Experience Manifesto

CES 2021, Day 1

So, the very first, virtual CES has completed day one and, I have to be honest, it wasn't nearly as much fun as actually being there! No doubt, it's really hard to get as excited about things when you can't really see or touch them. The second challenge that I've actually had with CES for a few years is that many times, the show is pretty incremental. In fact, this was was what I said when I reviewed CES in 2019. So we'll see what the breakouts are this year and whether or not it's more incremental than innovative. You can see all of my Tweets about this years CES here and my previous writing about CES here.

You may also want to read this piece, where I talk about some of the things I don't think will be trends, like 8K TV's, drone deliveries and others. It's not that I don't necessarily think these things will have an impact on the world, but I think they will not be big trends in the immediate future.

Now, there's a lot that I don't really cover, like all of the new laptops that were announced, although I personally want one of the new Surface Pro 7 Plus! I don't really talk about connected cars, there are more than enough people already covering them. One thing I'd love to see happen with connected cars is the ability to start planning at home online and then throw my plans to the car. I would also love to see branded drives. Put together some great day drives around key cities and tie it into my GPS. Once we get released from Covid, I'm pretty sure people would even pay for them!

So, what did I see so far today that got me excited?

• Rollable Screens. I'm pretty excited to see a number of companies rolling out (pun intended) rollable screens. For example, TCL has a prototype that can be extended from 6.7-inches to 7.8-inches with a simple tap of the finger, turning it from a smartphone into a tablet. LG also had a rollable screen phone, which might be out sometime this year. Of course, they showed off a rollable TV back in 2019, but for $87,000, it's probably not going to be available at your local Best Buy anytime soon. And here's what I said about it back then:

There's no doubt that this TV was a big hit. And it is both beautiful and cool, no doubt about it! People, myself included, would watch that screen roll up & down over & over again, sort of mesmerized by how it works. The picture quality is obviously excellent and the rolling mechanism worked extremely well. But I wonder how many people really need a TV that rolls away when it's not being watched?

Again, it might be cool in certain retail or OOH environments, I think it ultimately creates limited value for the typical home consumer.

And when LG showed it last year, it was at the end of a bed and the idea was that you would roll it up to watch it and it would be closed when it was down. In my house, that becomes a surface for things and the thought of having to clear it off everytime I wanted to watch TV would make me crazy!

Where I get very excited about this tech, however, is in its use in OOH and retail design. For so many years we've been bound by the rectangular shape of most screens and the fact that the screens are very rigid in that shape. With these new rollable/bendable screens, we'll be able to create all kinds of new environments, like these Illuminariums being done in partnership with Panasonic.

• Touchless Technology. For many years, retailers have been excited about putting lots of touchscreens in the stores/malls and now, thanks to Covid, we don't really want to touch them anymore. Thanks to gesture tracking technologies, we have new ways to engage with a screen. For example, Ultraleap has been doing great work in this area, with both gesture tracking and tactile feedback. We have some demos in the Lab if you want to experience them first-hand.
• Transparent OLED. Yes, these have also been around for a few years, but they do seem to be getting better and more practical today. I am not a fan at all of transparent TV's for the home. Not sure about your house, but I'm not really sure when we last cleaned behind the TV. And I don't really see the utility at home as well, especially for the anticipated price points. But once again, I can see great uses in retail and OOH. As you can see in this demo video, there's a lot that you can do with it in a retail or experiential setting.

I've gotten a few pitches today that certainly come under the "just because you can, should you" category. Like the LiDAR based showerhead, that uses the technology to turn your gestures into temperature control. Yea, I could see lots of challenges when I moving in the shower and those movements translate into temperature changes! I'm also not sure I can be excited about robots that will clean up after me. We just got a robot vacuum and we're starting to get it really set up. But a robot to put my dishes in the dishwasher? Not sure there's a big audience for that. And, sorry for all of the dentists out there, but also not really jammin' on connected tooth brushes, although maybe if I have grandchildren, I'll change my mind.

Tomorrow, I'll review some other categories, like senior tech and 5G, both of which I am pretty excited about. And I'll keep tweeting tomorrow with any announcements that happen!

Some additional CES reading:

• Digitaltrends
• Engadget
• c|net
• Wired

Some (Potentially) Unpopular CES Opinions

I've been giving tours of #CES for 10 years now, this is the first year that I'm not checking into a Vegas hotel today! One of the reasons I was brought in to give tours was to help separate things that would be trends from things I didn't think would be trends. While I've had a few misses over the years, I haven't done that badly. So, while most people are currently posting CES trends, I thought I would talk about some things that won't be trends, at least any time soon.

