We are the IPG Media Lab, the creative technology arm of Mediabrands.

Every year, we round up the ideas that animate us: the market forces, new technologies, and consumer shifts that are changing the ways we evaluate, buy, and create media.

There are now more than 2 billion people walking around with smartphones in their pockets. Where a person is, what they're doing and even who they are is wrapped up in these devices.

This smartphone saturation is paving the way for a series of intensely personal, mass-market computing and media experiences,leveraging our homes, our cars and our bodies.

We're at the early days of a new era, one we call the age of Intimate Computing: one in which people's lives and their mobile devices are now completely intertwined. In this report, we’ll be examining four related micro-trends that will change the game for marketers in 2015.

You may not realize it, but you and your phone are emotionally connected. Just glancing at your phone can cause your heart to beat faster, your pupils to dilate and your sweat-glands to activate.

Now that our homes, cars and even our wrists (thanks to wearables) are "coming online," expect new levels of emotional connection with technology and media.

The
Internet
of
 Thrills

The Internet of Thrills

You may not realize it, but you and your phone are emotionally connected. Just glancing at your phone can cause your heart to beat faster, your pupils to dilate, and your sweat glands to activate.

Dr. David Greenfield, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, recently explained the effects that the phone can have on the human brain, as part of a study on texting and driving.

"We compulsively check our phones because every time we get an update through text, email or social media, we experience an elevation of dopamine, which is a neurochemical in the brain that makes us feel happy," said Greenfield.

But it's not just the thrill of being acknowledged by a friend on social media. Plenty of other emotions are tied to advances in mobile technology. There's a feeling of comfort when your Nest thermostat knows exactly what temperature your house should be when you come home from work. You feel secure when you get a notification from Apple Pay that the charge you made a second ago went through. You experience a sense of heightened reality when your Philips hue lighting system responds in real time to the program on your TV.

It used to be that the only emotion that technology triggered was frustration, when it didn't work. Now we're seeing negative emotions like anxiety when we’re separated from our phones for extended periods of time.

We're certainly not yet at a point where these emotional connections are on the level of a face-to-face interaction with another human. The reality of interacting with your phone as an intelligent being, akin to the movie Her, is still at least a few years away. But we are seeing the first steps of this reality in products like Siri and Amazon Echo. Consumers attempt to talk to these products like they’re living beings with thoughts and feelings. The products are just not quite ready to talk back in a convincing way. But that emotional bond is already being formed.

And these emotions are powerful. It's easy for marketers to leap to the assumption that emotions can be manipulated, but emotional connections do not come easily. There needs to be value to consumers, an actual life benefit to their mobile interactions, to elicit an emotional response. Just sending a notification that a sale is going on is not enough. But what if a store kept track of the social media response on a recent outfit, found that it was positive, and shared that information with you? Suddenly that interaction would become a lot more personal. To get that emotional response, marketers need to earn it.


“New forms of delivering content and media will be game-changing. Imagine knowing when you’re close to an item on your shopping list ​and how long the checkout line is.”

— Steve Cheney, Co-Founder and SVP of Business Operations, Estimote

Peak
Distraction

The average human attention span is now 8 seconds. That's one second shorter than the attention span of your average goldfish.

As more of our time is taken up by smaller screens, we are reaching an inflection point – one in which we're losing the cognitive ability to attend to everything else. And it's going to be a very real problem for marketers.

Peak Distraction

In this mobile age, it's harder and harder to be heard.

Publishers and marketers have monetized every available pixel of screen real estate. In many ways, we've overmonetized, and so there is a view-ability crisis in media. According to Google, only 43.9% of ad impressions are viewable on the Web. And that's before Banner Blindness.

At the same time we're spending more time with smaller screens, compounding the problem. We each have a finite amount of attention, and that's shrinking by the day. According to a recent study, the average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. (The average goldfish now has us beat, with an attention span of 9 seconds.) There's simply too much to keep track of.

Peak distraction is an inflection point where we have lost the cognitive ability to attend to anything else.

New media needs to replace something that was getting our attention, because there's no room left for additions. We must slow down, declutter, have better filters, make choices about what we pay attention to.

xAd found that advertisers are increasingly combining location-based factors with their demographic targeting or retargeting campaigns. Ads using no location data (2% to 1%) or only zip code or city-level data (40% to 21%) were cut in half from 2013 to 2014. "Geo Precise" ads using specific behavioral or GPS data are taking over, making up 79% of ads in 2014 vs. 58% in 2013.

Media buyers will benefit from improved technology, like machine learning and combining contextual targeting factors, that helps them determine the exact perfect moment to deliver an impression. Everything else is waste and clutter, and risks banishment.

This is actually great news for advertisers and consumers. Consumers get only the ads that are relevant for them at one moment, and advertisers get the best shot at winning the consumer dollar.

Everybody wins.


“As an industry, we’ve become obsessed with certain aspects of ‘who’ consumers are and forgotten the fundamentals of consumer-brand interaction. Traditional media channels like television, OOH and radio succeeded in penetrating the consumer psyche by identifying and becoming a part of consumers’ daily routines during those in-between moments when consumers are more receptive to distraction from the outside world. As consumers spend more time on-the-go, knowing where they are in time, space, and mind space will be key to finding opportunities to connect with them.”

