In a post-GDPR world, it is essential that brands find authentic ways to connect with always-on consumers and take advantage of the opportunities that exist to reach them in this ‘connected world’ – while keeping in mind the control that the consumer now has over how brands engage with them.

If you werent able to make it to the event, here is a selection of the best gems of wisdom shared.

“In a lot of ways, the connected experience has already provided for the needs of customers. Customers are already connected. And, through technology, they have an expectation of a high-level interaction with your brands.”

“With how the ecosystems are expanding quickly, it’s crucial that we don’t think about the touchpoints independently. The experience the customer has with your brand needs to be complete. Customers should be able to get the information that they require, or perform the function that they desire, at the right place and at the right time – whenever and wherever they might be.”

Kicking off the event, Neil Ballinger, UX lead at Nimbletank, discussed the need for consistent interaction with customers across the ever-growing number of digital platforms at their disposal.

“As human beings, we instantly gravitate toward the negative. So, if you can solve some of those negative issues… then you will stand head and shoulders above the competition.”

Nick Pike, VP of UK & Ireland at Outsystems, looked at the importance of brands being a shining light for consumers during the negative moments they lean toward.

“I think if you’re briefing the right types of influencers for your voice on social media, you’re looking for that ‘eureka’ moment of reach, relevance, and resonance.”

Getting influencers to represent your voice can be the most effective way for brands to accomplish the three Rs they seek, according to David Saunders, brand partnerships manager EMEA at Indahash.

“There’s a lot of fluff on the net that says that [Generation Z] are just millennials on steroids. And they’re not for a lot of different reasons. They were born into the global recession, so that’s impacted how they were brought up, what they worry about, and the family environment they were brought into. Unfortunately, terrorism was a norm for them from the time they were born, so there’s that level of insecurity, which has brand ramifications.”

“It’s mobile everything. It’s not mobile-first anymore. These guys [Generation Z] see the smartphone as being a hub. They think it’s weird that people use it to make phone calls and do emails. To them, it’s their entertainment hub, their communication hub – absolutely everything is through their smartphone.”

Kohlben Vodden, director at StoryScience, believes its about time that brands shifted their attention away from millennials toward Generation Z – who are set to redefine the entire marketing spectrum.

“There’s an almost perfect correlation between what you say you’re going to do on a self-reported questionnaire on your mobile phone and what you actually do about going to a store. Why is that? Because our mobile phone is an extension of ourselves. We feel very close to it and it represents us very clearly.”

“There’s no way you can use cookies to see who has actually been exposed. So, we have to embrace device IDs… It’s persistent unless you reset it.”

Mobiles tell brands everything they need to know about a person and, as such, interactions need to be tracked in the most accurate way possible, says Nigel Roth, managing director at On Device Research.

“[websites should operate with] peak efficiency across all devices… Having said that, just because it works on a mobile, doesn’t mean it’s actually optimised to work on mobile. There is a big difference.”

“A website can make you understand what consumers are looking for from other channels. What we’ve seen, for example, is that people coming from search are much more likely to click on links with retailers than people coming from social. The people coming from social are more likely to spend more time watching videos or looking at recipes maybe.”

Charlie Clinton, digital & social manager at Bel UK, finished off the event by giving the audience an insight into how the company reaches consumers across its brands – which include The Laughing Cow, Babybel, and Leerdammer, to name a few.

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Mobile no longer just means your smartphone and tablet; it encompasses everything from your smart TV to your automated home, from your connected car to intelligent billboards. In this new age of connectivity, there are more channels than ever before to reach consumers, and more data available that can help marketers refine their targeting, improve their performance and ensure they are reaching customers with the right message at the right time and in the right place. Our Connected Consumer Summit aimed to explain this brave new world, and allowed brand marketers to put their questions to a wide variety of experts.

If you werent able to make it to the Summit, you missed out on some fantastic guidance from leading industry figures, but you can still access some of the gems of wisdom here, with our top 10 quotes from the day.

“eCommerce going forward should be included and analysed as part of the connected home environment. It can easily be bundled by a utility provider or by a telecom provider as part of their connected home solutions.”
Archana Vidyasekar, global research manager, Frost & Sullivan

Our day was kicked off by Archana Vidyasekar of Frost & Sullivan, who provided us with a comprehensive overview of the rise of the connected consumer, detailing how advances in the smart home, business and city were changing consumer behaviour. You can read more about Archanas presentation here.

“We dont just need the tools and intelligence to do this, but also the creativity and imagination to use it wisely.”
Kenny Davies, lead technical analyst, DigitasLBi

Data was a big focus of the day, with the growth of connected devices meaning that marketers have more access that ever before to crucial granular-level data on consumers. Kenny Davies from DigitasLBi spoke about how brands can use individual-level data from a wide variety of sources to inform and personalise their messaging.