• 8K TV's. Truth be told, no one needs an 8K TV. The average consumer can see the difference be 1080 & 4K, but unless you're seeing the TV's side by side, you can't see difference between 4K and 8K. Secondly, while they certainly will come down in price, 8K TV's are still ridiculously expensive and without a compelling amount of content to watch on it, there's no consumer need. In fact, there's actually not much 4K content out there now. There's no reason to go beyond 4K. Thirdly, after spending billions in capex to upgrade all broadcast facilities to 4K, they're not spending the money to go to 8K. Especially being given that there's not a lot of 8K TV's to pump the content to. 8K and beyond is great for #OOH, but it will be the next consumer 3D.
• Self-driving cars. I have a teenager & believe me, I would love to have self driving cars, but we're at least a decade away from it happening. First, in order for it to really work, all cars need to be connected on same system. So, simple math: There are approximately 284.5 million vehicles registered in the US and we sell about 17 million a year. So it would take about 17 years to replace them all. Then, there's the entire ecosystem around cars today. For example, who does the insurance liability fall to? The consumer in the car? The car company that manufacturers the car? The self-driving AI software? It will take years just to answer that one question and there's are many others like that.
• Drone deliveries. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I'm not a big fan of drone deliveries. Sure, there are remote areas where delivery by drones might make sense, but it certainly doesn't make sense in suburban/urban areas. It's only real advantage is that it's cheaper than human delivery people.
• Slight improvements being touted as big deals. I've been giving tours for 10 years and year after year, we saw slight improvements. I even titled my 2019 review The Year of Being Incremental. Everything got slightly faster & smaller, more things got connected. Maybe missing this year will make next year feel like a real improvement.
• More Data, Less Help. There are lots of health & fitness tools out there helping me quantify, but not quantify. Sure, it can tell me I've met my step goal, but when will it help me adjust my goal because it's raining today? And how many ways do I need to track my sleep? I don't need more data, I need actionable plans!

I'm sure I'll add more throughout the week. So follow me to see what will be the real trends will be and what things everyone will talk about but will never really become a trend. LMK what you think!

Repealing Section 230 - What Does That Really Mean?

Repealing Section 230 has been a hot call this year, even hotter now that it's been tied to additional Covid relief in the Senate. And it's certainly been a hot topic for President Trump all year, even tied into his veto of the defense budget. But there's a serious amount of confusion about what 230 is and how it came about. So, let's start at the beginning.

Section 230 was part of the Communication Decency Act of 1996. Yes, a good 10 years before social media even really existed. It doesn't just protect social media companies from lawsuits coming from what is said on their platforms, it protects all platforms. The language is pretty simple:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"

As the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) explains here, Section 230 gives broad protection from what is said on the internet to the carriers of that information:

In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content.

Hannah Cox also has an excellent review of Section 230 here, with some very good examples of what 230 protects and doesn't protect.

As I said in this Twitter thread, its protections go far beyond just letting Twitter/Facebook share fake news. Without Section 230:

• Conspiracy websites like Qanon, Infowars and even Michael Flynn's new "patriot" website could not be hosted.
• Hate groups would never have been allowed on the air/internet.
• Companies like OANN and Newsmax would never be allowed to start.
• Companies could be held even more liable for things it's employees said in email/Slack, etc., and would need to monitor your communications on those channels in a deeper way.
• Email providers might need to approve every email before it's sent.
• And Trump, who complains about 230 almost daily, would not have any platform to constantly lie about things like that he actually won the election.

I might not have a blog and, if I did, it might take days for someone to approve my content. Technically, 230 even protects you when you pass along that off-color email or make a racist comment about a coworker through an online channel. Think about what would happen to all the communication tools we use today, email, Slack, etc., if they were liable for EVERYTHING said on them.

These are just some of the examples of the way we're all protected by Section 230. The truth is, if 230 is repealed, it wouldn't actually solve the problem that people think it addresses at all. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., might have the financial and legal resources to figure out a way to deal with a repeal, but there's not likely an ability for smaller companies or start-ups to be able to put in place the guardrails they'd need to operate.

The big issue with repealing 230 is that it only attacks one side of the equation, supply. It doesn't deal with the other side of the issue at all - demand.

