We were lucky enough to be invited to curate the Ethics & Society stage at CogX Festival 2021. If you haven’t caught up with everything that happened over a packed 3 days across 18 stages at this festival of AI, then you can catch up with all the industry, academic, policymakers, and government speakers here
The Festival of Marketing
Marketing Week: Could the rise of virtual worlds spell the end of the corporate brand?
As we move increasingly into virtual worlds and the very notion of self changes, brands must prepare for a time when personal brands usurp corporate brands, predicts futurist Tracey Follows.
“This could be the end of the corporate brand and it could be the new era of the personal brand,” according to futurist Tracey Follows.
Speaking at the Festival of Marketing: Fast Forward today (9 June), Follows discussed how the changing nature of identity for both consumers and companies could mean big changes for how the two interact.
Follows, the co-founder and CEO of Futuremade, said there are positive ways in which digital technologies are allowing us to reshape our identities in innovative and exciting ways.
Read on for the full debrief.
The Future of XR in Health
Here’s a post on Forbes on the fast-changing field of mixed reality and immersive media in Health.
An important report launched in the UK outlines the opportunities of using XR in Health. XR refers to Extended Reality and covers Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR), haptics, interfaces, platforms, and software and is often referred to as immersive technologies.
There’s additional importance attached to this report because it was carried out in partnership with the NHS. It gives us plenty of insight into what the future of a technology-enabled NHS healthcare system could look like and sketches out ways in which immersive technologies could help drive a more effective service not to mention, a more financially efficient one.
The Future of Identity
Tracey has published her book The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology. It’s been well received and has been covered on Times Radio, BBC, in The Big Issue, at Stratford and Glasgow Literary Festivals - and even featured in Denmark’s broadsheet, Weekendavisen. The book covers the future of social and virtual media, the surveillance state, identity verification, augmented minds, and bodies as well as digital identity after death. Thank you to everyone who has already bought the book, and look out for more futures work in and around the future of identity. You can buy the book at Waterstones on Amazon or at your local bookstore via Bookshop.org
Transhumanism or Bust
Here you can find my articles for Forbes. In the latest one l talk to Transhumanist Presidential Election Candidate, Zoltan Istvan, about his award-winning documentary film Immortality or Bust
2020: The Year Ahead
Another Year Past
2019. It was the future once.
Now we hurtle into 2020 and a new decade with lucid dreams, fresh hopes and enthused with resolutions.
2019 was a great year at Futuremade. We started it with several innovative internal projects with our friends at Diageo, shot a film with EY to explore AI in the Boardroom, and worked with KPMG too. Before long we were on a top secret project at Google working with the Advanced Technology teams in MTV and Creative Labs in London whilst also launching the Future of Media Report for Sky, scheduled to celebrate their 30th year of innovation since launching in the UK. Tracey served as the first ever Jury President of the inaugural Creative Strategy Lion at Cannes and continued to write monthly columns on futures and foresight for Mediatel and Forbes, and was appointed to the new Advisory Board of Doteveryone, the think tank for responsible technology. We presented at Disrupt, at Virgin and L’oreal and shot films with WSJ to support LG innovation and design. We finished off the year with an in-depth research project on the Future of Work for Women which will launch in 2020, when all will be revealed. Meanwhile, about now some of our trends forecasts for the 2020’s should be appearing across print and online media.
Next year we will be working with several of the world’s biggest companies on a retained basis as their ‘futurists in residence’ and we will be launching and delivering futures training with academic and commercial partners - more on this shortly! For now, we’re prepping for several spring keynote presentations, and looking ahead to what the next decade will hold.
Thank you to everyone we have worked with in 2019 and here’s to everyone and everything that awaits in 2020.
The Colour of The Year: 2020
Pantone announced that next year’s colour of the year is Classic Blue. Tracey’s article in Forbes this week explores how colour can give us insight into the Zeitgeist.
The Future of the Front Office
We are pleased to see a new report from KPMG entitled the future of the front office. It’s a piece of work we were involved in. KPMG sets out a vision of the future of the Front Office. That is the entity that they think will be the combination of sales, marketing and customer service when these disciplines become fully integrated, and the report covers what that might mean for clients and customers alike. You can download the report direct from KPMG here.
Human Futures at L'Oréal
Whilst at Cannes we were able to attend the three day event that L’Oréal had staged for their top leaders in marketing - who were incredibly smart and engaged. We presented the closing to the three days and bought together key themes, which attendees described as ‘truly visionary’
In a presentation entitled ‘How Human is the Future?’ we challenged the application of new technologies to the ideas of beauty, gender and identity, all important areas for a company like L’Oréal. You can see a summary of the ideas and themes we covered in the illustration that they kindly forwarded to us - it is the main image in the blogpost here. We are looking forward to the future of L’Oréal as it faces the ‘future of the face’.
If you would like a visionary closing or opening keynote presentation, do get in touch.
