[post title loving stolen from Mark Earls's excellent book Welcome to the Creative Age]
A while back I got the opportunity to speak at NXNEi in Toronto.
[It was awesome, I heartily recommend it, like SXSW, except..before it got big I guess.]
They filmed this little clip for Strategy Magazine in Canada. My talk had been about proximty, because things that are near you are more important to you, in lots of ways.
My thought above was that context is super important, both psychologically and technologically, and that finding useful, interesting ways to understand and leverage it is an opportunity and a responsibility for brands.
Psychologically, it's becoming increasingly clear that contextual elements beneath our conscious awareness have dramatic effects on purchasing decisions. We spend a lot timing thinking about people and what makes them tick, but who you are is only part of it, where and when and what are important to.
Who you are provides aspects of contexts, what you have done before, what you seem to like. Then circumstances activates that context with another layer – most people do most things because they are convenient. Impulse drives far more of our behaviour than our conscious mind leads us to believe.
Technologically, we are leaving a data exhaust that can interact with itself and the world, and that eventually it might be able to predict purchases before we consciously know about deciding to buy them.
As is often the case I'm waxing futurological, I'm not exactly sure what I'm talking about will look like until I see it.
Then, my mate Chris sent me this, and I saw it.
Or at least some future echoes of it.
Qualcomm announced it yesterday. It's a new context awareness platform for iOS and Android. A mobile SDK designed for the contextual age.
Scoble covers it here with undisguised glee.
This video explains how they see it – connecting all the ways your phone understands you together, giving it some weak intelligence, and letting it interact with the world around it to infer context, and how that might be useful.
Welcome to the Contextual Age.
7 responses to “Welcome To The Contextual Age”
I don’t want this. In fact I am 100% against Geo Fence technology. It is kind of like Social Media but worse. Every brand wants to talk with you. But if I had a phone that was GeoFence enabled do i really want it to buzz every time I pass a pizza place because I like pizza? Imagine going to a mall and the phone knows you like clothes.
I tried dropkick and immediately uninstalled it. I like pull vs push on my phone. Give me a call to action. Let me go to the mall and decide to activate a service that will allow me to look at offers. I don’t want the offers initiating things. And people I don’t really think want it either.
Agreed! That’s spam. But what if you phone could negotiate with the brands in real time and auction the right to push notify based on value to you?
If it is permission based, contextual, relevant based on time and space, de-activatable (is that a word?), saves someone money, gives special offers for loyalty, helps businesses shape their services to better serve their customers due to understanding things like migratory patterns with predictive (anonymous) modelling…. what is wrong with that?
ello!
nothing mate – permission and transparency are the key things. opt-in means not spam. but we’ll prob need a system to broker permissions.
FX
apple needs to open up siri so she can do all this.
i love it but do worry a little bit about serendipity. if it’s all based on past behavior then when do we experience something new and benefit from all the lovely fresh neural pathways that open as a result. it would be great if you could switch your behaviors for a curated set of responses – your mate who eats out 5 times a week, that guy you know who’s a movie producer, your best friend from high school who’s got a online shoe business, maria popova, jason kottke, ashton kutcher… that way you could be efficient when you want to be and experience something you’d never choose yourself at other times. kind of like this + path + quarterly?
tonight, matthew, i’m going to be…
What if waiting was what “matterd most”. That’s when the fun happens, when stories arise, creative juices flourish and shit gets broken…. when nothing’s happpening, everything is going on. Being efficient is not a life goal, be satisfied is.
Ava Watson
Talent imitates, genius steals: Welcome To The Contextual Age