision-making services, freeing human brain power to do what it does best – add personality, creativity, strive for success and push boundaries.

But it isn’t answering a question that needs to be asked right now. Those of us that ‘make stuff’ – either physically or virtually – and provide more than a service find ourselves delivering an experience, heightening sensations and making us all feel better as humans – even if only for a second, we’re asking the most important question – what’s the next big platform?

It’s mobility. Not just cars, it’s bigger than that. This is a platform that has history, heritage and a solid technological background, so it doesn’t fall at the first hurdle.

The automotive industry has spent forever telling an audience (drivers) that they can’t be distracted from their main objective – driving. This hasn’t been an opportunity to sell, as with most ‘platforms’ or deliver information overload. We have specific data to process when a vehicle is on the move – speed, obstacle avoidance, range and comfort and little beyond.

Although systems are already being integrated into the latest generation of cars, most visual information is still processed by us and acted upon in the most appropriate manner.

Entertainment has come in the form of audio-only broadcast or playback and nothing can encroach on our main focus. The industry is about to experience seismic activity.

With the introduction of the autonomous vehicle this ALL changes. From zero distraction to channelling the outside world. All of it.

I’m in the fortunate position where I get to test a lot of emerging technology at a very early stage. It makes a fundamental difference when you experience the future, rather than simply read about it. Take it from me, if I’ve been hands-on, I will tell it like it is – not just a sanitised relaying of the facts, but how we’ll feel physically and emotionally about what’s around the corner.

I’ll write a lot more about mobility as a platform as we deliver it in 2018 and beyond, but back to that headline…

If the car moves from a focused driving environment to an empty vessel bursting with promise, how do we fill our time and fulfil our potential? Well, you tap into the obvious first – social comms, localised information, entertainment (movies, music and gaming) and deliver the mobile office. But it’s in moving beyond this where we really tap into the benefits of a controlled environment.

I spent time with Renault recently, testing their autonomous SYMBIOZ EV. This performed on the expected levels – driving itself and in silence, but with the additional element of VR. Wearing a headset seamlessly built into your vehicle, displaying content that moves and turns in sync with the movement of the car doesn’t just immerse the occupants, but enhances the experience beyond that of a simple VR HMD. Control and comfort (both physical and psychological) are key ingredients to acceptance of VR as a viable medium. This is incredibly effective in a car.

So what content do we make?  I’ve long held the belief that we’ve neglected the psychological aspect of being human when designing a vehicle. Many people around the world use their cars as a personal and private space. A symbol of independence in an increasingly impersonal and overcrowded world. This naturally brings us to the elephant in the car – sex.

Drivers and passengers have sex in cars, but manufacturers refuse to publicly acknowledge this. As we head towards a world where we’ll be offered alternatives to ownership and ‘self-driving’, how will mobility brands entice their passengers in? They’ll need to offer comfort, personalisation and access to the things we all take for granted outside a vehicle.

So, admit it or not – sex happens. And it’s something that will increasingly occur in new virtual environments. Not to replace the real thing, but to enhance it, or extend the long distance (and potentially socially-driven) relationships.

In a data-hungry world, the connected car is only relevant if it’s actually connected. We demand this in our everyday lives and 2018 is a big year for building the foundations of the new mobility platform so we’re ready for the next technological revolution.

I’ve spent enough time with Huawei over the last 12 months to realise they’re poised to make this future platform a reality. They have a new partnership in place with PSA Group to connect vehicles to the outside world and each other but Huawei is once again playing its trump (small T) card with their future dominance of the 5G market.

I’m more than along for the ride with Huawei, I’ll be pushing for everything we hope for to become reality so we’re still driving the future, even if the cars are driving themselves.

If you'd like to hear more on the subject matter in this post, this Alexa Stop Podcast Innovation Social CES Special delivers.

The Subtle Art of Adfluence

There are genuine markets for all our current social broadcast ephemera but brands and audiences alike have little idea what experience and depth sits behind these. Do they care? Should they care?

In a world where anyone can jump on a live stream, become an overnight YouTube sensation or deliver an Instagram account to rival the exploits of Ernest Hemingway, how do we make sense of what we’re presented with, and what sticks?

I recently spent three days in London in the company of Chinese tech giant Huawei at their ‘Global Mobile Broadband Forum 2017’, which sounds tediously dull to my regular audience. It wasn’t.

The main conference introduced the great and the good of various networks (BT, Vodafone, BELL, Viacom, Telefonica) and a collection of speakers telling us how amazing 5G is going to be. It will be, when it finally arrives, but Huawei are at least in the driving seat of the future of connectivity.

