Tag: VR

Preparing for the 2018 CES

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If you’ve ever attended Consumer Electronics Show (CES) then you know it is a beast of a show with more than 4,000 exhibiting companies and covering the 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space is next to impossible especially as you are fighting through crowds of 170,000+. It might sound too overwhelming but having attended regularly since 1988 and as a marketer hoping to spot trends, I can assure you it is always worth the trouble. Inevitably, I leave CES with some new ideas, at least one new friend and a dousing of Vegas silliness.

With the 2018 CES right around the corner (Jan 8-11, 2018), I thought it would be helpful and interesting to record a special episode with the legendary tech guru Shelly Palmer.  I first met Shelly back in 2010 (when I wrote about him as the prototypical personal brand on FastCompany.com) and have spotted his ubiquitous signs at CES ever since. [Blatant unpaid plug — if you are new to CES, have a limited time frame or just want to make sure you don’t miss the big trends while you’re in Vegas, then you’d be wise to sign up for a tour of the show by Shelly and his team at The Palmer Group.]  As for my earlier point about Shelly being interesting to talk to, he didn’t disappoint!

In the podcast, we discuss why he’s excited about this year’s show and why expects to see more evolutionary products than revolutionary ones. We dive into hot topics like drones, cars, VR and AI among others. You’ll also hear Shelly school me on why I’m wrong to call Alexa (Amazon voice activation system) dumb just because she can’t infer the request Dear Evan Hansen from Evan Hansen when a Google search does that handily!  The tech challenge aside, I still think she has some cognitive development work ahead of her!  You can listen to the special episode here.

Here are a few other highlights from the interview:

Drew: What should marketers be paying attention to at this year’s CES?

Shelly: This year at CES, we’re going to have a really good look at integrations between the natural language understanding tools and the physical world. I’m pretty sure you’re going to see a lot of augmented reality because that is the toolset that is most flexible. You need great programming skills but it also yields amazing benefits – everything from a doctor looking into an incubator and seeing a heads-up display of all of the vital signs of the patient to gameplay and 100% of everything in the middle. You’ll see a lot of augmented reality. Drones and machine learning. Drones are now self-flying for the most part and there’s a bunch of companies who have taken to creating machines that not only fly themselves but with either high definition or 4k cameras in them and in some cases 8k cameras in them. And in some cases infrared cameras in them. They’re doing materials processing in the air. They can look at an insurance company like Travelers, who are the number one user of drones in the United States, and put a drone up in the air to look at the exterior damage. They can understand what happened to your roof in the air and file and process your claim without having someone go out to your house. When you think about a hurricane like we’ve had and the ability to quickly process and quickly get people the help they need who are insured, you’ll see a lot of that at CES. A lot of drone companies showing off their ability to have not only self-flying drones, but drones that can carry bigger payloads, can take better cameras with them, and fly in inclement weather or in adverse conditions that you wouldn’t have seen before. The drone story is going to be pretty big.

Drew: What else is going to be big?

Shelly: The cars are going to be out in force – driver assistance of every kind. Autonomy is coming. There’s never a lack of cool cars at CES. It’s more fun than the auto show because for us who are all semi-geeks about the technology, they come and they put their tech foot forward as opposed to their design foot forward or this guy with 500 horsepower or whatever. You’re going to see great TVs, but we haven’t had a year with a bad TV in 20 years. Let me tell you about the TVs. I can tell you I haven’t seen them yet. Let me tell exactly what I’m going to say when I get to stand in front of any TV; it’s bigger. It’s thinner. It’s got a brighter picture, higher dynamic range, wider color gamut, bigger screen, thinner. That’s sort of the joke at CES. It used to be a TV show. Now the TVs just get better.

Drew: Is there anything new that’s coming to CES?  

