Industry experts are more bullish about gen AI but more pessimistic about the prospects of almost every other technology over the next five years.
WPP Media quizzed more than 60 industry leaders from around the world — including clients, analysts, and industry pundits such as Ari Paparo, Brian O’Kelly and Benedict Evans — about the future of media, technology and commerce for its latest Advertising in 2030 report. Specifically, it asked them how likely 20 scenarios were to occur by 2030. The study, which was also conducted in 2020 and 2021, found that industry experts are now less optimistic about the amount of change.
To find out more about the report, MediaCat spoke to Kate Scott-Dawkins, president of global business intelligence at WPP Media. She discussed the major themes from the report and shared advice on how brands and agencies can prepare for the future.
Could you give a quick summary of the key findings from the report?
This is a survey we’ve run twice before [in 2020 and 2021], and we’re keeping track over the longer term of what people are feeling as we head into the end of the decade. I think there were a couple of things that came out to me when reviewing the results this year.
The first is that, now that we’re only five years out, people feel a little bit less optimistic [than they did at the start of the decade] about how much change we’re likely to see ahead of 2030. The scores in terms of likelihood went backward to ‘less likely’ almost across the board for all of our questions, which is interesting.
There were a couple of big themes around AI. People are fairly optimistic that technology is likely to be integrated into the work that we do and into consumers’ lives rather than replacing it. Now that people have been using generative AI tools for the past couple of years, they were much more likely to say that gen AI is definitely going to be creating content — and they were quicker to assume that that was going to be advertising content rather than big studio productions.
This time, we also asked a bit more about consumer technology, autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots and different immersive technology interfaces like glasses or smart earbuds and wearables; people still think we’re too close to 2030 for those things to really take hold, partly because of cost issues, partly just because of the scale of production needed to sort of make those ubiquitous within the next five years.
How do experts see consumer behaviour evolving over the next five years?
When we ask experts what they think about consumer behaviour, some of them will answer from a personal point of view and some of them will take a broader approach. There was a lot said about the tension between wanting ease of use and less friction, and wanting to maintain elements of privacy and security.
People were pretty on board that things like personalisation and biometrics would be even more ubiquitous in 2030, but I think there were also a lot of calls for it being done with user consent. We have to watch out for it being misused or easy to hack, and I think some of that is just going to come down to who is using it and how often.
So if you think about how many times a day you unlock your phone, consumers are more than happy to let you scan their face or their thumbprint because it saves so much time. But people are less likely to scan their palmprint to pay at a Whole Foods or Amazon because it’s maybe your once-a-week shop. The trade-off isn’t there for most consumers.
We’ll be on that kind of scale as we go forward: how much friction does it reduce? How much does it add to your life versus what are you willing to part with in terms of data privacy? So there are a lot of questions that are tied into that.
The general sense that I got from the report was that experts don’t really see consumer behaviour changing that much until 2030. Is that correct?
Yes, I think that’s probably a fair assessment.
There were things like the use of micropayments or 3D printing or humanoid robots — some of it depends on the underlying tech being available and some of it relies on people adopting these behaviours, and I think there was a sense that that would change more slowly than maybe the questions insinuated.
What are the biggest challenges or risks that experts foresee in the next five years for the advertising industry?
One of the things they were most pessimistic about was that there would be any sort of global attempt at privacy regulation, and that just makes it difficult because if governments can’t agree and the largest tech providers or sellers of advertising can’t agree, then everyone is left in this position of trying to figure out. And I think that applies to both sellers and buyers of advertising trying to walk that tightrope. I think that’s going to be a challenge for people moving forward. There was no belief that we were anywhere close to solving that problem in the next five years.
The other one that’s interesting is the question around sustainability. In the long term, doing things sustainably is probably good for [brands’] bottom line. If they want to continue to have the natural resources to make their products and services, then they need to ensure that the planet is still producing those over a long period of time. But there was definitely a shift in the sense of how important sustainability for sustainability’s sake was to consumers, and so then brands are sort of left to figure out how to navigate that. They can’t necessarily call out a price premium for those kinds of things if consumers are making decisions more based on price than sustainability, but they have their own employees and their own future business practices to look after at the same time.
