A recent Wall Street Journal conference oversaw the trends and developments in technology and media industry in 2016.
Michael Wolf- a renowned business strategist, former Yahoo executive and co-founder and CEO of the consulting company Activate, gave a comprehensive overview of what we can expect next year. By analyzing the changes in people’s tech and media consumption, he draw clear conclusions, in which direction the industry and money are moving.
Wolf brought out nine priority topics. His presentation can be found here: Epic slide deck from former board member of Yahoo Lays out the future of tech and media.
Read more about some trends worth highlighting.
Fight for the consumer’s attention is becoming more and more rigorous. The main competitors in people’s use of time are mobile/tablet and TV.
Multitasking has become natural for us and attention can be directed to several concurrent activities, therefore the average American adult has 31 hours to use instead of 24.
US statisticians have come to such conclusion by combining the time people spend watching TV or listening to music while doing something else hence getting more active time to use. People spend more time watching screens and listening to audio than sleeping. A moving image accompanies us more than 5 hours a day, background sounds, whether it’s streaming music or listening to the radio while driving, 3.5 hours.
Total media and tech consumption is more than 11 hours a day, while time spent on sleeping on the average is 7 hours. Rest of the time is spent on work, hobbies, eating and other everyday errands.
Media consumption is increasing and so is multitasking, since new products come on the market with a purpose to enable that experience (Google self-driving car, Disney game console etc).
Chat is overtaking social media spend – people want to interact in real time, exchange their thoughts, pictures and share news. Instead of scrolling the Facebook wall, they interact in Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Viber. Reason for using these apps is the opportunity to chat for free, instead of sending SMS that costs.
Messaging keeps getting higher share of media consumption, and soon we will see that you can socialize, listen to music, play, watch TV programs as well as make purchases, all in the same channel. The good news is those as also new channels for advertising.
A business owner must understand that customers will not send an e-mail and wait few days for the response anymore. Sales is also made via chat – you need to communicate with the customer at the time he has questions about your product, which with correct handling can result in a purchase then and there. But by tomorrow, he is gone.
Information and product/service offering has to come quickly and in one place. You can no longer become rich by creating aps. Although a huge amount of applications are available, averagely 8 per month are downloaded and 26 actively used. These numbers have not changed in previous years.
For the new business, it is therefore quite difficult – you have just seconds to win the customer’s attention. More successful have used that knowledge to build billion-dollar businesses (eg HelloFresh, Shazam, BuzzFeed).
It is important to offer service that meets the specific need of a customer without requiring much delving into. Do not want to waste time food-shopping after work – subscribe to our service and we will start delivering food basket to your door. Sign up for account – a backup of clean socks will be delivered to you weekly. The services offered must be sharp and specific, that case less than a minute of customer’s daily attention is enough to get you money.
Wolf also pointed out an interesting overview of the next probable mergers and acquisitions based on the service offering areas the key tech and media players are today missing.
Looking forward to see if the predictions were correct!
