Microsoft - mapping IoT sensor data in Mixed Reality
Google - controlling robots remotely
The inside-out of every shopping story
Amazon or Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
Few businesses took as bad a beating as cruise companies in 2020, with travel bans and social distancing forcing many small operators to close their doors. Behemoths like Carnival, Norweigan, and Royal Caribbean, meanwhile, sold ships and took on debt to survive. In September of last year, Carnival announced they had sold a full 18 boats to an undisclosed buyer, representing 17% of its fleet.
While 2021 might bring better days, cruise operators are on the clock, burning a total of $1 billion a month. It may take some time to set sail, too: Carnival canceled all cruises through the end of March earlier this week. When they are finally able to hit the high seas, operators may find demand has weakened. An older customer base may treat confined spaces with newfound skepticism.
Enter Amazon. Under-the-radar, Bezos has been maneuvering to loop ships into the company's logistics empire. While much of this involves standard cargo shipping, with the company moving thousands of containers between the US and China in recent years, more creative applications have been considered. As early as 2016, Amazon was said to have considered “nearshoring”: purchasing ships to station close to large metropolises. These would serve as bases for drone delivery, with UAVs taking packages from deck to doorstep.
Hemorrhaging money in a potentially dying industry, cruise liners like Carnival — or much of its inventory — could be available at a historically low price. It might just be crazy enough to work.
Still nowhere near post-Covid, consumers’ continuing need for reassurance will make 2021 the optimum year to back omni-channel, contact-lite experiences that soothe by offering a sense of control without killing off style or experience. Acknowledging high service no longer means high touch, they’ll also expose just how ambient tech is already a force to be reckoned with.
Look to next-gen department store Showfield’s Magic Wand app where users scan products for info or add to a digital cart, collecting their booty duty-free style on exit. Also, Amazon’s new Fresh store format where Alexa stations offer voice assistance and smart trolleys ‘read’ visitors’ shopping lists (navigating accordingly), while simultaneously detecting what’s placed inside so there’s no need to risk standing in line. Sexier is Burberry’s content-connected swing tags in its Shenzhen flagship; scan a label to view related content and exactly how the item looks on a model.
This new gentler-touch landscape and next-gen interfaces will open the floodgates to richer sensory branding, via tech that can satisfy the cravings for physical stimulation suppressed during distancing without ditching the halo of safety. Leading the pack is Ultraleap whose USP – precision gesture tracking + ultra-haptics – is already allowing people to experience physical sensations (pushing a button, moving a knob, the touch of a rough surface) while they view or move content, heralding a new era of haptic branding.
Collaborative enterprise, specifically ‘co-opetition’, is another positive symptom of the pandemic with frenemy concepts – rival brands partnering up for a greater good – witnessing a welcome revival for a solidarity-appreciating consumer mindset in 2021.
Answering the swelling desire for brands that can step up to numerous eco-ethical marks (far beyond virtue signaling) it’s most overt in ads. In November 2020, a Burger King UK ad featured the provocative call-to-action ‘Order from McDonalds’ (plus numerous other fast food brands in the smaller print) as a rallying cry to support Europe’s beleaguered hospitality industry. Just a few months earlier its Finnish division had unveiled a poster to celebrate the Helsinki edition of Gay Pride featuring the two adversaries’ male mascots kissing, creating a heart-shaped silhouette above the mantra ‘Love Conquers All’. Notably, both brands are in US teens’ top five fast-food choices.
It’s reflective of a deep-seated desire for more kindness also illustrated in Netflix Brazil’s April (tweet) recommendation of content from competitors for locked down viewers running out of Netflix options, but it’s far from a one poster/social post salve. It’s also becomingly increasingly critical to the sustainability mission; H&M and Adidas recently jettisoned old grievances to join the New Cotton Project global consortium (a multinational group straddling waste management, recycling, retail, manufacturing and academia) in a three-year project to create a trial at the scale needed to catalyze major change.
Gaming worlds were a mega, Hollywood-dwarfing, sector pre-pandemic. But two key things mean they’re no longer a tangential influence: their transition into mainstream social venues during distancing (see Animal Crossing and rapper Travis Scott’s record-annihilating performance in Fortnite as two pivotal playmakers) and the use of gaming engines (primarily Unity or Unreal), 3D artistry and audience-seducing gaming mechanics within online brand experiences.
The metaverse – think of it as an evolved version of the internet involving collective, interactive virtual spaces – is already transforming formerly marketing-only playscapes into transaction-capable brand territories. Frontrunners include social-gaming-meets-luxury-fashion e-commerce platform ADA and the wildly creative, catwalk-presentation-reimagining environments of The Fabric of Reality VR experience by Ryot (Verizon Media’s immersive content division) in which avatar-upped VR users could talk with one another as they would IRL, explore designers’ worlds across diverse room/club settings and try virtual garments.
