Love Change? Love the Future.

Anticipating the Communications Landscape 15 Years from Now.

The annual trends report I've done the last few years with Mr. Whatley looks a year ahead. This article considers a more distant horizon, and includes specific suggestions for marketing and communications folks in the last section.

15 years ago, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were the stuff of science fiction stories. There was no iPhone. We couldn’t carry the Internet around in our pockets. And the only tablet we had seen was on Star Trek.

15 years later, we would rather lose a wallet full of cash than our mobile phone. And, as one smart Redditor observed, the biggest surprise of our time is that we carry around a device through which we can access all of the world’s accumulated wisdom and knowledge – and use it to watch cat videos.

When I became a digital specialist in 2004, I simply seized on emerging technology that enabled conversations between people with common interests, building on the astonishingly prescience thinking of the The Cluetrain Manifesto. That communications revolution is now largely resolved. Being a ‘digital’ expert isn’t that interesting these days, and it will be even less so in the future. But there is an important role for people who are interested looking ahead, and working to figure out what transformational moments in technology and society in general mean for people, and how to apply those in a communications context.

How can we conceive of the world we’ll live in 15 years from now? How will the world and society change? How will technology’s role in our lives evolve? How will those changes affect the way that we learn, share, and form relationships? And what will that mean for the world of communications? Will marketing and communications be replaced by robots?

At the moment, it’s easy to be worried about the future. The world arguably hasn’t seen this much upheaval and disruption since the 1914-1918 world war. All of us feel a degree of uncertainty that probably makes us uncomfortable.

As the new year begins, I’d prefer to be hopeful. After all, humans have managed to solve every meaningful problem or threat that’s been thrown our way, given enough time and energy. Challenges tend to focus the mind, and compel us to work together.

Consider some of the macro trends where we’re likely to see the most interesting development on the next fifteen years. Each offers hope for a better world.

New Energy Sources

We’ve depended on carbon and fossil fuels as our most important energy source since early humans tamed fire. First trees, then coal, then oil have kept us warm and fuelled our binges of building, industry and transportation. Industrialisation has brought us together in big cities and powered exploration of our own world and the heavens beyond.

Without energy, we are chained. We can go nowhere. Build nothing. Create nothing. Leave no poetry or prose, no stories or films. No marketing, because there would be no markets.

Only in the last fifteen years have we begun to seriously move on from carbon, experimenting with new and more sustainable forms of energy. We are harnessing the wind, making more of the sun, and enlisting the power of rivers and the tide into our service.

The next fifteen years will witness another dramatic transformation in how we harness energy to power progress. It might come in the form of fusion reactors or ion engines. We might even learn to recapture carbon from the atmosphere or convert methane to energy through robotic photosynthesis.

New battery technology promises to hold and deliver energy much more efficiently as well. The result will be smaller batteries that last far longer than their present-day cousins – not just by hours or days, but by weeks or months. That means smaller devices and greater freedom from charging stations.

And most importantly, new generation technologies and better, smaller storage solutions free us to explore beyond our world more vigorously. Humans are explorers by nature, and the coming fifteen years will begin the next great age of exploration, where we push the boundaries of our solar system, in the same way Magellan, de Gama and their brethren pushed the boundaries of the known European world in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Travel and Transportation

Fifteen years ago, kids dreamed of passing their driving test and getting their hands on a car. It was their ticket to freedom and independence from their parents and a nod towards adulthood. Air travel was an expensive proposition, so a vacation that involved a flight was generally a special treat.

Today, low cost airlines have democratised air travel, and most of us will have the chance to fly away for a holiday. Meanwhile, the future of cars is in doubt. Why own a car if it’s just going to sit in a parking space or a garage most of the time? Uber and other sharing platforms have taught us that transport assets like cars, busses and trains can be used more efficiently. Meanwhile, governments are preparing for the mandated end of the internal combustion engine. Norway and the UK have both announced future bans.

The next fifteen years will see electric replace petrol and diesel, and our attitude toward cars change radically. In fifteen years, it’s unlikely that many of us will own a car. Instead, we’ll take advantage of a pool of cars convenient to where we live, and pay only for the time we use.

Rail transport will get faster and more efficient. And technologies like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop might make it possible to travel far greater distances in markedly shorter times. We might have the opportunity to live in Bucharest and commute to a job in Milan or Munich.

Air transport might finally deliver on its promise to be both faster and more energy efficient. NASA’s development of a new, supersonic passenger aircraft is just one of several projects underway to push the boundaries of physics and engineering, and get us soaring through the upper reaches of the atmosphere to destinations on the other side of the world.

Perhaps engineers will succeed in restoring some magic to flying, even as airlines promise to fill the next fifteen years with more drudgery by adding more seats, putting them closer together, and depriving us of food, water, and even beer while we’re in flight.

So maybe we should rely on physicists to find the magic: Scientists in China have recently applied quantum theory to ‘teleport’ a particle from the Earth’s surface to a point more than 1,400km into space. Perhaps we’ll soon be ‘beaming’ ourselves from one side of the world to the other.

More sustainable, lower cost, faster travel will make the world an even smaller place. Culture will become even more homogenized, although a strong counter-movement to protect and celebrate distinctive local culture is certain, too. We’ll all have the opportunity to see and experience the wonder of the world around us – natural and manmade. Those experiences will bring us closer together, and be a force that encourages us to work together to protect our planet for the future.

3D Printing

Our ability to manipulate material into almost any form, and to do so cheaply and in any location, is one of the most profound and important changes in human society since the industrial revolution.

