Co-authored with @bbhlabs, we identified 3 key trends at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and what they mean for marketers:
Media Daily News featured the article, which can be found here.
“Life is a videogame.”
The electronic voice of Joshua, a rogue AI in the movie classic Wargames, has been echoing in my head for over 25 years. Even though ol’ never said that in the movie, it used to amuse me to “hear” it said as I noticed a mechanic in life that paralleled the experiences I was having in front of my computer or console. I’ve never escaped the feeling (or the voice), and the current excitement over gamification — of products, of marketing, of life — is a welcome addition to the dialogue around innovation. If you’re one of our clients, you’ve perhaps rolled your eyes while I went on about gamification. If you’re one of my friends, you definitely have. Eye-rolling is for spouses and art-school contrarians.
So BRAND walks into a bar… (no, this is not a joke). What happens when “bar” equals “community hub?”
I’ve found the reactions of marketers to the need for serious thought and planning around community-management to be both surprising and fascinating. After all, community management– like so many of the concepts that come onto our professional radar in a rush of “why haven’t you considered this before”– isn’t a new concept. We could go all the way back to early human communities and examine counselors, religious figures and even the town drunk for clues about how to keep people happy, engaged and contributing to a greater good (or evil).
I knew I was late to the game on Hoarders, A&E’s “look inside the lives of two different people whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis,” so I watched it over the weekend. I was smirking as the show came up and the initial interviews with the subjects began. Initial shots of their homes revealed stacked up boxes, stuffed animals, guns in open cases, and– in one home– a computer tucked away down a meandering walk-lane made of detritus. I happened to have my laptop open and glanced at my screen.
And then I became afraid.