The best currently come in (at least) two forms – VR headset-enabled for full immersion vs. browser-based fun to avoid alienating those with basic access. See pioneering eco-materials brand/fashion label’s Pangaia’s virtual window onto Antarctica with AnamXR and the Fashion Innovation Agency (visitors can wish-list or buy items from this by spring 2021) and Balenciaga’s Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow – a high production, desktop-accessible love letter to Gen Z by way of some unnerving urban dystopia, nineties-inflected rave scenes and an avatar-centric look book allowing fans to digest the outfits in detail.
Note also the incoming era of blended experiences, evidenced by Complexcon’s virtual guise, ComplexLand, for 2020 (created by Canadian agency Jam3). The ultimate streetwear festival for diehard hypebeasts, visitors entered as avatars, bought from branded in-game shops, attended live gigs and ordered street food for real-world delivery.
A nascent genre tethered to a new era of chameleonic online identities, there are many big ideas that will need to be considered. How will visitors connect with brands, and one another? Via whose viewpoint? And how do these fantasy worlds of digitized alter personas affect users IRL behaviors, health and societal prosperity? Look to collectives like the Institute of Digital Fashion – a collaborative band of inspired digital creators looking to “build a new inclusive, diverse and sustainable IRL x URL reality” – for a key group mining this critical vein with sensitivity and depth.
Where brands taking a stand was once considered a risky agenda, the turmoil of 2020 has pulled it closer to an imperative. The demand for quantifiable allyship regarding diversity, and inclusivity is already skyrocketing, making 2021 the year where brand rhetoric will need to align with long-lasting action, often to the tune of systemic change.
Key to this will be brand-backed initiatives that unlock access to skills, education and even intercommunity connections. Neo-education and incubators are one example. Take The Face magazine’s Future Academy with **Moncler – a ‘360° crash course into the world of media and design’ providing paid opportunities to underrepresented individuals, from ‘neuro-diverse’ people to those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Or Best Buy’s beefing up of its decade-old Tech Tech Centers – after-school spaces where teens can kick-start tech careers – with another 35 hubs next year (venues the brand hope’s also will diversify its employee pipeline).
Vans needs mentioning here, too, as a long-time advocate of levelling up with authenticity. It’s most recent creativity-championing ad campaign for its Off the Wall series allies with The Skate Witches – an American zine by and for women, trans and non-binary skateboarders – to help fans create their own skate content, from videography to zine writing. Meanwhile, ‘elite amateur’ running-gear brand Tracksmith is offering fellowships to emerging creatives who are also runners, dispelling hackneyed assumptions about the running community itself (see HOKA ONE ONE for another brand doing this excellently).
Sustainability, clearly no trend, must also be addressed at a whole new level – public and personal. From eco-impact light brand spaces to self-auditing tracker (as relevant to supermarkets as fashion – see digital closet app Save Your Wardrobe as a prime example) the message is this: allow people to witness their own often imperceptible behaviors and make better alternative choices.
You waste time, money and effort by building before selling.
Validate demand first.Presell to learn faster, save time and money.
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Key Lessons
You may not have noticed it as you shop online, but the experience is changing.
Clicking through a navigation bar of a website to find an item has become passé. A search bar that allows you to look up a specific product is faster. In some cases, chatting with a bot may be even more efficient.
We have experimented with chatbots for years. Facebook has offered tools for merchants to make bots that engage with customers. Retailers like Amazon have used chatbots to answer customers’ questions, and when the bots can’t help, a person can hop in to take over.
Now that visiting a physical retail store has largely become impractical in the pandemic, we can expect such conversational technologies to gain momentum, said Julie Ask, a technology analyst for Forrester Research.
“This notion of going online and searching and clicking and using a navigation window is very dated,” she said. “What’s next after that? A lot of it is going to be conversational, whether it’s text or voice.”
There are already plenty of examples. Recently, I shopped for a pair of shoes at Beckett Simonon, an online fashion brand, and asked an employee via a chat box about the correct shoe size for my feet.
More companies are also using augmented reality to help people with online shopping, Ask said. Jins Eyewear, which sells prescription glasses, lets you take a photo of your face to virtually try on glasses before deciding whether to buy them. Snap, the parent company for Snapchat, has teamed up with luxury brands like Gucci and Dior to offer virtual try-ons.
Augmented reality is poised to become especially popular this year because the technology keeps improving. New high-end Apple and Android smartphones include sensors for detecting depth, which makes it easier for augmented reality apps to place objects like virtual furniture in physical spaces.