Consumers have little interest and even less belief in 5G when most of us still struggle to connect on 3 or 4G. Although we’ll be able to download every episode of Game of Thrones in less than a second with the new technology, in the real world we’d probably do this over WiFi before we left the house.

One of the greatest hurdles ahead for anyone hoping to sell the wonderful world of connectivity is to successfully tell the story of where it practically sits in our daily lives, how it invisibly weaves its magic by empowering the things we already love.

And this is where the most interesting part of the Forum kicked in – the expo. Here, Huawei were demonstrating the practical applications for 5G, such as streamed VR and AR content, connected cars, cows (yes, cows), robots, phones, watches and the world’s first full-size passenger drone – which I just managed to cram my 6 foot frame into. Next steps, test this future mobility platform in the skies where current legislation actually allows for it.

There’s a taster of the expo action in my summary video below.

.@Huawei Global Mobile Broadband Forum = #5G + #VR + #IoT + #Cars + #Drones + #AutonomousDriving + #Wearables + #Robots + #DoctorWho!! #HWMBBF pic.twitter.com/1fZuWV1AgR

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) November 16, 2017

The main reason I find myself spending quality time with Huawei is as a Key Option Leader (KOL) and I’ve built up enough social significance and driven public opinion through conference speaking and broadcast platforms to demonstrate relevance. My third day with Huawei was all about me, I mean us, well the future of ‘Influence’ anyway.

There weren’t any YouTube sensations or Snapchat superstars – this was about how influence will develop beyond the mere title, and how we can genuinely shape opinion rather than merely grab a bunch of likes.

I’ve seen some really poorly targeted influencer campaigns recently, including one global auto manufacturer letting a bunch of the aforementioned YouTubers/SnapChatter stars loose across Europe in their newest hero model, a car they’re never realistically going to buy – not because they couldn’t afford to (they’ve either made enough from their Instagram posts or rich parents to grab anything they want) but because the car was clearly aimed at an entirely different demographic.

I’m sure they delivered thousands of likes and views for the brand – but not from anyone that would part with their cash. The Social/Marketing team probably thought they had a massive success on their hands though as the initial results would seem positive. Let’s see how many cars they shift as a direct result…

So, what’s the future of Influence? Well, most agreed that the type of platforms will be similar – even if new concepts appear, they’ll be accessed on different devices but text, image and video will still be relevant, with voice becoming increasingly popular, especially with the adoption of more AI-driven content and interaction.

There was a general consensus of opinion that ‘likes’ wouldn’t be relevant in the future, but I disagree with this as it’s usually something said by people that don’t receive enough likes. Many people use a like as a way of bookmarking or personally expressing agreement. So unless we all plan to remember everything or agree with nothing, the ability to like is not going away in a hurry.

Also, seeking out your audience will become increasingly important as broadcast continues to increase, you can’t expect everyone to find you.

The best quote of the day came from Tamara McCleary “Relevance is the intersection between your opinion and theirs” – make yourself relevant but not by simply posting exactly what you think your audience wants to hear, as that adds little or no personality.

Here's my personal approach to social content that genuinely influences:

• Have an opinion – even if it causes controversy by conflicting with your audience because that generates conversation
• Make something – don’t just repost everybody else’s content or you become a researcher rather than an individual
• If you want to become an opinion leader, then lead by example rather than generate white noise in the continual pursuit of likes
• Don’t be afraid to hi-jack a conversation – play the hashtag game and tag your posts to amplify yourself by having the right opinion at the right time
• Remember, you've had no influence if everything remains the same

I’ve put the above into practice over the past couple of weeks, so here are a few examples. These links are to Tweets but I also posted supporting tailored content across Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn where relevant:

Lamborghini (I helped the Italian supercar brand to trend globally by Tweeting the launch of their latest concept car revealed at MIT).

Oh, great work @Lamborghini (and @MIT ) - say hello to the #TerzoMillennio, the #EV Superfuture! #EmTechMIT #cars #future #tech #design pic.twitter.com/tzIxzCN4dN

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) November 6, 2017

Hattie meets Google meets John Lewis meets Moz (Google sent Hattie the cuddly Moz toy featured in their Christmas commercial. They also included the accompanying book which interacts with Google Home and Google Home Mini. My video of Hattie was then picked up by John Lewis, Google and the publisher, Nosy Crow).

When Hattie met @Google and @johnlewisretail and #MozTheMonster (and @sallyephillips ) . A lot of love for these brands right now. Thanks @GoogleUK - Hattie loves Moz! Great work from @NosyCrow on the book and innovative #publishing! #googlehome #IoT pic.twitter.com/6M9h1H1U5j

— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) November 19, 2017

CUBED (I filmed a promo video for my Keynote at CUBE Tech Fair in Berlin next year. Promoted by the event).