Lots of folks want to believe in in fake news, misinformation and even hate. It doesn't matter how often we tag information as not being accurate or how much evidence there is against their position, they want to believe. Remember, there are people today who believe the world is flat and have to work very hard to keep that believe in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

At Sydney's school, they actually had classes in how to not only find information, but use critical thinking skills to determine the value of that information. That's not to say that we can't disagree of have different point of views, but there has to be a better understanding of the shared truths that we will hold as a society. We're nowhere near that right now and until that happens, everything is is IMHO pretty useless.

Repealing Section 230 is an easy and wrong answer to a much more complicated problem. Once again, without solving the underlying reasons, we won't really solve the problems we have as a society at all.

Retail as a New (Old) Third Place

American Girl Doll store, NYC

I was involved in a discussion on Twitter today and was reminded on the idea of the the third place. It was a topic that I used to write about about a great deal and with everything happening these days, guess it's kind of fallen off my radar lately. If you don't know the idea of the third place, it's this:

In community building, the third place is the social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). Examples of third places would be environments such as churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, bookstores or parks. In his influential book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

When you look at how companies like Google, Facebook, etc., built their offices, I always thought they were built to really combine the second and third places together. For younger generations, so much of their social life was built around their work environments. For my Dad's generation, you worked and you mainly went home after work. During the dot com boom, they created offices that were for both work and socializing and the Google's of the world took it even further. You could do everything but actually sleep there.

Thanks to Covid, we're all working from home these days and while we talk a lot about how working from home is impacting our businesses, I haven't seen a lot of discussions about how working from home is impacting our social experiences. Yes, we know that covid has seriously impacted socializing right now, but even when Covid has left us, it seems like working from home is with us for the long term.

And that's where retail has an opportunity to step up. Back in 2011, I wrote:

We're missing a big opportunity to emphasize just what makes place special. As I've said in the past, I continue to think that there's a coming trend to socialize the retail environment instead of just merchandising the real estate space.

When Sydney was very young, we used to eat at a Burger King near our house quite often because they had an indoor playground. And it's not just about the actual playground. Since she's an only child, it was about Sydney's desire to play with a group of other children her age and the social aspect of that experience. It's not about the food there (sorry Burger King!), it was about it being a Third Place for Sydney.

So, what is the value of real estate for retailers today? If, thanks to the Covid and the internet people are much more comfortable getting their purchases sent to them, rather then getting them right away, do we need that much space dedicated to merchandise? So, if we can do away with the inventory portion of most retail spaces today, what else would you do with the space? How could you make it a much more social environment, rather than being a retail environment?

And if, thanks to the significant structural changes being made to our work structure, I think that there's a huge opportunity today. I continue to think that there's a coming trend to socialize the retail environment instead of just merchandising the real estate space. And the more we try to use the space for our purposes rather then our guests, the more they'll stay away.

Writing in their Dialogue, Gensler designer Kathleen Jordan talks about how retailers are adding to their experiences:

Familiar “ands,” such as a coffee bar or DJ booth, are commonplace. These added amenities draw from hospitality and are meant to personalize the retail experience and increase how much time consumers spend in a space—the “dwell time,” according to Gensler’s Kathleen Jordan. The right amenity doesn’t compete or distract with the product being sold, but offers a complementary use and a respite that allows consumers to recharge and extend their day.

Starbucks Reserve NYC

Starbucks is almost always one of the first examples given as a third place and their Starbucks Reserve is no different. I've had the chance to visit the original in Seattle as well as the location in Lower Manhattan, pictured below. With more menu choices and an actual bar serving alcohol, they are building on the environments that have driven them for years. Of course, in reaction to Covid, they are also building more drive-thru and pick-up locations., but they are not losing sight of what made them in the first place. A recent article in Restaurant Business about their efforts:

“As we started opening limited seating in our stores with very limited seating, it was immediate,” CEO Kevin Johnson told investors on Wednesday. “Customers were there. They want to be part of that community.

Back in 2017, long before we had ever heard of Covid, Retail Customer Experience had this to say:

Remember that for thousands of years the most powerful social experiences have happened where people gather. Whether it's a street fair or soccer game, a church or a coffee shop, people will always crave company. And what could provide a more engaging and social experience than shopping together? A show-stopping display, the big reveal as a friend emerges from the dressing room, an immersive installation — these occasions beg to be shared. The most compelling social media experiences begin with in-person social interactions.