So with that in mind, what should brands, advertisers and agencies be doing today to prepare for these changes?
I think the biggest thing at this point is continuing to test, strategise, and learn with and about AI. It’s not going away. It’s sort of an underpinning, enabling technology like the internet. The reason I talk about guidelines and strategies is that there needs to be transparency, safeguards, and clarity to consumers in terms of how that’s being used and how the training and reinforcement learning is being done so that the incentives of the AI are aligned with the incentives of people. I think most brands are aware that they need to be doing that.
The other thing is to start to think about how new surfaces and computing interfaces might impact them. At CES in January this year, there were lots of displays on glass, so if we’re thinking that messaging now could be anywhere and on any sort of surface, what does that mean? And as we roll out more autonomous vehicles in cities and people aren’t driving but are leaning back riding, what does that mean for advertisers? And then as we shift to voice and ambient computing, what does that mean alongside the rise of digital agents? How are they expecting to interface with humans when that relationship is being intermediated by a digital assistant on the consumer side, as well as a digital assistant on the brand side?
There’s been a lot of discussion around AI shopping in recent years and the report also touches on bot-to-bot interactions. Is this something we’re likely to see by 2030?
It’s going to come down to that cost-benefit analysis of how much time and energy does it save me versus what’s the cost. Some of that behaviour is going to be pushed along by the companies offering these kinds of services. If it gets promoted as an option by Google or ChatGPT because they’re looking at a future where they’re getting affiliated commission revenue from sales, I think that helps push consumer adoption and use forward.
But there will be people who want the AI-free version of everything and then there will be very heavy adopters and those in the middle who are happy to try it out and use it if it works for them.
What does the future look like for publishers? The report said that experts don’t think subscription services will continue to grow much more and they also don’t see micropayments as a sustainable complement.
I think they were pretty upbeat on subscriptions and the companies that had shown an ability to get users to value their content enough to pay. I think what we see in the work we’re doing today is that that tends to be easier for scaled national or global players like a national newspaper versus a local newspaper, for instance.
AI is almost a blessing and a curse. There’s wide belief that it’s going to be involved in the creative production process, and that could have all kinds of benefits for these companies, in terms of coming up with ideas and being able to produce things more quickly. The flip side of that is when everyone has that same capability, you have millions of individual influencers and creators who can also create things with AI [and] what the panel also said was that a majority of news consumption would be individual creators and AI bots, so that puts real pressure on companies to define a reason why consumers come to you.
How might the future look for social media platforms, considering that all platforms today essentially offer the same thing?
Sometimes you get something new and it rapidly ascends, like TikTok. Sometimes you get something new and it fizzles, like BeReal.
I still think there’s room for something new, given all the changes we’re seeing with chatbots and changes to computing interfaces, like glasses. Is there a new form of social media that maybe just works better in that new reality that we don’t have yet today, that will actually mount some kind of serious competition for TikTok and Meta in a way that they haven’t been challenged recently?
I think it’s hard for people to change those instincts when they’ve gotten into the rhythm of continual scrolling. I personally don’t have or use Instagram or TikTok. I don’t spend my time that way and I think it’s one of the reasons why I am so vocal with our clients and people around making sure that when we’re in these very early days of AI, setting up the incentives, that we don’t choose easy metrics like time spent, which I think lead to some of those behaviours and maybe undesired consequences, like people spending hours and hours scrolling.
What metrics do you suggest then?
I’m not an AI researcher, so that’s tricky. But there’s something called intentional tech, which is about getting humans to set intended behaviours and actions and then having AI help with that, which I think is a lovely concept.
We’ve seen already, and there’s research around this, that when you set incentives around user ratings or user feedback, that can lead to some chatbots being overly obsequious or people-pleasing at the detriment of truthfulness or whatever else.
I don’t have all the answers. I wish I did, but those are just maybe a couple of things to think about.
Going back to the report, were the results that you received what you expected?
Pretty close. I think overall, like I mentioned, the fact that most scenarios moved slightly to ‘less likely’ and that there were only a couple that went the other direction was maybe a little bit surprising. But I think it just feels harder to achieve things in the shorter timeline. So that was a little bit surprising that we’d moved through the wrong direction on just about everything.
Featured image: Tasha Lyn on Unsplash