We’re pumped to have @activrightbrain at #CUBETechFair - watch him as he spills some time-tested secrets!

Get a head start on Tech Fair and register now https://t.co/IKac3EVvwx pic.twitter.com/LPpBRGhJUC

— CUBE Global (@CUBEConnects) November 21, 2017

Go forth and Adfluence!

Me, Myself and i: The Eternal Avatar

We talk about personality, be that for brands or individuals, as if it’s something that comes naturally. Actually, in an ever-growing digital environment where we face a multitude of platforms and networks, it’s all too easy to lose your voice in a maelstrom of white noise. 

If you believe Mark Zuckerberg, the future of VR is Social. Of course he’s going to say that with the backing of the world’s largest social network, but what does this mean?

Last week, Facebook revealed a set of much better looking avatars for their foray into social VR as part of their expanding Oculus lineup. It’s an important second step – the first being ‘Spaces’ earlier this year and other established networks such as vTime and Altspace offering a few customisable features to allow visitors to feel comfortable in their virtual skin.

Whether you want to accurately represent yourself or an ‘alternative you’, the audience needs to overcome the fact you can’t currently broadcast your own face thanks to the lump of plastic and a screen in the way, so let’s not get hung up on that. Think about the avatar itself and how it needs to become platform agnostic – not just across VR environments, but also into AR, regular digital screen content and even an audio signature.

We have yet to witness VR’s Pokemon moment as the platform still doesn’t fit into many people’s lives. It is taking hold for enterprise but consumers still couldn’t give a crap as it requires too much effort and is too easy to put down. This is why personalisation and realistic avatars are a vital step on the road to success.

The concept of lurking in alternate worlds and sharing quality time with others will be experienced by a mainstream audience when Stephen Spielberg brings Ready Player One to life in cinemas next year. Although HTC has plans for actual VR content, you won’t need to watch the film with a headset on so there will at least be more eyeballs on the VR lifestyle. Let’s see how many like the idea of the real thing.

I’ve been tackling the significance of avatars in general but they’re more of a branding exercise. What happens when you add real substance, with AI sitting behind the facade?

With a recent death in the family, mortality is something close to my heart right now. This was brought into focus a few weeks ago when I received a LinkedIn status message “Wish Matt a happy birthday” – from a colleague and friend who died in 2015. You could say he lives on through social channels but this isn't really true is it? 

I've pondered the social and emotional benefits of preserving VR snapshots in time with family members for future generations – those no longer with us or simply to remember magical moments with your children and loved ones. The true measure of technology is when it exists for a reason, rather than simply existing. 

We talk about Artificial Intelligence and automation stealing jobs from the rest of us but they'll be freeing up precious time for us to be more productive in other key areas. What if we use AI to deliver immortality? Sounds far-fetched, but it isn't. 

When we have perfected digital personalities, mimicking real individuals and 'thinking' as they do, why wouldn't the LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook status of the future be delivered from beyond the grave?

Of course there are ethical and religious issues and a few technical hurdles to overcome, but I’m not suggesting we take control of someone else’s personality, rather it becomes a box-checking exercise to ‘live on’ or ‘delete persona’ beyond death. This throws up the question of whether erase means erase or we’re merely placing our personalities in a ‘recently deleted’ folder.

It’s easy to see how a grieving relative could be tempted to have one more conversation, or ask the questions you never seemed to find time for. Does this become a path to acceptance or a way to normalise post-life interaction? For some it will be a simple choice, others may decide on both.

Filming VR moments offers us a virtual time machine, with the ability to relive events as if we were there again, albeit passively. Add layers of interaction across multiple devices and platforms and you begin to see how this becomes about the persona, rather than the delivery mechanism – like real life.

In a deluge of indiscernible Fake News, a hacked personality in VR will offer the ultimate brain-washing medium so there are some enormous hurdles plus new levels of digital encryption and authentication required.

We could potentially face a transitionary period where we’re testing AI avatars as a direct replacement for genuine social accounts to see if audiences notice the difference. It’s these standards that bots and personal assistants need to strive for, proving this research is essential.

Avatars are the ringtones of the future and will be a huge growth market over the next decade. Control the supply of these and you own the gateway to digital personality, the most comprehensive database on earth. You’ll make yourself useful in a world of useless and provide a service as a brand or build a business driven by data, insight and creativity.

I plan to add more substance to this subject over the next few months through the written word and on the global conference circuit. It deserves the widest possible audience.