Today, Louis Morales-Chanard, Strategy Director – Global Clients at Blue 449 brings us his view of our industry and the years to come. Through this paper, Louis introduces us to the Age of Immersion, an ambitious yet humble attempt at embracing an incredibly complex situation.
Every year, our industry ponders on what will be the next defining trends in technology and media. This time-honored tradition is part of the fun of our jobs, but one has to admit it is getting more and more difficult.
Indeed, mega-trends run so deep they don’t go anywhere for a decade, exposing analysts to redundancy every year, while smaller trends quickly disappear, only to re-emerge under new forms. How can we refresh this tradition and be more relevant than ever for our clients? Probably by taking a big step back.
This is why we tried to come up with something a little different this year at Publicis Media France, with The Age of Immersion.
This new trends report focuses on very deep and strong transformative forces: technology getting faster, technology gaining acute awareness of its environment, technology getting smarter, technology feeling more discreet and finally technology becoming fully immersive.
WE WILL SOON BE IMMERSED IN TECHNOLOGY
All these technological forces are not isolated by any means. On the contrary, they add up.
Since technology is getting faster, it allows connected things to exchange data more seamlessly and thus to become all the more aware of their environment. Higher awareness also means more data fuelling machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence going through the roof.
At the same time, numerous objects from our daily lives are also getting smarter by integrating sensors, while computer/human interfaces become simpler and feel more natural, to the point where they simply disappear.
At the end of the day, all these changes are paving the way for an omnipresent yet invisible technology. We believe we will soon be all but immersed in it. Welcome to the “age of immersion”, which follows two previous periods: the age of foundation and the age of connection.