“If you told a traditional department store search engine youre going to a wedding, it might offer you a wedding dress. But youre not getting married, youre attending a wedding. A cognitive system will know to take you to formal wear.”
Tony Maile, European retail leader, IBM

The rise of AI, both in the form of back-end automation and consumer-facing interactions, was the focus for the presentation by IBMs Tony Maile, who detailed how different brands have used the tech giants Watson platform to create intelligent, cognitive systems that learn from consumer behaviour and offer the next level of automated interaction.

“Im not sure I want my personal habits paraded in front of everyone in a store. I think people will make mistakes when it comes to over-personalisation, and well end up going back to the personal devices we currently have, the phone.”
David Morris, director of solutions consulting, EMEA, Tealium

During our afternoon panel debate, David Morris of Tealium spoke about the dangers the new connected world poses when it comes to creepy levels of marketing that make consumers feel tracked and observed at every point. Brands need to be cautious about how they deploy the data they can harvest from new channels, and whether super-personalisation is always the right choice.

“Theres so much data available – its all about building up profiles and finding ways to use that in a meaningful way.”
Rob Jones, client services director, Code ComputerLove

Rob Jones from Code ComputerLove walked us through a detailed case study from the companys work with home improvement brand Hillarys, exploring how data can be used at every step of the customer journey, and how even in the new connected age, theres no substitute for understanding the product youre selling, the customers youre targeting and the business youre working with.

“The consumer needs to be taken on a journey. Theres still a big education and awareness job to do. At the same time, were moving away from product and rational-based communications, and in the consideration phase were focusing on emotion and story-telling.”
Katherine Walker, head of marketing, UK, Hive

Hive has seen huge growth over the past five years, securing its place as the UKs leader in the smart home category by expanding from connected thermostats to smart plugs, lights and home sensors. UK head of marketing Katherine Walker took us through the brands growth, and how it plans to continue expanding and innovating in the IoT space.

“Location is going to become the new third-party cookie. Its going to become the way we identify someones interests, their drives.”
David Morris, director of solutions consulting, EMEA, Tealium

With so many data points available, the question of how marketers can connect the disparate information available to them and create a singular view of the customer was a common one. Tealiums David Morris spoke about mobiles role as the connecting point between every channel, thanks to its ability to track location.

“Kids can download this world and move inside the painting, learning things about it, speaking to the painter, playing games within the space weve created.”
James Delaney, managing director, BlockWorks

BlockWorks creates marketing experiences in an unconventional space – within the world of Minecraft, the worlds second-most successful video game of all time. Managing director James Delaney spoke about the companys work with brands like Disney, Tate Modern and the Museum of London, creating interactive digital experiences that drive huge levels of engagement.

“Snacking is not planned, its impulse driven, its about moments in your day. But its still predictable. Weve been working around what triggers we can identify that become long term trends.”
James JT Turner, insights and analytics business leader, Black Swan

Machine learning and advanced algorithms mean that the data available to marketers can yield insights that humans would never think to look for. James Turner from Black Swan explained how information sourced from places as diverse as social media and app usage can predict everything from when and where youll next eat to who medicine brands should target during cold and flu season.

“On this day in 1933, prohibition came to an end in the United States. Now theres something to drink to.”
Alexa

Perhaps the most unique speaker of the day was Alexa, Amazons digital assistant. Mobile Marketing Magazines David Murphy interviewed the AI via the Amazon Echo, the retailers popular smart speaker and home hub, demonstrating both the capabilities and limitations of current digital assistants, and asking what we can expect from them in the future.

If you’re interested in hearing these sorts of insights into a variety of verticals and technology areas, check out our 2017 Summits site, with events covering Finance, Programmatic, Travel and more. Click here to find out more.

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It is this now constant influx of connected devices all around us that has led business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan to predict there will be as many as 80bn connected devices around the world by 2020.

Speaking at the Connected Consumer Summit, Frost & Sullivan’s global research manager Archana Vidyasekar said: “We believe there will be close to 80bn connected devices by 2020, meaning nearly 120bn by 2025. This may seem like a huge number to you, but every time we present this to technology companies, especially when you present to CTOs, they tell us ‘Frost & Sullivan, you’re being very conservative’.

“We have to look at the infrastructure that facilitates this connectivity – the availability of wi-fi in public spaces, the availability of 3G and 4G, broadband connectivity – both in the developing countries and the developing regions. Taking all of that into consideration, we believe 80bn devices by 2020 is an achievable scenario. We hope the future exceeds our expectations.”

Mobile developments
Much of the connected device growth can be to advances in mobile technologies. 4G has the capability to account for up to 500,000 connections per square kilometre, however, “we’re not exploiting it to its full potential,” said Vidyasekar.