Expect to see a wave of new ads that take advantage of the format. This year, advertisers are expected to spend about $2.4 billion on augmented reality advertising, up 71% from $1.4 billion last year, according to the research firm eMarketer.
Last week, Google filed a patent application for creating shoppable images that merchants can use to create ads for their products.
Let’s suppose a user searches for “laundry room”. Google will retrieve an image that contains a list of products that are related to the search term. In this case, the image could include a washer, dryer, laundry bags etc. The image will then be displayed with shoppable advertisements attached to the relevant products. If a merchant is wanting to advertise their products for this search term, Google will select (or in the future, generate) an image that contains relevant products offered by the merchant, as well as any promotional messages.
Why is this interesting?
In the filing, Google mention that lots of people use the search engine for finding images of products they might be looking to buy. Currently, when you go into Google Images, there is no advertising component. Although there is Google Shop, Shop is only really relevant for people with high intentionality for making a purchasing decision. By creating shoppable images, Google could be looking to monetise the ‘discovery’ component that people currently use Google Images for.
Wherever there is a high volume of traffic, specific user intent, and a content ranking algorithm, there is the opportunity for advertising revenue to be generated. By opening Google Images to advertising, Google massively ramp up advertising capacity. And the truth is that Google’s monopoly on search means that advertising money will naturally flow here: whether it’s for brands wanting to capitalise on the new opportunities for being discovered, or for brands that need to defend themselves against competitors targeting their keywords (e.g. if Samsung targeted the search term “Apple”).
All in all, it looks like advertising is coming to Google Images.
Lifetime deals offer lifetime access to products with ongoing costs for a one-time price.
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Klarna will claim to be the new Amazon. Klarna app has moved away from being a payment app. You can still manage your payments) to something bigger and shinier.
SPACs allow retail investors to invest in private equity type transactions, particularly leveraged buyouts.
Last year was an inflection point for mobile payments. For safety reasons, even cash-only die-hards, like farmers market merchants and food trucks, started accepting mobile payments.
Overall, 67% of American retailers accept touchless payments, up from 40% in 2019, according to a survey by Forrester. Among those surveyed, 19% said they made a digital payment in a store for the first time last May.
Hands-off technology doesn’t end with mobile wallets. So-called Ultra-Wide Band, a relatively new radio technology, may also find its moment this year. The technology, which uses radio waves to detect objects with extreme precision, has not been used much since its debut on smartphones about two years ago. But the need for contact-free experiences could change that, said Milanesi of Creative Strategies.
So how might Ultra-Wide Band be used? Let’s say you have a smartphone and a coffee shop has a tablet, and both are equipped with the radio technology. If you’re standing in front of the tablet, it can sense your phone and accept a payment from you (and not the person behind you in line). The technology could also be used to allow employees into buildings and start up cars without physical keys.
2020’s uptick in e-commerce (global e-tail sales have roughly stabilized at 7% higher than a year ago) will put the art of e-persuasion at a serious premium, raising the stock of brands able to create more intimate, personalized digital spaces.
It’s been served up brilliantly by the one-to-one virtual consultation tools of companies like Hero and Go In-Store (video-based concepts that allow brand ambassador/associates to see from anywhere that works, flexing to brands’ now faster-moving agendas), and the consciously unscripted chat apps of clienteling specialists such as Proximity Insights whose scalable, WhatsApp-aping forms of conversational commerce generated major success.
Affluence is no barrier to success: see Threads Styling, an e-commerce app which communicates with its “very peripatetic” young customers solely via the informality of messaging platforms and is regularly selling pieces of jewelry for $30k and far more.
‘Insperiences’ may sound like one of the most pretentious pieces of pandemic speak to emerge since Covid hit, but it’s a booming economy (88% of British retailers alone have registered demand for them this year) set to outlive a year of zoom-enabled naffness.
Fitness is a shoe-in to cash-in, with Lululemon’s $500m acquisition of MIRROR (live-stream screen tech that can ‘turn any space into a personal fitness studio’) proof of the direction. It’s yet to confirm how it’ll be deployed beyond “strengthening our community, loyalty and our relationship with our guests and memberships” (chief executive Calvin McDonald) but super gym Equinox offers one likely template: instructors on its members-only fitness app wear clothing from its store, tagged with e-commerce links for post-class shopping.
But it’s a space ripe for food and kids, too. For the former, everyone from mainstream players (Wagamama) to Michelin-starred gastro gods (Massimo Bottura) have been getting involved with live-streamed cook-a-longs to upsell their culinary connections. For the latter, 2020’s hamstrung Holiday season offers inspiration; FAO Schwarz’ Academy of Wonder microsite hosted virtual magic or science class centered on its STEM and magic toys, guided by a ‘professor’ or ‘magician’. At $60 a pop (toys included) it exemplifies the rising power of the product + (remote) experience brand package.
