Zee Melt 2017 has made it through the first two days of its schedule pretty swiftly. Even though the conference puts its focus mostly on advertising and the different aspects of it, it had something for pretty much every vertical of the industry.
Why?
It is because in today’s time, be it a service, product or a brand, they are all interspersed with advertising in some form or the other, however, digital definitely takes the lead.
We attended a session titled ‘Strategy, Creativity & Technology’ and it turned out to be pretty interesting.
The post-lunch session of the day was initiated by Fast Future Publishing, director, Steve Wells. He started his presentation with the title, “Artificial Intelligence – What’s all the fuss about?”
He explained what are the chances of robots taking away our jobs in the next 20 years. According to the Business Insider report he projected, telemarketing, accountant and auditors, retail salespersons, technical agents are in top of the sector-chain where AI or artificial intelligence are likely to take over.
However, he was quick to add to it that technology also creates more jobs – if some sectors will be taken over by AI, there would be new sectors to manage them, hence creating new opportunities. According to statistics, around 65 per cent of the children joining primary schools now would be working on jobs which don’t even exist yet.
Further he mentioned, how future family choices might be challenging, as human augmentation, that is genetic modifications and nootropic cognitive enhances drug will help us in keeping up with the pace of work. Our daily lives might be managed by AI, from reading to appointments; it might even know more about us than our family / partners would.
Concluding his session he stated that science and advancement is reshaping every aspect of our lives and it will deeply impact the way we go about it.
The session was followed by Kantar South Asia chief strategy officer Hemant Mehta, providing insights on how the consumer behaviour is dissected for better reach. He stated that messaging and calls are still better ways of communicating as it builds trust, as long as you get them on your mobile, because it is more personalised messaging. Government messaging notifying the masses about various schemes worked more than the message-promotion attempt from the private sectors except in the health sector where private sectors were ahead.
Mehta stated that mobile is possibly the most powerful mode of communicating now as it acts as an entertainment device as well. From games to music, everyone uses mobile and reaching out to masses is much easier because of the same thing.
Concluding his statement, he said everyone must be open to new things as the dynamics are about to change for good in the coming years.
Wrapping things up for the session was an unscheduled talk by Facebook, creative strategist, Ram Cobain. Titled ‘Creativity in a strange new world’, through his session the speaker projected how creativity is used in this world of technology.
Cobain stated how we are going the visual-first way and how in this age where our average attention span is of mere eight seconds, the measures which should be taken. He described it as a three-step process.
1. Compression: He insisted on packing more in short time limits. Thus the message/s have to conveyed in the given time in a creative and crisp manner.
2. Context: Through this point he focused on the context of the advertisement and how the content should be more customised and personalised to tap in the correct audience.
3. Combination: As the title is self explanatory, it has to be a combination of both creativity and technology to reach and optimise advertisement campaigns.
He further explained that Facebook users browse the platform in three ways or rather modes – ‘on the go’, ‘lean’ and ‘lean back’ – and the content is curated and targeted at each of the segment differently given browsing patterns.
Finally, he shared some tips which people should actually follow to get through their audience which include, immersive content, redefining storytelling, creating social experiences in real time and doing work that feels good.