Continuing our coverage of New York Ad Week, today the Lab attended “Proximity Marketing, Wearables, and the Art of the Possible”, focusing on disruptive technologies and their impact on customer experience marketing. Led by Moderator Andrea Fishman from PwC, the panelists consisted of Fishman’s colleague David Clarke; Andrew Markowitz, Global Digital Strategy Director, GE; Mark Donovan, Chief Operating Officer, Thinaire; and Jordan Grossman, US Head of Sales at Waze.
Contextualization
Fishman started the discussion with the claim that “NFC and beacon-enabled proximity marketing is already happening—and not just in retail and consumer space, but globally in B2B and enterprises too”. Grossman concurred with her comment while also pointing out that “today’s marketing is about relevancy and proximity—it’s about offering people what they want in the right context to engage with them”.
The Value In Data
“NFC and RFID chips could be easily embedded and thus turn any daily item into a wearable,” Donovan noted, “and that means a lot of consumer data to be generated”. As Clarke pointed out, however, many companies are still “trying to figure out what to do with the data that proximity and wearable tech generated”. In order to realize the aforementioned contextualization in consumer marketing, we will need figure out how to leverage data into consumer insights.
Future of Marketing
Changing consumer behaviors led by new technologies indicates that “the future of marketing lies in where physical, digital and mobile spheres all converge into one total experience”, concluded Clarke. Markowitz also shared his vision that “the next marketing revolution will be internal, starting within the industry” and the only way to survive such disruption is to “trust and collaborate with your partners”.