With 5G, there is a possibility to connect to over 1m devices per square kilometre – due to its low latency and speed.

Vidyasekar continued: “You can imagine for future applications, like a fully autonomous Tesla or a fully connected car, low latency and making decisions quickly is very important.

“We’ve been tracking it in terms of implementation – which countries are likely to have widespread 5G – and we believe in countries such as Japan, South Korea, the US, the UK and Europe, this could be implemented in a big way from 2020 onwards and we should see emerging countries also follow suit soon after that.”

Show me the money
The biggest market in the connected spectrum is the connected living market. Frost & Sullivan predicts it will be worth nearly $730bn – which is “by far the biggest we have seen”.

“It’s very easily a market that can be integrated. One service provider can easily aggregate services across all verticals for one consolidated package for the consumer,” said Vidysekar.

Much of this $730bn is expected to come from home automation and home security. But the health sector could have a significant role to play also, due to the increasing age of the population.

“if you look at the willingness to pay from the consumers end, the two main things they would open their wallets for are security of the home and energy management,” Vidysekar went on. “In the future, home health will be a very important sector to watch, if you’re looking at future growth opportunities because of the aging population, especially in the Western world, and there will be a demand for assisted living, remote health, telehealth etc.”

Vidysekar is adamant that eCommerce, despite not being previously considered part of the connected home, has a role to play in connected living spend also.

“A few years back, we didn’t really consider eCommerce part of the connected home,” she said. “All of us shop online from our homes, and it is part of a living environment, but it’s not really part of the connected home market in that sense. But, with products like Amazon Dash, I think this is a very interesting addition to the whole angle of home automation. The whole process of buying and replenishing groceries in home is being completely automated.

“This angle of automation is a fresh perspective to home, and I think eCommerce going forward should be included and analysed as part of the connected home environment. It can easily be bundled by a utility provider or by a telecom provider as part of their connected home solutions.”

Remote on your wrist
The growth in wearables is changing how consumers interact with devices. More and more people are relying on wearables to handle various tasks.

“The remote control of life is moving from the smartphone to the wearables – and I think that’s something that’s interesting to watch,” said Vidysekar.

Despite this increased adoption of wearables, Vidysekar made it clear that the problem is they are not yet standalone devices and still rely on smartphones to operate. She feels that, when enterprises push wearables, there is “potential for these devices becoming much more integral in our lives and there will be more trust from the consumers’ ends for these devices, and we might start using them for all other purposes”.

Subscribing our lives away
Connectivity is moving at a rapid rate and this is even evident in government adoption, notably in Helsinki.

In the city, they are offering mobility as a service to its citizens – on a subscription basis, similar to how people subscribe to data services from a telecom company.

“We all use mobility-integrated apps, for example CityMapper or Google Maps, and it integrates the journey for you across all different modes. It gives you the best route possible, using different modes of transport, to get from point A to point B,” Vidysekar said.

“That’s essentially what Helsinki is envisaging to do for its citizens – where it’s offering mobility as a service. The interesting part is that they’re offering this on a subscription basis – much like how you subscribe to a telecom operator for data services, you will subscribe to the government for mobility services.

“In the future, more of this will be living in a digital world based on subscription services.”

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Today there are multiple ways for brands to engage and connect with consumers across a range of platforms and devices, and this trend will only grow as more people adopt these new technologies.

Our Connected Consumer Summit is all about exploring these challenges and opportunities, looking at the potential for reaching the always-on consumer, as well as the barriers that need to be overcome to ensure that every touchpoint and interaction is timely, relevant and context-appropriate.

The help explore these topics, well be joined by a range of experts in the area including Tony Maile, European retail leader for IBM and Archana Vidyasekar, global research manager from market research firm Frost & Sullivan.

Katherine Walker, head of UK marketing for Hive will explore how British Gas smart home solution has improved customer relations, while Ilicco Elia and Kenny Davies from DigitasLBi will offer guidance on how the new wave of home IoT can provide brands with vital individual-level data.

Our Summits are an opportunity for brand marketers and tech industry experts to connect and converse, with our roundtable sessions and panel discussions offering attendees a chance to address their concerns when it comes to approaching this exciting new area. Confirmed brand attendees so far include Tesco, Disney, BT, Cancer Research UK, Sky, Sainsburys, Marks & Spencer, Odeon, Eurostar, Thomas Cook and Ralph Lauren, and the day will provide all delegates with a great chance to network and share their experiences with their peers.

The Connected Consumer Summit takes place on Thursday 16 February at the St. James Court Hotel in Westminster. Senior brand marketers can register to attend for free here. If youre interested in sponsoring the Connected Consumer Summit or any of our events, email james.mcgowan@mobilemarketingmagazine.com

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