Goodbye, Smartphone; Hello, Predictive Context Device - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

Goodbye, Smartphone; Hello, Predictive Context Device

It's Only a Matter of Time Before Your Mobile Device Knows Your Every Want and Need

Posted by Oren Frank on 05.25.10 @ 05:14 PM

Oren Frank

Let’s look a minute at the most recent hype we all fol­low: “The next net­work is mobile” or “the inter­net just became location-aware.” Both are true, but oh so very 2009, and they miss the point. 

The cur­rent phase of the “mobile” dis­cus­sion focus­es on loca­tion as the next plat­form. The growth of Foursquare and Gowalla serves as evi­dence and as a great demon­stra­tion of Metcalfe’s law on the mobile net, and tiny play­ers such as Google, Twitter and Facebook have recent­ly rushed to add loca­tion fea­tures to their platforms. 

But, when look­ing through the POV of the con­sumer, loca­tion isn’t quite enough. Mobile tech­nol­o­gy is now the­o­ret­i­cal­ly capa­ble of pro­vid­ing us with real-time con­tex­tu­al­ized and per­son­al­ized ser­vices and infor­ma­tion. The full poten­tial of what this tech­nol­o­gy can pro­vide should be seen through the aggre­gat­ed fil­ters of our loca­tion, our time­line, our social graph, what we did just before and what we’re expect­ed to want or do lat­er on. All of the above (and not just the loca­tion), com­plete­ly change our needs as consumers. 

If I’m going scu­ba div­ing in Florida with a group of nerds on a Friday after­noon, I have one set of con­tex­tu­al needs. If I’m tak­ing my daugh­ter to school on a snowy New York Monday morn­ing, it’s a very dif­fer­ent set. The best way to under­stand the poten­tial of this tech­nol­o­gy is to real­ize that it is sort of “aware.” Your device kind of “knows” (through GPS/3G/Wi-Fi/accelerometer data, etc.) where you are in the phys­i­cal and social time and space. It is also “aware” because it holds a com­plete record of your past actions and habits and of your future inten­tions – where you are head­ing and who you will meet (via cal­en­dar entries, con­tacts, web/search his­to­ry etc.). 

So, one could argue that your device is “you-aware.” At that moment we’re leav­ing the realm of the “mobile net­work” and mov­ing into a new ter­ri­to­ry where there is only one net­work – the net­work of you. Your new per­son­al­ized con­tex­tu­al device will active­ly assist you – and in being active lies the huge poten­tial leap com­pared to cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy. I have no doubt that very soon context-based tech­nol­o­gy will actu­al­ly pre­dict our needs and desires. 

Here are few sce­nar­ios that, at the moment, may seem a tad sci­ence fic­tion­al, but the required tech­nol­o­gy to real­ize them already exists. What’s miss­ing is a software-based solu­tion that will tie up the loose data ends: 

• My con­text device “knows” it’s noon. It also knows (via accelerom­e­ter data) that I haven’t moved from my desk for the last cou­ple of hours. Because it “knows” I have a TBD lunch sched­uled for 12:30 (it reads my tagged cal­en­dar entries), it will remind me I should leave. As soon as I move the device, it dis­plays the list of places where I had lunch the last cou­ple of weeks. Since most were Italian restau­rants, it sug­gests Chinese or falafel and gen­er­ates the lat­est con­sumer rat­ing of the restau­rants offered. At the same time, it also high­lights restau­rants locat­ed with­in walk­ing dis­tance that will allow me to be back in time for my sched­uled 2 p.m. meeting. 
• I am on a busi­ness trip to Madrid, have just fin­ished my meet­ings and have three hours until my flight back to New York. My device “sens­es” I start­ed mov­ing and “knows” my sched­ule, there­fore it asks me if I pre­fer to get a taxi to the air­port, or if I pre­fer to stay in the city since the dri­ve to the air­port takes about 15 min­utes. I choose the sec­ond option, slide the “ambi­ent media streams” all the way from “pri­va­cy please” to “hit me with every­thing you’ve got,” and the device offers me all the tourist attrac­tions around me, even a near­by cof­fee shop that has received excep­tion­al­ly high rat­ings (I love cof­fee). I choose the cof­fee shop, and as I am drink­ing my sec­ond cup, the device alerts me that my flight has been delayed by an hour and will board through gate E32. I drink anoth­er cup of cof­fee and read from my device the his­to­ry of Madrid until the next alert updates me that I should call a taxi – imme­di­ate­ly pro­vid­ing me with an appli­ca­tion that direct­ly books one. 
• I leave my office to inter­view some­one at a near­by bar. My device “knows” it is a job inter­view (tagged in my cal­en­dar), there­fore it auto­mat­i­cal­ly Googles the appli­cant, uploads his resume and image, and then pro­vides me with a sum­ma­ry of the avail­able infor­ma­tion found about him from HR, the web and oth­er social sources. As I approach the bar, my device turns itself into “meet­ing” mode, in which I can view a map that dis­plays two dots approach­ing each oth­er. As we meet, the device asks me if I would like to record the con­ver­sa­tion and send it to HR. 

And the list goes on. Once we’ve learned to con­nect loca­tion and time with per­son­al­ized social/behavioral data, there are end­less sce­nar­ios. Using not-too-complex algo­rithms, the con­text device can con­tin­u­ous­ly study our lives, mak­ing ever-improving “guess­es” to active­ly help us. 

So, good­bye, app phone; hel­lo, pre­dic­tive con­text device. On one hand, the scope of per­son­al infor­ma­tion that a device like this will col­lect about our behav­ior and pref­er­ences is straight-forwardly scary. On the oth­er, whether we like it or not, most of this infor­ma­tion is already being col­lect­ed today. Wise usage and lever­ag­ing of our per­son­al infor­ma­tion will allow context-driven tech­nol­o­gy to pro­vide us with ser­vices that will turn the next gen­er­a­tion of mobile devices into smart and effi­cient per­son­al assis­tants that will con­tin­ue to improve our qual­i­ty of life. 

For mar­keters, this is the ulti­mate wet dream of the mar­ket­ing world since day one: a tar­get audi­ence of one. You. 

The orig­i­nal and often for­got­ten pur­pose of mar­ket­ing was to add val­ue to con­sumers’ lives, what MRM Worldwide defines as Customer Utility. Marketing that is context-based – the kind that pro­vides tan­gi­ble val­ue in real-time with the pro­fessed per­mis­sion of the con­sumer – is an excel­lent basis for a new type of rela­tion­ship between mar­keters and con­sumers, one that is final­ly based on win-win. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oren Frank is glob­al chief cre­ative offi­cer at MRM Worldwide. During his career, Frank has worked with such brands as Honda, Volvo, Microsoft, Yoplait, Heineken, Axe and McDonalds.