Wearables promise real-time brand engagement in a world where the virtual connects with the actual via a network that encompasses everyday objects, our personal devices and our minds. It’s all a matter of how to use the data, but as Adrian Pennington learns, with great power comes great responsibility.
In
his 2013 novel The Circle, author Dave Eggers depicts a
not-too-distant future in which a tech giant monopolises computing,
from search to social networks, and accesses every digital beat of
millions of people’s lives. ‘The Circle’ believes it is a
democratising force unlocking creativity and freedom of choice, but
when personal lives are broadcast online Truman Show-style, when
private actions are policed by public forums, and where no record is
erased, its totalitarian surveillance is unambiguously Orwellian.
Eggers’
book touches on a question much debated within Silicon Valley: who
owns our personal data and what should be done with it, as more and
more is collected from the micro-computers that are set to pervade
our lives? In Eggers’ scenario, too much data in the wrong hands
closes off choice and harms our wellbeing. It’s aimed at Amazon,
Google, Facebook and others who contend that data can be farmed,
curated then targeted to benefit an individual’s existence, rather
than benefiting the corporation.
That
sense of life enhancement from product is of course the same trick
that advertising tries to pull off and it’s why there’s
considerable buzz around wearables, even if the jury is out on
exactly what its communications potential is. “Wearables are still
in digital snake-oil territory,” says Aaron Martin, head of
strategic services at digital communications agency Collective
London. “They have massive potential but brands are in the phase of
doing things for the sake of it, rather than for the benefit of
consumers. We’re asking consumers to adapt their behaviour to
technology rather than respecting human behaviour and getting
technology to adapt.” Wearables are different to previous mobile
technologies because they give us access to information about our
physical bodies and the physical environment we inhabit in real-time.
As Evangeline Marzec – now co-founder of a wearable tech startup
and until recently the mobile strategy specialist at Deloitte Digital
– observed in her blog, wearables’ primary purpose “is to
support immediate, real-world actions by providing relevant,
contextual information precisely at the point of decision-making.”
An example: the use of GPS tracking software in pro sports kicked off
with sabermetrics, in which statistical data of baseball players’
performance is gathered and analysed – it was famously used by
baseball team Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane (immortalised in the
film Moneyball). The next stage saw the British and Irish Lions rugby
team have sensors stitched into players’ jerseys to help managers
analyse team performance and to make decisions on replacements in
real time.
Let
your glasses tell you what to eat
It
is the contextual awareness offered by light and temperature sensors,
magnetometers, gyroscopes, barometers, altimeters and accelerometers,
sensors for geolocation, electrodermal (skin) response, security or
health biometrics that gives “brands an opportunity to truly
integrate into every facet of life and deliver high value
interactions,” enthuses Scott Amyx,
founder and CEO of wearables digital agency Amyx+McKinsey.
Brands
can insert themselves in infinitesimal non-invasive ways into our
lives. Heartbeat monitoring via wristbands may trigger dietary
suggestions to your Google Glass; Microsoft’s Septimu earbuds can
monitor wearers’ moods by measuring heart rate, temperature and
biorhythms and, together with the app Musical Heart, choose the best
type of music to play to them. Ben Jones,
chief technology officer at AKQA
classifies wearables as a separate communications channel and says
the key is to marry utility and message. AKQA’s work includes
designing the fabled immersive Oculus Rift world for Nissan and it’s
the lead digital agency for wristband micropayment device Barclaycard
bPay: “We are giving the bank’s customers the chance to simplify
their lives in an immediate, relevant and positive manner,” he
says.
Brands
who’ve entered into the wearables space are doing so, by and large,
for the prestige of association. Media players from ELLE
magazine
to The New York
Times,
for example, piled into Glasswear apps. There’s no harm in doing
so, especially if treated as experimentation. CNN, for example, is
exploring whether Glass enables reporters to broadcast live from the
field, and down the line, whether multiple Glass-captured recordings
of an event can be united to provide a new panoramic perspective on
what actually happened.
The
apparent popularity of devices like fitness bands Jawbone UP and
Nike+ FuelBand, smartwatches Galaxy Gear and Pebble and smartglasses
from Vuzix, Google and Epson (Moverio) prompt wild speculation as to
the market’s worth. Researcher Visiongain estimates the sector is
worth $5.24bn this year, while analysts forecasting 2018 figures
range from Juniper Research predicting a global market of $19bn and
IHS predict a whopping $30bn on annual sales of more than 180 million
devices. The truth is, this is such a nascent market that no one
knows how big it may become. Nonetheless, any of those stats are
remarkable enough for a fledgling consumer electronics category,
until you contrast it with smartphones, of which we will buy 2.3
billion worldwide in 2018, according to IDC. Wearable-tech is tiny.
