Digital Experience (DX) And the Re-invention of Marketing

The Post War World of the '50s and '60s saw a massive explosion in marketing as companies tried to force feed Baby Boomers mass produced electro mechanical goods, encased in plastic. They did this by trying to create desire and brainwash people into needing their brands. This was the last hurrah for the Henry ford approach, "they can have any colour they like, so long as it is black" and the Taylorist School of management which focused on productivity and costs, whilst paying lip service to quality.

It took the massive economic melt down of the late seventies and early eighties for the Quality led management, pioneered largely by Japanese companies to gain acceptance in Europe and America, which at the same time was accompanied by the angst of Punk, as Generation X turned on mass consumerism and the break down of "A Job for Life". Customer Care, based on the concept of listening to and delighting customers, came to the forefront. New technologies like CADCAM and philosophies like Flexible Manufacturing made it possible to design, prototype and evolve products to meet customer needs and gradually Design Thinking came into being.

At the same time, the '80s saw the birth of the PC and take up of lower cost client server technology, which usurped proprietary mainframes whilst Rapid Application Development (the forerunner to Agile) sparked the first steps to evolving the Digital Ecosystem that we see today. This has pushed marketing evolution to the extent that the modern marketing function is digitally obsessed with Customer Behaviour Data, Customer Experience and Agile Marketing. So much so, that most digital conversations inevitable involve talking about Customer Experience and the Customer Journey.

So it was great to see Nimbus Ninety publish "The CX Manifesto" which sets out over 30 recommendations under the 5 headings of Personalisation, Experimentation, Trust, Data and Loyalty in its latest  quarterly publication of the Chief Disruptor magazine. This is well worth a read as it has been compiled by practitioners from London's vibrant digital scene over the first 6 months of 2018 and is based on sound experience.

Digital Advertising Needs To Grow Up

There's an old saying amongst Marketing Directors "Only 30% of advertising is effective, I just want to know which 30%", because like everyone else they have to fight for budget to pay for advertising and want to optimise revenue growth.

Recently, Facebook, YouTube and Google have all faced criticism for incidents where brand damage has been caused when respectable businesses have had their advertising messages placed on pages which are associated with terrorists, hate sites and other disreputable content. The upshot being that they are paying money to organisations (for views on their pages) with whom they would regard any association as "Brand Contagion".

There are other issues too, such as manipulation of Search Engine Optimisation and boring people to death with nauseous adverts for "rip off" services are damaging consumer interest in on-line advertising.

So it was interesting to see Raconteur reporting Marc Pritchard's (Chief Brand Officer, Proctor & Gamble) comments, when he told the digital advertising industry that it needed to grow up. This is long past time and a wake up call to the industry. There's plenty of opportunity with both machine learning and proper filtering of "acceptable advertisers" to clean this up.

Cyber Aggression versus Authenticity

In a week when EU officials expressed the fear that "British Agents may have bugged Brexit Planning Sessions", it is interesting to note that President Trump has decided to reverse a previous Obama administration framework for controlling the launch of cyber attacks by the US.

Sabine Weyand expressed the EU officials' fears following an incident in which Britain requested that slides from an briefing meeting should not be released to press. this has led to all mobile devices and ipads being banned from meetings, in case they are used to spy on them or leak secrets. Trump's move undoes measures designed to ensure co-ordinated and considered response by the US's intelligence community to perceived threat. The exact reasons for this have not been disclosed, but given the president's penchant for action, the political pressure that he has suffered following allegations that Russian organisations may have interfered with the presidential election and the fact that a considerable number of potential foes may be looking for ways to hit back at the US following sanctions placed on Turkey, Russia and Iran, it is not surprising that he might want to be able to react quickly without engaging multiple layers of decision making and delay.

At the same time in an almost polar opposite direction, key operators in the digital world are emphasising the need for "brand authenticity" in the way in which they market and sell their products to today's modern consumer. This is discussed in some detail in this quarters magazine from Nimbus Ninety, an organisation focused the London Digital Ecosystem. They also discuss some interesting thoughts from academia about how Socrates railed against the idea of writing things down and how this would damage young people's minds, in a strikingly similar way to which modern social media is being accused of damaging generation Z's cognitive attention spans. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.

Where Does AI take Us Next

AI is at last beginning to make serious inroads into practicable automation. At its heart, practical applications are mainly based upon recognition and learning. So if we think back to the late 80s when IVR with a few key words was abaout as good as it got, followed by some voice dictation systems in the early 90s which never quite delivered what was wanted, things have moved on. Early attempts at biometric based acces control were also quite fraught with too many false positives. Japan's big push into AI with its 5th generation computing initiative ended with a wimper and similar lower key initiatives in Europe were never sustained.

Perhaps the first significant advance was the use of voice analysis to detect whether people were likely to be lying, used by some large insurance companies. However gradually, in many small incremental steps other applications have gradually become more practicable, e.g. facial recognition in crowds to find wanted fugitives or prevent entry into countries at passport checkpoints. Other more subtle approaches have also been used to try and detect intentions of people in crowded public spaces so that probable terrorists or pick pockets could be identified before they commit offences.