Consider that for the last three centuries, if you wanted something, you had to find someone to make it for you. If it was a single purchase, like a cake, you might find an artisan to make it for you. If you wanted to make large numbers, you had to find or build a factory. But society tends to cluster factories together, and they are often not convenient. So manufacturing might happen hundreds or thousands of kilometres from where the product is sold and used. Thus, the global economy has come to rely on industrial scale transport solutions. The products we use are made in one corner of the world and brought to us by ship, train, truck or plane.

No more.

As 3D printing is perfected in the next fifteen years, we will be able to make anything we want, given the right materials and detailed plans. To be sure, certain complex items will still require specialist manufacturing. But simpler items might be made in a workshop down the street.

This has a huge implications. First, the transport industry faces radical disruption. Infrastructure requirements will evolve in ways that hard to forsee. Second, we can keep older machines in service longer by printing our own spare parts. This could be hugely important in places like Africa where spare parts are hard to get. Third, manufacturing and retailing will likely merge. Amazon’s network of distribution centres might soon include thousands of 3D printers, churning out the products we love, which drones will deliver to our door. Finally, as manufacturing clusters around a more common set of materials, recycling could become easier, and materials more frequently reused and revitalised.

3D printing will be another force enabling greater human mobility, both on Earth and beyond as it empowers us to make almost anything we need to continue our journey. It might also revitalise small communities and restore the importance of the local corner shop, bringing back a local connection point that’s essential for society.

The Changing Communications Landscape

Those are just three of the potentially positive areas of progress we’re likely to see in the next fifteen years. I could have included discussions of nanotechnology, AI, fully immersive A/R and V/R experiences, and many more. The central point is simple: The pace of technological change is only going to accelerate. Disruption will only become more frequent and more significant. In 15 years, we will look back on Uber’s disruption of taxicabs as a relatively minor blip. And within 5 years, some of the disruptors will find themselves disrupted. A big, new-economy business like Twitter might go bust. The consequence will be big changes in how people are employed and how they spend their non-working time.

There are also potential pitfalls in each area of progress. We need to guard carefully important principles like free speech, privacy, and ethics as well as key life moments, like childhood, and ensure protect them from negative consequences that might accompany technological advancement.

Communications has a crucial role to play in helping society deal with on-going disruption and protect its most important values. Communicators must put their gifts to work, focusing the spotlight on hopeful areas for progress and ensuring limits are developed and respected. All the while, the world of communications itself will have to navigate its own disruptive forces, as technologies and human behaviour both change.

So let’s consider how communications might be disrupted in the next 15 years.

• It’s going to get even harder to differentiate the truth and hard facts from lies. The communications profession has been a significant contributor to building a post-fact landscape. We’ve contested every fact, turned every cause for question into cause for doubt, and built arguments on the fringes of truth. These forces are beyond our control now, and they are going to make our work more difficult in the future. It’s time to redeem ourselves. We need to find, establish or protect spaces for unadulterated truth, and defend the people and institutions who arbitrate what is fact and what is myth.
• The publishing industry as we know it will collapse or transform into a shape that bears little resemblance to its current form. The acquisition of the Washington Post by Amazon.com is unquestionably good news for the Post and people who love it. And the Post might the first of the new model – the Long Tail applied to news publishing. But lots of newspapers will fail, and the burden of scrutinising politicians, especially at the local level where the potential for corruption and malfeasance is greatest, will fall to others. The communications industry needs to seek out and support these emerging publishers and get behind the business models, while also helping them professionalise and respecting their ethics.
• Micro will replace Mass. In his brilliant book, The End of Big, Nicco Mele explains that social media makes mass communications harder and less effective. But the opportunity now is to communicate with micro audiences, to create content that they will love, and to put less energy and effort into ideas that are made for everyone because they are, in effect, made for no one. As brands create more content for more audiences, the work of customisation and content creation will become more automated.
• Creative talent will become even more important. Finding and keeping great creative talent will get harder. And new market models for working with creative talent will emerge. As automation replaces certain aspects of our work, it’s creativity that will distinguish humans from the machines. So people with creative talent will be in even greater demand.
• Behavioural science will drive a wider range of communications activities. Michael Lewis’s latest book The Undoing Project explored the origins of behavioural science as a discipline, and shows how challenging assumptions can have huge impacts. In the next 15 years, all communications professionals will need a working knowledge of behavioural science, will need to stay current on developments in the field, and will need to apply what they learn to make communications more effective.
• Rigour in measurement will be essential. Businesses won’t tolerate the silly, stupid and misleading metrics that communications professionals have traditionally used. Activities that don’t have a direct relationship to bottom line – either via a clear connection to sales or an econometric link to business performance – won’t attract investment.
• Interruptive marketing will end. Consumers will have the technological power to choose what content they interact with. There will be fewer avenues to buy their attention, and unwelcome interruption will be largely impossible. So to communication successfully, businesses and others will have to earn attention, space on platforms, and scale of reach. To earn it, they’ll have to make more interesting content that people choose to share, and get audiences to opt into hearing from them in the future. Put more succinctly, the communications choice will be a simple one: Earn, or die.

Needless to say, everything I’ve written is just my own speculation. I’m sure much of it will be wrong. But the broader point is beyond argument: The world will change. Technology will be a driving force. Society and human behaviour will change in ways that are impossible to predict with real certainty. Communications will play an important role in determining whether those changes are positive or negative. And the world will remain uncertain and unpredictable, just as it always has been.

It’s easy to worry about the future, especially now. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. But there are so many reasons to be hopeful, and so many positive changes to come, it’s impossible for me not to be excited about the possibilities. The future is what we make it. I hope we’ll make the most of our collective potential, and I hope that communications will be a positive force for helping us get there.

This article is adapted from a chapter I wrote for the Golden Book of Romanian Public Relations, organised and edited by the brilliant Dana Oancea.

#AgencyVoices #HappyNewYear #FutureGazing #2018