So why all the attention?
“It
feels like [wearables] should be important even if nobody’s figured
out the killer app,” says Mark Avnet, dean of digital agency 360i’s
education hub. He feels that genuine wearables, like haptic sensors
embedded in jewellery or clothing will provide a more seamless and
fruitful set of interactions. “We sweat into them, we customise
them,” he says. “There’s a physical intimacy to wearing them
that feels real in an age of abstraction. It’s personal, although
its potential is not yet realised.” Examples of the more intimate
nature of wearables include the T.Jacket, which enables parents to
‘hug’ their kids via mobile devices; the Tactilu bracelet that
responds to and delivers touch remotely and Fundawear, developed for
Durex, via which lovers can phone in their foreplay by controlling
their partner’s underwear long distance.
A
more cerebral application, the Neurocam by Neurowear offers a
wearable camera system that hooks a brainwave detecting headset to an
iPhone to identify what the wearer is interested in and automatically
records and saves the footage in five-second GIF clips. One
implication of this, according to researchers PSFK, could be the
creation of ‘highlight reels’ from a day or social event.
Another, in a decade or so, could be the cataloguing of entire
personal experiences to a ‘memory cloud’.
The
focus is already switching from hardware to software and the glue
that unites these wearables together. It’s one reason why Nike and
lark, which manufactures activity trackers, recently ditched their
wearable hardware-making divisions to focus on researching and
developing software that other hardware makers can integrate into
their own wearables. “Over time we’ll see single-purpose devices
such as sensor bands give way to multi-purpose Swiss Army Knife-style
devices,” says Amyx. “Hardware will consolidate.”
AKQA
created NikeFuel Guides for FuelBands and is now helping the sports
brand redesign its API [application programming interface]. “The
future is one of integration,” says AKQA’s Jones. “It’s about
making sure that wearable devices connect seamlessly.” Promising
far more innovation and potential than the individual devices
themselves, adds Amyx, “are the value-added services that can be
wrapped around them.”
Building
the brave new world of the ecosystem
If
you Google ‘wearables’ and ‘brand communication’ your search
will return the keyword ‘ecosystem’ with a frequency too high to
be ignored. Often a vacuous piece of marketeering, the word
‘ecosystem’ has come into its own as the best way to sum up the
power of data aggregated from a number of wearable sources. “The
success of wearables will not hinge on the hardware alone,” writes
Julie Ask, Forrester analyst and co-author of the book The
Mobile Mind Shift.
“Success will hinge on the associated mobile apps and how effective
they are in changing behaviour.” While consultant Mark Brill,
blogging for content agency River, says the growth of the technology
“will lead to a unique personal ecosystem consisting of different
sets of wearable and connected devices. Today’s branded content is
largely thought of as content delivered through screens. In the
future we’ll need to think of content not just in terms of viewing
but also in terms of hearing, feeling and touching.”
Wearables
fits into the massive economic and cultural transformation driven by
digital, a trend that BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith put
succinctly in an interview with The New York Times: “Technology
isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture.”
So
what does this mean for brands? It’s clear that traditional
advertising methods aren’t going to work for wearables. In fact,
Google has already vetoed advertising on Glass in its developer
guidelines. Carl
Panczak,
CEO of digital agency Reactive
New York,
says that for advertising to work on wearables it needs to harness
the key elements of context, location and personalisation. Brands
wanting to take advantage of these new devices need to figure out a
way to integrate themselves as services, become an indispensible part
of the wearable experience and thereby build a valuable relationship
with the wearer. “Current ads on mobile devices are frankly
irrelevant and annoying,” agrees Amyx. “You cannot transplant a
piece of creative onto a wearable like a smartwatch by simply making
the format smaller. With wearables, context makes all the difference.
Wearables can handle something that smartphones cannot, namely a
constant interaction between the computer and user that enables
ambient intelligence, ubiquitous computing and biometric data
tracking. This creates a unique opportunity for brands to participate
in a new dimension of brand engagement. As recommendations become
more relevant and on target, the premise of advertising takes on an
entirely different dimension as users will come to see value in
information personalised for them.”
This
is not possible with devices in isolation but is becoming possible as
sensors connect with each other – so called machine-to-machine
communication. When you couple personalised data to environmental
data you create a powerful wireless sensor network which can be used
“to assemble a holistic picture about the quantified self,”
concludes Amyx.
Homo
sapiens outnumbered, mobile devices rule
The
startling statistic which we should be taking note of is not the
figure for wearable sales but the unfathomably vast value for the
internet of things (IoT), the global network set to unify consumers
with inanimate objects via the web. Network manufacturer Cisco charts
the IoT as a $19trillion opportunity for the world’s economies over
the next decade, noting that by next year the number of mobile
devices on the planet will be greater than the total population.