Shelly: What you will see this year that you haven’t seen so much before is how well integrated the home is becoming. Honestly, it is Alexa’s voice services and all of NLP systems that have caused this. Because if you think about it, when you walk in the house you have to open an app, tap a couple of buttons, open another app, and press a couple more buttons. It’s like, “Oh come on, stop it! I’ll just turn the light switch on.” But now you walk in and you say, “Alexa, lights on. Alexa, daytime scene.” Whatever you want. And boom, the house is set. The value proposition for consumers is so great. Everybody’s jumping on that. Look for integrations in ways you’ve never seen them.

Moving from Storytelling to Story Living Through VR

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Marketing has undergone drastic changes in the last 100 years. At the start of the twentieth century, advertisers started hooking consumers in new ways, appealing to the psychology of storytelling to sell products. With the recent birth of social media, marketers took this strategy up a notch by further personalizing those messages. Now, we are on the brink of another marketing revolution. Virtual reality, or VR, seeks to fully immerse consumers, figuratively and literally providing 360-degree story experiences. Zoo, which is Google’s creative think tank, initiated a study on VR and is now working on ways to discover its full potential.

Abigail Posner, Head of Strategic Planning for Zoo, boldly claims that storytelling is evolving into story living through VR. A student of anthropology, Abigail sees great promise in VR’s ability to connect people and brands on an essential level. Even though VR is more or less in its infancy stage, it may play a critical in both marketing and culture in the near future.  [Note: Drew saw Abigail speak at this year’s PSFK conference, a must attend event for any renegade thinker!]

On this episode of the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast, Abigail shares her expert VR insights with host Drew Neisser. She describes some unexpected use cases for the platform and discusses ways in which marketers may soon be able to capitalize on this new technology. You can listen to the episode here. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, check out these sample Q&As from the interview:

Drew: VR has been talked about for years and years and years as the next thing. Are we finally at the point where this is going to become at least semi-mass?

Abigail: I think it’s a combination of a number of things. One is that we have enough experiences under our belt to recognize the value of it, whether it’s gamers playing it, whether it’s porn, whether it’s the fact that doctors are using it. All of a sudden, there’s a range of different worlds that are recognizing its value and it’s hitting mainstream. That’s number one. Number two, as we brought up before, the actual physical headsets themselves are becoming more accessible, whether it’s accessible that we can wear them or accessible price wise. That helps. And then finally the technology itself is evolving. So it’s becoming finer tuned. It’s becoming more accessible so that we can use it on a number of different platforms integrated into our phones and so forth. It’s a combination of a number of different factors. And then I just think generally we are becoming just more comfortable and agile with what it means to create a story in this space.

Drew: Are there any brands that are using this immersive technology right now that you can talk about and that are paving the way for others?

Abigail: Yes, we’ve seen it in a couple of different genres or categories. One is what R/GA recently launched with Guinness, which is an experience that you can experience inside a convenience store, inside a store that sells beer. And so instead of just giving you a message about the beer, you actually get to experience the shapes and the smells and the angles of beer in a way that you never would have thought of before, really giving you the essence of beer. So that’s one example. I mean whoever thought of getting to the essence of beer in that way?

Drew: How are brands going to learn how to use VR?

Abigail: I think it’s going to be about brands recognizing the role they play and how they want the user / consumer / human being to respond to them. Here’s another example that we created. This is like the ultimate PSA. We worked with The National Transportation Highway Safety Board, and they are trying to do something quite important, quite serious. It is not entertaining whatsoever, and that’s about preventing drunk driving. Probably one of the most critical endeavors that we have today, especially among young people. And so instead of creating the same type of story over and over again, which is, “Here’s what you do when you drive drunk, you hurt people or you hurt yourself.” It wasn’t effective. It just wasn’t doing what it needed to do. The results were just not in, that it was positively stopping drunk driving. They said we’re going to create a VR 360 experience where people would themselves experience as sober people, what happens to themselves as they get increasingly drunk.

Drew: How does that work?