Future of Travel and Leisure
Nice piece in the Drum’s Marketer of the Future issue, here. We were happy to contribute our views on future trends and needs about travel, leisure and the vacation of the future
The Future of Creativity
The Cannes Lions Festival was adorned with banners all along Le Croisette displaying the message “The Future of Creativity”. The whole festival this year was more future-facing than in the past and even had a future gazers track of presentations. Tracey was lucky enough to be a Jury President, for the inaugural Creative Strategy Lion and 848 submissions across 57 countries later the Jury awarded 22 Lions for strategic brilliance.
You can read Tracey’s summary here
The Future of Media
In their 30th Anniversary year, Sky commissioned us to investigate the future of media. Using horizon scanning, desk research and consumer research as well as industry expert opinion we analysed the emerging trends and exciting developments in media. Taking a 20 year time horizon we identified near to far future trends influencing broadcast media in developed markets, concluding with FIVE DIMENSIONS FOR FUTURE MEDIA. You can read the exec summary and the full report here on the Sky website, and learn more about the five dimensions:
Immersive Entertainment
Innovative Interfaces
Trusted Sources
Smart Environments
Empathetic Media
And you can read more here.
Thanks to Karli-Jade Fontiverio-Hylton for the research and James Maiki for the videography.
Thank you to our client @SkyCorporate and here’s to the next 30 years!
China's Modern Advertising
This week, Modern Advertising in China ran an interview with Tracey covering her role as Jury President for the Creative Strategy Lion and Reach Ambassador at the Festival. Thank you to Modern Advertising for such great coverage and for the additional interest in how strategic foresight works, the benefits for global clients and what we do at Futuremade. If you are fluent in Mandarin, then you can read on here
Disruption in the Boardroom; AI and the Future Consumer
EY and Marmalade Film and Media were kind enough ask me to host and present a short film on the Future of AI for Consumer Products and Retail. We interviewed a number of very impressive entrepreneurs, advisors and board directors and the result is this film here. We were lucky enough to spend time with the pioneering founder of Dressipi, Sarah McVittie., Jan Babiak, a non-exec director who sits on many globally renowned boards including Walgreens in the US, and Cathy Cobey, Global Trusted AI Advisory Lead at EY. We talked about having a data strategy for AI, developing the right ethical policy and approach and the importance of diversity in times of transformation. Lots of advice in here for Boards on how to embrace the disruptive opportunities that AI can bring….
What a Year
As 2018 draws to a close, we at Futuremade are looking back at a busy and futures-packed 12 months. We carried out consultancy projects and workshops for Diageo, Atrium, Wired, Contact Engine and Virgin. We collaborated with WSJ and Kantar Consulting on projects for LG and Ikea. We are currently in the midst of several other brands’ projects, aiming for completion early next year. We spoke at a huge number of events including IAB’s Digital Britain, Farfetch’s 10th Anniversary Gathering, TBD Conference, Connect, Sky’s Tech Summit, MRG’s conference, Zappistore, Universal, Futurebook Live and we moderated a panel discussion on the future of advertising at CogX’s festival of AI. Tracey served as President on the Innovation and Creative Data juries at Eurobest, served on the Cannes Lions Innovation Jury in the summer and wrote about futures for Mediatel all through the year. To top off the year, catch us on Business Matters predictions for 2019 on the BBC’s World Service next week. Thank you to all our clients and everyone we’ve worked with throughout the year, we have loved working with you and helping to make your futures successful and sustainable. We wish you all long-term happiness and success for 2019 and beyond! See you next year.
Sky Tech Summit 2018
We had a presence alongside Rana el Kaliouby, Christian Hernandez, and Jamie West, Deputy MD, Sky Media in a panel discussion at the recent Tech Summit. Rana is a PhD and co-founder/CEO of Affectiva, a pioneer in Emotion AI. She believes emotional AI is the next frontier of Artificial Intelligence. We had a fascinating discussion about how brands were using AI and how important ethics would be in its application and implementation for consumers. Superbly moderated by Sky’s Anna Jones, the consensus was that full regulation is probably not on the near horizon but that industry standards need to be adopted asap. You can see some of the videos, presentations and panels soon on the Sky site here.
The Future of Luxury
We were honoured to be asked to deliver the keynote presentation for the Farfetch Gathering last month. Over 2,500 Farfetch employees gathered in Porto to celebrate 10 years of revolutionising luxury online. José Neves gave an inspirational speech which included the highlights of the last decade, and Tracey gave a future facing presentation about what lies ahead. A wonderful celebration of a truly disruptive business. We should all take away the innovation challenge encompassed in the Farfetch mantra: Do What's Never Been Done
*the image above is the view in rehearsals, the presentation stage at the event
Shiny New Object
Tracey was featured in the latest episode of Shiny New Object, her shiny new object was of course FUTURES. You can tune into the podcast here
IAB & The Future of Marketing
Tracey has been speaking and consulting a lot on the Future of Marketing. Seemingly there is a perfect storm of AI, Blockchain and GDPR gathering, that is a cause for consternation and opportunity for marketeers. One of the most recent talks she gave was in Manchester at IAB's Digital Britain. She talked about how we need to shift from the mindset of Information Technology to the mindset of Information Biology. There is a nice summary of all of the speakers here in a roundup of the day via the IAB podcast series: episode 9