Agencies who aren’t already involved in the heavy lifting of big
data will be left behind, notes Amyx, although the volume of data and
the collection itself is less important than knowing how to read it
and apply it. Statistical pattern recognition and building decision
trees are two of many routes to actionable insight. “You need
algorithm developers, computer programs, data scientists, specialists
in machine learning who understand how to aggregate the right sources
of raw data,” agrees AKQA’S Jones. “The level of insight you
can garner changes products and creates new product and experience
flows.” An example of machine-to-machine interaction has been
explored by Collective London, who turned startup founder Sarah
Buggle’s idea for an audio flyer into reality. The BUGGLE app
allows the user to listen to live music being played at clubs and
bars nearby – in real time – to inform their choice about where
to go.
According
to Amyx, app designers can no longer assume that the de facto user
experience starts with a user turning on an app and then proceeding
through a pre-defined user interface workflow. “Rather than
requiring input from users, wearable apps will deliver high-value
information in snippets as you go about your day. It will always be
on in the background, listening and making sense of your context and
activities,” he says. “What excites me about this is real-time
brand engagement.”
Amyx+McKinsey
partnered with Coke on its 2013 Ahh Effect campaign in which YouTube
artist Kurt Hugo Schneider used the drink bottles to perform musical
percussion. A select group of home viewers with biometric bracelets
agreed to share their responses with Coke so that the brand could
learn – by tracking heartbeat and body rhythm – how the spot
could heighten the watcher’s happiness, leaving participants with
‘post-brand goodwill’.
Another
Amyx+McKinsey project saw Korean automotive brand Kia give every
visitor to a motor show a sensor-laden band to measure their
reactions to different car models as they walked around. Gyroscopes
tracked body and head movement, pulse rates were assessed,
temperatures gauged. The feedback will be used to inform future
marketing decisions. “With geo and vertical location sensors we can
pinpoint consumers in retail malls relative to different shops, and
within shops to different display areas,” says Amyx. “There’s a
tremendous amount of user information we can capture. We can quantify
a user’s reaction to brands. Their respiratory rate, facial
gestures or even gasps or sighs provide clues to their emotional
state.” In return, the consumer receives instore deals on their
smartglasses, or instructional videos on how to use a product. If
they express an interest in a product, they could get help in finding
the right one via live chat with a virtual store guide. Based on
eye-tracking movements and length of gaze at a particular fashion
item, product highlights might appear in their field of vision. “At
no point, did the consumer have to stop to pull out a smartphone and
launch an app,” notes Amyx. The information is granular and
intimate, as if neurochemicals such as serotonin, adrenaline,
dopamine and oxytocin had been measured to assess degrees of
happiness. “Brands could know more about an individual than they do
themselves,” says Amyx. “Not everybody is self-aware.”
Methods
of analysing big data range from a branch of mathematics called Monte
Carlo simulation – a computerised mathematical technique that lets
you see all the possible outcomes of a decision and assess the impact
of risk – to off-the-shelf tools, such as Google BigQuery and
Apache Hadoop. Consumer electronics vendors are developing their own
tools. The Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions (SAMI)
platform aggregates health data from Samsung (Simband) and
non-Samsung sensors to give developers API access to granular sensor
data to run analytics.
Meanwhile,
Amyx+McKinsey is collaborating with “one of the world’s largest
agencies” to develop a networked approach to employing real-time
brand engagement. Obtaining the data presupposes either a mass
invasion of privacy or mass consent. The media industry is not alone
in grappling with this issue, for which there are few regulations. On
the one hand, fears bordering on paranoia about the slippery slope to
Orwell’s 1984 (see NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s opinion on
the right of states to own our private digital activity for supposed
national security); on the other hand the IoT could be represented by
the type of benevolent, omnipresent OS with which we may fall in love
(see the Spike
Jonze
film Her). “I think this is just the start of something pretty
amazing – and scary too,” says AKQA’s Jones. “It has the
potential to be Big Brother, knowing my location, my movement, how
caffeinated I am. The point is to combine this insight with services
the customer finds useful. If, for example, I am too highly
caffeinated, perhaps I could use advice on maintaining regular sleep
patterns.” We are prepared to give up our data if we receive value
in return. “There has to be an exchange of function and features,”
says Chris Matlub, founder and director of digital design agency 5K,
which devised the VELA app for sailing enthusiasts wearing
sports-oriented smart headgear ReconJet. “Maybe I give someone an
application for specific use of a smartwatch and in return I collect
data about how they interact with the world. It is up to the agency
to go beyond the gimmick and understand how they can make it useful
to the consumer.”