Abigail: Where you’re playing bar games for example, and all of a sudden you don’t have the same trajectory you used to, or the sounds that are penetrating your brain are now more muffled and you come across as really funny to your friends. And all of a sudden you realize, which you wouldn’t realize being drunk, how affected you are as someone drunk. And so your cognitive side of your brain goes, “I don’t want to get behind a wheel now because now I can see how affected I am.” So it’s not entertaining as much as it is educational.

Drew: If I’m a brand, and I’m looking at VR right now, what are some of the things that I should be trying to do to capitalize on this burgeoning channel?

Abigail: Recognize that this is not a story-like experience that we’ve ever had before. In other words, it’s not a linear story. It’s not a place where you can message something that has a beginning middle or an end. It is not a space that a marketer can control. Rather, it is a highly sensory highly visceral place, so leverage senses. Recognize that people are going knee-deep in. It’s highly immersive, which is wonderful. It’s highly absorbing, so therefore you cannot be distracted by anything else. But in that experience you have to realize that this is not a place where you can distract them with stories and language. Let them go and experience a world by themselves. There are so many different nooks and crannies for them on Earth, and people want to do that. Let them do that. Give them the opportunity to just kind of see everything from different angles.

The Ingredients to KFC’s New VR Recipe

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In terms of marketing technology, virtual reality is one of the newest kids on the block. As Google’s Abigail Posner previously discussed with RTU host Drew Neisser, VR has the potential to become a dominant advertising platform sooner rather than later. Many brands are already figuring out ways to improve consumer experiences through VR.

KFC is one such company. The 70-year-old quick-service chain recently initiated a VR experienced that will help teach new cooks how to prepare fried chicken under the watchful eyes of Colonel Sanders. The game, which is called “The Hard Way: A KFC Virtual Training Escape Room,” isn’t just a publicity stunt. According to KFC’s Director of Advertising George Felix, it aims to help recruit and train quality candidates (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

On this episode, key members of KFC’s marketing team explain how the new VR training program is “re-colonelizing” the brand. You can listen by clicking this link.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Drew: What is the strategy behind KFC’s VR effort?

George: It’s definitely an interesting endeavor for us. It starts with the fact that we have cooks in every one of our restaurants that are hand preparing the Colonel’s original recipe chicken. That means that we have about nineteen thousand cooks across the country that go through extensive training, we call it Chicken Mastery Certification, in order to make Kentucky Fried Chicken. There’s nothing that’s changing about that. There’s no replacement for getting your hands dirty and making chicken in the restaurant.

Drew: How does Colonel Sanders play into the VR game?

We really saw an opportunity “Colonelizing” the brand. The best person to teach someone to make our original recipe would be Colonel Sanders himself. Through the magic of virtual reality technology, we’ve been able to bring the colonel back in a fun and engaging way that we think can supplement our training and really bring a sense of pride and excitement to the team members. Honestly, when you compare us to other quick-serve restaurants, it’s a point of difference that we have cooks in every kitchen that are hand-preparing meals. We want our team members to feel that pride and excitement.

Drew: How much of the VR strategy is marketing, and how much of this is real training and employee engagement?

George: I think it’s both parts. There’s a definitive purpose we want from a training aspect that really brings attention and pride to this process. Of course, we want to reinforce the fact that we do have nineteen thousand cooks across the country making KFC. By doing things with virtual reality, we’re also hoping that we not only draw in younger customers but also we attract high-potential talent to work in a Kentucky Fried Chicken and this is a brand that they want to be associated with.

Drew: I’m imagining that a lot of your future cooks are millennials. Did that factor into KFC’s thinking in terms of developing a gaming experience?

George: Absolutely. The idea of making this gamified, escape room idea and the colonel not letting you out until you’ve proven that you know his way of making Kentucky Fried Chicken was a big part of that. We know that our team members and our cooks are the lifeblood of the brand. We’re extremely proud of the work they do and we want to make a brand that they’re proud to work for.