Additionally, many issues facing enterprises managing their IT / Digital estates involve monitoring and analysis of so many events in order to detect, analyse and prevent probable service failures or security breaches that only automation can work. Given the large combination of factors, behaviours and knowledge needed, only AI can do this. So Dark Trace is currently a favourite in the Cyber Security community for its ability to detect anomolies, not just by looking at known issues, but comparison of behaviour of assets to detect anomolies suggeting problems. Dark Trace is credted with helping stem the Wannacry ransome ware attack in the NHS last year. Oracle has also started to provide an AI based service for system management and security across heterogenerous platforms. Whilst others are building capabilities into their existing event analysis products such as Splunk.

Much of this is what might be called "defensive" application, but it is interesting that a number of new initiatives are being investigated in the health sector to help automate the bureucratic aspects of doctors consultations, freeing them up to spend more value added time actually dealling with patients. Also some new research areas are looking at things like whether speech analysis can be use to help diagnose specific conditions. For Example the Mayo clinic is looking at its application to Coronary Artery Disease, so that remote over the phone diagnosis may become practicable.

Speech bots have also advanced a little beyond the IVR stage to be capable of sustaining "human alike" interactions in fairly limited and constrained applications and some of the recent game based demonstrators for GO and Chess have evolved beyond brute force projection to strategy formulation, although again these are limited in scope and application.

The papers are still full of instances where researchers have shon how to fool facial recognition or facial recognition works poorly on people with dark coloured skin. So there is room for significant incremental improvement.

Putting these limitations aside, it is possible to see that we are on course for real digital companions such as HAL in Stanley Kubric's well know film or legal AI entities in Iain Banks's novels. However, what is difficult to project is how soon this will be attainable. We do however need to start thinking about the ethical and legal frameworks for such adoption, otherwise we risk regressive reactive legislation in the future which undoes the value to be gained from future adoption.

Dreem Experience Update #2

So, I have been using the Dreem Headband for another couple of weeks. What's new?

Well, Dreem continue to release regular software improvements to the product at relatively short intervals, which is reassuring.

Also, the latest enhancement was to the night time stimulations to optimise deep sleep. These certainly do appear to have had an affect in improving the overll affect.

Also, Dreem has offered a small discount to any friends and family who may be interested.  Promo code is: OTC5YYLF . So I am sharing it with the modest readership of this blog, in case anyone is considering the product.

That's all.

IT and Digital's New World Order

A common theme in many IT departments or functions is the "Them and Us" relationship with the rest of "The Business". Miles of column print are given in IT publications and by analysts on emotional hand wringing about the lack of connection with colleagues in the business and multiple surveys examine the CIO's role and status in the business as well as his or her relationship with the CEO.

Recently, however, the press has been distracted by the idea of automation and everyone being replaced by AI based automation and the supposed death of many jobs, without actually bothering to analyse the capability of AI tools. the fact is that they are both powerful and limited at the same time and it takes an aweful lot of training to get some quite basic capability out of a machine learning application. Anyone who has used Alexa (Amazon's voice based AI agent for automating your home, answering general knowledge questions and playing music) knows that you can be both delighted and frustrated by her abilities to do what you want or to get it so completely wrong that you wring your hands in despair.

In reality the things having the most impact in the UK are Brexit (because it is used as a general excuse for not making decisions and refusing to hire new staff) and the impact of XaaS and Lean. These are gradually evolving the way in which products are developed and IT works both within itself and with other people in the wider business. It's no longer appropriate to organise IT around functional siloes and gatekeeper roles, which slow down progress and frustrate our business colleagues. The move to end-to-end product teams and more integrative roles means that IT needs to shift its mentality from reclusive castle dwellers to engaged collaborators, as IT becomes a fundamental part of business operations. The rest of the business has to do this too. Because, when you look at it, most other functions suffer similar problems of angst and feelings of under appreciation.

The most difficult part of the evolving role, is how does IT relate to Business Operations once this transition has been made and IT is properly organised to align and integrate with Operations. This means that many traditional assumptions around how to implement ITIL, organise testing or approach enterprise architecture (for example) need to be revisited. People in IT need to move towards taking more interest in the business and its customers, as well as what a collaborative culture looks like. It also means that CIOs need to become more assertive (not aggressive) in engaging with their peers to understand and agree business priorities, as well as partnering internally and externally to move quicker to address urgent needs. Old ideas like "boiling the ocean" with monolithic technology change initiatives need to go. Smaller, quicker steps and daring to experiment is now the order of the day. Whilst, rigorously pursuing simplification, security hardening and IT automation in localised areas as these steps are taken is the path to earlier value delivery. This means that 2 speed IT is a misnomer, its more like 6 gear 4 wheel drive IT, which adapts to different terrain and problems.