Driven by homeworking, travel curbs and a more survivalist desire to support the immediate community, local retail has soared on the back of the pandemic, as has a fresh affinity with regionality thanks to a boom in ‘micropolitanism’ (a big city exodus) that was already in motion pre-pandemic.
It’s cementing the creep towards decentralized brand culture, of which there are multiple strands. There’s regional resonance (since broadcasting from its ‘dark’ stores during lockdown Brazilian footwear brand Melissa has seen major sales hikes from localized commissioning and scheduling); hometown heroism – flagships from Nike, Foot Locker and Carhartt among others that give back to the locales that raised them (via sponsoring creative collectives, localized employment and more) and even concepts giving kudos to the charms of suburbia; see the Fred Perry X Raf Simons collaboration – an e-store mimicking a Google Street View of an unspecified Dutch neighborhood. Created by Random Studio 30,000 product views in week one alone can’t be wrong.
Brand-backed, smart city-style digital networks will be another backbone of this change, allowing consumers to connect and brands play the empowering facilitators. While Nike’s been building out its local store network to flex a hyper-targeted phygital muscle (it’s Live and Rise formats both pull from real-time local data to ensure consumer relevance) there’s a key role here for the everyday brands. Look to Walmart’s partnership with vastly popular social exchange-based app Nextdoor (25% of all US households already use it) so quarantining individuals could request help from Walmart-going neighbors, via the app or Nextdoor.com. Think: e-tail meets Neighborhood Watch to leverage the lucrative new high-tech localism.
Iris nova exploite le plus grand réseau de marques de boissons DTC aux États-Unis. Sa force ? La puissance d’un réseau, permettant notamment d’adapter, de mutualiser l’infrastructure, de réaliser des ventes croisées avec le même public et de baisser le coût d'acquisition client (CAC).
Affirmed by both gaming’s storming of mainstream pop culture and the appetite for contactless connections, XR – extended reality tech (virtual, augmented and mixed – VR, AR, MR) will become an essential power play.
AR in particular, the most accessible of the lot and downplayed for too long, will be instant commercial gold, and the gateway to ballsier blended experiences. Take creative technologist Holition’s concept for Coty. Mirror-like store screens conduct instant face scanning, overlaying make-up looks onto fans’ faces in AR – styles transferrable to a smartphones via ‘hand-off’ tech, to review or buy from later. For packaging see Lush’s AI app-based visual recognition tool – Lush Lens – that surfaces relevant info as AR interface via one simple scan. In-app purchasing currently in development.
For fit tech it’s a no-brainer: technologists Wannaby has worked with both Farfetch and Gucci in the last year to enable instant virtual try-ones for sneakers (its software detects users’ feet, generating a 3D overlay simulating how they’ll look on foot) while in early 2020 Burberry collaborated with Google Search on a tool that shows an AR version of the product at scale against other objects in their vicinity.
Car brands from Škoda to Porsche have all worked around showroom shutdowns with contextualizing apps where would-be owners visualize vehicles in their driveways, while Verizon’s WebAR tech delivers AR ad formats to online publishers – letting fans view a car, scaled to fit their surroundings, by simply launching it from the on-page advert itself.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/the-tech-that-will-invade-our-lives-in-2021/
https://sifted.eu/articles/european-startup-predictions/
https://www.google.com/search?q=SPAC&oq=SPAC&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i59l3j69i65j69i60l3&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebaron/2021/01/04/from-silver-bullets-to-strategic-overhauls-9-retail-trends-tactics--innovations-for-success-in-2021-/?sh=7a927637d3bd&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RNNE5UTmxOV001TVRVMCIsInQiOiJwMk83SENOeDBcLzdZYWFpVW4zVUduUmRjQUZZeDUzVHVrR0RxNXhaRVRxV3JCU04xR0EwK0srVFBuTFFHamlCdDdXSmVZang3ZDJSVFJtck50VHcxSzBHSURLd1BFK1RIblNMRWRHdVgzTFY5WEtLakQzS3diaEZ3TEFYNXBxZHMifQ%3D%3D
https://trends.vc/trends-0047-lifetime-deals/
https://mariedolle.substack.com/p/comment-la-curation-rinvente-le-e?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNTk2MzAxNCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzExODA1OTQsIl8iOiIxMlg5OSIsImlhdCI6MTYxMDM2MDM0NCwiZXhwIjoxNjEwMzYzOTQ0LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNDY2NzgiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.p-AdnEbWACdZK2YUbRJ7HvyPMa-iME6r1PYwr2aX0XA
https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/the-nostradamus-list
https://mailchi.mp/getplanet/ton-rapport-magma-dark-stores-astro-electro-mini886622