The annual digital conference in Germany, #dmexco, outdid itself this year with the content that was shared and presented at the forum. Many of the presentations were punchy and thoroughly insightful. This conference is certainly a place where ideas are born, and you not only see purposeful innovation but also invention that changes industries forever. Or even better, creates them. More than 50,000 people visited Cologne this year with the goal to learn and tell people about their technology solutions for brands and individuals. The theme was ‘Digital is everything – not everything is digital’. This was explained during one of the earlier opening sessions, about specific ‘things’ not being natively digital, but being heavily influenced by digital technology. I believe the organizers wanted to plant a flag on the ground, and recognize that digital affects every part of our lives.
I attended different sessions during the conference, and there were many insights acquired and some of my ideas were in a way, validated. There were different topics of conversation and many subjects addressed during the two days at dmexco, but the main focus points included enhancing experiences as consumers physically or digitally, how technology is making our lives easier by the second courtesy some very smart thought-leaders, and finally, if you don’t create emotions with your potential and current customer, you don’t have a chance at moving product.
Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer at Facebook kicked off dmexco for me with an exciting session, ‘Video and The Next Billion’. This specific topic is of considerable importance for many companies with vision. The next billion is all about the new users from developing parts of the world in Asia and Africa that will finally have access to the internet, and we know what access to the internet means.
The web gives us opportunity. From a personal perspective, it was an enabler as someone from LinkedIn reached out while I was working in Mexico City with an interesting proposition, moving to Dubai. It gives us knowledge, the internet enables me to access Twitter, which helps me on a daily basis with inspiration for my work and personal improvement. It breaks communication barriers easily via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and it creates new tools such as Dropbox and Uber which makes our lives more convenient.
This ‘next billion’ will have access to the internet and their lives will change forever, and I’m sure their invention will change my life as well. Facebook touched upon the availability of smartphones continuing to drop in price drastically giving this ‘next billion’ finally access to a better web. However, they importantly highlighted that the telecommunications companies in the region will have challenges meeting data and speed demands customers want in these regions.
As an example, in Delhi at night, one of out five connections are dropped. The new big blue is working with the telecommunication companies to update their infrastructure to support this data demand, but at the same time they are doubling up in a similar fashion that NASA does, and they are working on their own way to beam internet to these places in the world via Aquila, their solar power plane.
Now, why is Facebook so interested in enhancing internet connections to be stable, reliable and faster in these regions? The answer is video and new rich video formats. By 2023, 70 percent of all mobile traffic will be video based, users will be spending an average of 3.4 hours per day really putting a strain on networks. What was really surprising was Facebook’s way to get their engineers to understand the current’s ‘next billion’ mobile network connections. In Menlo Park, Facebook takes its developers network connections down to 2G every Tuesday so that they really understand what conditions some places in the developing world are under. This would be enough incentive for me to get moving faster to provide solutions for the ‘next billion’. As per the updated ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’, everyone needs a good internet connection.
Facebook created 2G Tuesdays to show their developers what the situation is like in emerging markets, in the session ‘Big Data – how algorithms and insights can shape Storytelling and rise profits’, Matthew Luhn, a 20-year Pixar story veteran told us how he sent his team to a garbage landfill to understand how Woody from Toy Story would feel. Proper research and data are so important to deliver an engaging story such as Toy Story. Luhn during the presentation shared how obsessed as a civilization we’ve been obsessed with recording life and different aspects of it.
Funnily, in a way Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram go back thousands of years ago because people have always been obsessed with recording their experiences and in a way sharing them with people around them. Proof of this is are Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan writings, and many other cultures who took a snapshot of their lives and recorded them on stone. This is a part of storytelling back, really back in the day, but storytelling today requires gathering of data and flawless analysis.
The Toy Story team wanted to make their characters more real to create bigger emotions on people as humans relate to humans more than relating to toys or fictional characters. Pixar looked through data from psychologists and applied some of those data insights to Woody, Buzz Light Year and the rest of the cast. Data helped the success of the film as they uncover how humans communicate via slight eye movements. Different eye movement can mean different emotions or thoughts. In their research they uncovered all these different nuggets of information which made their characters more believable and relatable.
Pixar and Facebook enhanced experiences be it on the silver screen or the mobile screen through digital data crunching or using technology to improve our web surfing experience, and both of these guys also confirmed that this world is all about creating emotions. And these are created very well through video and fantastic content.