“The
watch-out for agencies and brands is to be respectful of data,”
warns Collective’s Martin. “This is more important when we start
reading people’s biometrics. One issue is security. Already, smart
connected cars have been hacked causing erratic braking and
accelerating. Another issue is respecting unwritten agreements. It’s
not unfeasible to think that [a company] might brand a product that
monitors your health and if your blood pressure is high then the
brand responds with alerts/advice. That’s fine until your health
insurance premium goes up. It’s not the contract you agreed to but
it’s what we are sleepwalking into.” Stanford School of
Engineering’s MobiSocial Lab is seeking to combat such misuse by
giving individuals back control of their personal data. Its
communications platform Omlet is an open standard social network that
lets users store and own all their data in a cloud.
Getting
connected while still looking cool
Moving
from data ethics to design, another facet of wearable tech is how it
will develop physically. “The next step is about breaking through
the screen,” says Matt
Pollitt,
co-founder of 5K.
“At the moment we all interact with mobile devices via a piece of
glass. It has created a digital barrier. Nobody looks up from their
mobiles to go face-to-face. Exciting new experiences will happen when
we can interact with the connected world unobtrusively by looking and
behaving as normal.” Wearable tech is considered a clunky stopgap
en route to an ecosystem that truly does hook us up to ‘the
Matrix’. Today’s rudimentary plastic bands and self-conscious
smartwear will become obsolete, replaced by nanomaterials and
nanosensors that can tap our brain activity and are carried in
clothing or in accessories, such as handbags. It will be a system
that taps our neural network. “Until we can embed technology into
our brains, our mobile device is the next best thing we have to sync
our connected selves with our wearable technologies,” writes Matt
Doherty,
associate director of creative and global strategy at OgilvyOne
Worldwide.
Brain
machine interfaces have been around for a while, but they are now at
workable level for brand experimentation. At tech expo SXSW this
year, 360i
devised a game, Think Flatizza, to launch a new flatbread/pizza
product from food chain Subway. It used EEG-reading headsets to
measure brainwave activity via electrodes to the temple. “Players
were asked to focus on images of the Flatizza on a monitor that
pitted one person’s mind against another in a virtual tug-of-war in
a bid to win a meal by thinking happy Flatizza thoughts.” explains
360i’s Avnet. “We had people staring at the new product for 10
minutes at time.” Other examples include NuWave glasses, which help
to amplify sound for the hearing impaired by transforming sound waves
into vibrations; beauty tech designer Katia Vega has prototyped
make-up products (false eyelashes, conductive eyeshadow)
incorporating low-voltage circuitry to detect when someone winks and
convert the action into a communication with other devices;
Shoreditch design studio This Place has programmed MindRDR, a Google
Glass app that translates brain activity readings, collected by the
NeuroSky headset, into commands to take photographs via Glass with
just a few moments’ concentration, bypassing the need to vocalise a
command. This could help ameliorate the slightly uncool element of
some wearables. “Social norms drive our behaviour in public spaces,
which is why Google Glass wearing jars with what we consider to be
socially acceptable,” says Collective’s Martin. “The current
generation of wearables is struggling to catch-on partly because the
products lack intuitive control. Telekinesis is most useful in
controlling devices without us having to do anything abnormal.”
Is
telly controlling your mind? Or vice versa
Google
is already taking the considerable learning it has collected about
user behaviour from Glass and porting into interactive contact
lenses, on which it has taken out a patent. “We can already use
emotional analytics of a person’s verbal and non-verbal
communication to understand their mood or attitude,” says Jones.
“Telepathy is the next stage of that, where we can truly understand
thought and instruct things to happen.”
At
electronics fest CES this year, TV data analytics specialist Rovi
demonstrated how viewers could tune into a channel using just their
brain and a blink of the eye. Mind-control telly is but the first
application. Just think what might happen if Netflix, say, knew what
you were looking for and what reaction you gave to new content.
Content could be commissioned or decommissioned on the basis of that
accumulated knowledge. Movies might be re-edited according to
real-time feedback from trailers. The idea is already being explored
by Technicolor. “This is the future of recommendation,” explained
Philippe Guillotel, co-leader of Technicolor’s Open Research Group.
“We are detecting your emotions from biological signals; it’s the
same principle as lie detectors. In ten years there could be sensors
on your TV that will propose relevant content to you according to
your emotional state.”
Amyx
believes that over time we will experience augmented reality [via
Glass, contact lens or some yet to be invented media] on a daily
basis. “As you go about your day the information received from the
environment around you will be overlaid with a digital virtual world.
Rather than having to invest in a large billboard, brands can deliver
the same set of messages in a more customised manner and within that
person’s field of view.” This represents a huge brand opportunity
and a power that must be used wisely.
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