LOVE Technology: The Competitive Value of Staying Current on Emerging Trends

This week in tech: Elon Musk announced SpaceX will send two very wealthy civilians around the moon in 2018; YouTube claims viewers watch one billion (yes - that is billion with a B) hours of footage daily; Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary, has developed a tool to sift through online comments which are disruptive to public discourse; Twitter is doubling down its emphasis on videos follow an abysmal $400 million loss in 2016; and Facebook is implementing more mid-video advertisements.

Technology is - and has been - rapidly evolving. These advances indicate substantial changes to the status quo. Innovation is changing the ways we work, how we reach clients, make business decisions, and view the world around us. Subsequently, technology provides opportunities for proactive brand marketers and advertisers to differentiate themselves from their peers.

While circumnavigating the moon might not be in your organizations budget, understanding the latest research on the formerly overstated average view time of Facebook videos or the prospects of Adtech vs Martech should be.

Staying current on various emerging technological innovations can provide organizations with a leg up on the competition. While not yet utilized heavily in marketing and advertising, the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) markets are expected to eclipse $100 billion collectively by 2020 according to new research by Markets and Markets. Growth of this nature could profoundly transform advertising.

Snapchat is a great case study. Launched in late 2011, Snapchat was largely heralded as a way to send NSFW photos with friends. In barely four years, Snapchat has evolved significantly. The photo sharing app has ballooned into a marketing staple, especially for brands intending to reach a younger demographic, with an anticipated ad revenue of one billion in 2017 (again, that is billion with a B).

The staples of advertising in the future are unknown to us today. But we do know the future will be upon us sooner than we think.

Recent history suggests technological innovations will facilitate new platforms and revolutionary methods by which to reach consumers. Brands and agencies that wait too long to see which innovations emerge as the most prevalent will be left playing catch up to proactive organizations who possess an anticipatory, rather than reactionary, approach to organization evolution.

Depending on your position, the pace of innovation is either inspiring and exciting or alarming and intimidating. Regardless, it is adamantly clear that if you wait for the dust to settle, you will already be behind.

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Six Years Strong

smith & beta is now 6 years into our research of the capabilities and ways of working at agencies. We just released our 2018 Talent and Transformation report and we're excited to share with you what we found.

Our business at smith & beta has always been focused on the development of people walking in the doors each day. We believe that if a company focuses on the current talent, what they know today and should know in the future, it can make all the difference to the bottom line. But some leaders aren’t familiar with talent development. It’s new. It feels unmeasurable. It seems foreign compared to hiring a few new experts. It’s a mindset and strategic shift. Yet we know talent development works. We also know that experts don’t scale. Often those superheros we hire land at the new job only to find that no one at the company understands them. They get siloed into a back room. They are change agents without support. They eventually leave. It happens time and time again. Take a minute to consider your budget for hiring experts this year or even a single leader and then compare to your training dollars. Is there a big difference? Do you operate as “training is nice to have” but not required? If so, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to scale and distribute capabilities beyond a few people at your company. Digital is not a department. Digital is shared knowledge, common language and collective understanding. When we design talent development programs, we work with industry leaders directly to lead content design. They are the experts. They know what should specifics should be covered. They walk in the room and own the conversation with employees. Below we’ve included a great workshop to get started this year.

2017 Greatest Hits

Welcome to the Greatest Hits 2017.Each year, at smith & beta, we publish our “greatest hits” for classes, workshops that we completed. This year, we noticed a preferential trend for content that focused on mindset development. No big surprise given how important mindsets, behaviors and habits are for learning in the workplace.

According to smith & beta’s 2016 report, 62% of industry professionals say their clients are asking for more advanced digital work from them and 43% of respondents said they were unprepared to provide more advanced work. When a company does not have the knowledge and talent to give their customers what they expect in the current technological climate, they fall behind and often cannot catch up.