— Michael Provenzano, CEO & Co-Founder, Vistar Media

"In a world of infinite content... it's meaningful when someone is actually spending time."

-Ev Williams, Medium

Measurable
Intimacy

We live in highly measurable times. And our ability to go deeper is about to improve dramatically. A confluence of technology trends – from new, more intimate media interfaces to better curation filters to location-based technologies – is letting marketers get up close and personal with their customers.

Measurable Intimacy

At IPG Mediabrands, we're focused on performance-based advertising, where results are measured by total business outcomes, not just conventional metrics.

A confluence of media and technology trends – from new, more intimate interfaces and advanced curation filters to location-based technologies – is about to make our lives easier, enhancing our ability to measure and qualify performance.

To combat the threat of peak distraction, media companies are developing more personal interfaces and techniques to ensure that their audience is developing a deeper connection to content and services.

Snapchat Stories is one such method. Rather than allowing you to hit play and passively watch a series of short videos, Snapchat Stories requires that you hold your finger on the screen for the duration of a "story." This is deep media engagement with the content. You're physically tied to it.

Compare that with an Instagram video, where someone can just hit play and then go do other things. With Snapchat Stories, the person's thumb is literally ensuring engagement.

This interest in pushing users to get intimate with their content is cropping up everywhere. The CEO of Medium, Ev Williams, recently wrote that the top-line metric they judge users by is not uniques but rather total time reading.

"In a world of infinite content – where there are a million shiny attention-grabbing objects a touch away and notifications coming in constantly – it's meaningful when someone is actually spending time," Williams wrote.

TouchCast is taking this idea in another direction, making each video they produce a clickable, interactive experience. See a story in a news ticker and want to know more? You're able to simply click through an in-video app. This type of interactivity is resulting in a reported 47% of users interacting with at least one app, approximately five times the engagement of YouTube annotations.

Viewing behaviors themselves are also radically changing, becoming more intimate. Massive increases in smart TV and over-the-top box adoption — more than double where they were in 2012 — are enabling viewers to become programmers, curating their own hyper-personal (and increasingly binge-worthy) TV lineups.

Companies like Samba and Cognitive Networks are using this data to let advertisers target mobile ads against users' real-time TV consumption, no matter whether they're watching NBC or Netflix. Why target "men 18-34" in a broad campaign when you can retarget a House of Cards binge viewer while he or she is going grocery shopping? This sort of micro-specific targeting will lead to better ads for a more engaged audience.

This measurable intimacy isn't just limited to the ways we view content. Tracking tools like Bluetooth beacons and Wi-Fi sensing can help us understand how a shopper is moving through space. This data can be used to determine the effectiveness of a storefront or print campaign.

Next
Level
Awk-
ward-
ness

We're entering a world in which marketers can engage people in more personal ways in more personal spaces. What could possibly go wrong?

Next-Level Awkwardness

"Be human."

In the social media age, all marketers have heard some riff on this theme. As we enter the age of intimate computing, however – as we try to figure out how our brands fit into a world in which media is hyper-personal, data is everywhere, and our ability to target is ultra-precise – we'll see many new forays in "being human" by brands.

2015 is shaping up to be a year for new adventures in hyper-personal marketing. In some cases, like an adolescent making the transition to teenager, the results are going to be awkward.

Case in point: just last Christmas, we saw the first instance of a restaurant brand using drones to deliver mistletoe to unsuspecting diners. It was a cute, emotion-filled engagement – that resulted in a drone chopping off part of a diner's nose.

And Facebook, a master of data mining, found itself in a river of awkwardness with its Year in Review feature, in which photos from a person's history were spliced together in a fancy montage, ending with the encouraging tagline, "It's been a great year!" When a father lost his daughter to brain cancer earlier in the year and photos of her were automatically input into the montage, it made for a painful and public experience.

As we get closer to our customers, on both the physical and data levels, it's going to get easier to cross that line between contextual awareness and contextual sensitivity.

Some companies are taking steps to divorce themselves from falling into hot water with regard to customers' personal data. Apple, for example, famously removed itself from being able to remotely access data like credit card numbers used for Apple Pay, as a way to better ensure customer security.

Others will experiment with that line in interesting ways. AT&T recently announced the first scripted series designed for that most intimate of messaging applications, Snapchat. Philips hue and SyFy launched the first light bulbs that change dynamically in time with the show 12 Monkeys.

And at the IPG Media Lab, we're experimenting with new ways to humanize location marketing. For example, imagine walking into a sports bar and having a location-based beacon ping your phone, letting you know which TV is showing your fantasy football team's quarterback. Then, and only once you've sat down, it offers to buy you a beer.

We're bullish on the opportunities for marketers in 2015 and beyond. As people's relationships with technology grow ever more personal, marketers are being given incredibly powerful tools that can be used to do great things: to better connect with people, to deliver more utility. Sure, we'll see a number of awkward missteps, but the eventual progress will be well worth it. Welcome to the era of Intimate Computing.


“The difference between a really great recommendation engine and really creepy advertising is just a matter of degrees. We like to think that the ‘creepy threshold,’ the place at which people start to feel uncomfortable, is a little after the point where we make great recommendations. More often than not, we’re wrong.”

— Tim Hwang, American Internet entrepreneur