As we wrote about here, retailers need to be thinking about their post-Covid strategy now, to be ready for when we get back to normal. I had the same challenges writing about the theme park industry right after 9-11. In the weeks after those horrible attacks, I spoke to many colleagues in the entertainment marketing field who all asked the same question: How do we go back to our business in the face of such a tragedy? What we do seems so trivial in the face of such tragedy…so unimportant. I, too, asked the same questions and wondered how I would get back to "business as usual" after these events.

Thanks to encouragement from industry friends and a great editor, Pat Esgate, I wrote a piece entitled The Great Good Places, where I talked about the important need to create fun. I wrote then:

As I thought more about it, the need for fun is a global experience. We may have fun in different ways, but we all like to have fun. Fun is one of the greatest tools we have to create a world of understanding and -- potentially -- peace. Hate can’t thrive in an atmosphere of fun.

Let’s ask how can we create experiences that bring people together to share a common, joyous activity. What we need today is more ways for people to come together and share joy—and that’s what we do. So celebrate the joy that you create.

Retailers now have a huge opportunity to recreate themselves for a new world. For 10+ years, I've been asking Why More Retailers Don't have Genius Bars and maybe this is the time to experiment and add new ideas. The large department stores that seem to be dinosaurs today, were once the forefront of retail experimentation. They were social experiences, where people gathered to be educated, to see the latest and to see each other.

The point is, that as consumers become continue to grow even more sophisticated in their expectations, retailers need to change their approach. I can shop online if all I need is shopping. I go to the store to receive service and I’m expecting more & more. Make my shopping experience my enjoyable. More helpful. More convenient. More of an experience.

If we do lose the office complexes that have been built the last decade or so, people will need new environments to be social and socialize. For decades, teens have used the mall as their socializing place, now more of us might be looking for a new place to hang out.

Retail can be the new (old) third place. As Ray Oldenberg said, third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place. Today, more than ever perhaps, we need our third places as a society and what better way for retailers to help than to be our gathering places.

Movie Theaters Will Be Back

This has been a hard year for movie theaters, possibly their hardest ever. In October, Variety Had a dialogue on the future of theaters. Earlier this month, Warner Bros made news (and a few enemies) when it announced that it would release movies simultaneously on HBO Max and in-cinema on the same today. That effort kicked off yesterday with the launch of WW84.

As a little background on us as a movie family, we love movies! We went to the movies a lot, every week in the summer. I had the AMC Stubs A List and usually I made out pretty well with it. My wife & I did many a date night at the movies and my daughter and I made sure we were in the theater for every super hero movie that came out. You just have to watch those movies on a big screen!

Watching a movie in a movie theater is a completely different experience than watching something at home. At least it is for me. There’s a ritual to seeing a movie in a cinema. I only eat Sno-Caps in a movie theater, despite the fact that I can buy them other places. They get sprinkled into the popcorn to create a melted mess that’s awesome!

Seeing a movie in a theater with an audience also creates a group catharsis that almost never happens for me when watching at home. Part of the issue is the many distractions that I have at home that don’t happen in the theater. I’m constantly looking up trivia or checking emails or doing something completely unrelated at home. In the theater, I’m focused on the screen and the story. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been totally engrossed in a movie in the theater and sometimes even questioned how I thought I liked the movie when watching it at home. Or thought a movie was really funny when surrounded by other people laughing and then sat bored while watching it at home.

At some point today, I will admit that we will be watching WW84 and Soul here at home with the family. But honestly, only because it’s our only way to watch it right now. The smart move would be for these companies to bring them back to the theaters when they reopen later this year. I’d certainly pay to see them on a large screen in a darkened movie theater with my popcorn and Sno-Caps, surrounded by an audience all sharing the same experience.

Plus, I can assure you that my wife will never count it as a date night if we watch a movie at home.

Media Consumption Gen Z

During the Covid break, Sydney and I had the chance to speak with Alyssa Mullin from NUMA New York on a variety of Gen Z topics. In this section, Sydney talks about how they're using things like Instagram and, of course, TikTok. She also talks about her general media consumption and how right now, they're looking for things that make them feel nostalgic. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Media Consumption Gen Z from NUMA New York on Vimeo.

It’s the Little Things

It's 2020 and we're in the middle of a pandemic where people can't go out to eat in restaurants as we usually do. Thankfully, take out and delivery is booming!

So why do so many restaurants still not have their actual menu online??? Sometimes I can find the menu in pictures taken by guests and posted on Yelp or Trip Advisor, but the restaurant itself doesn’t have their menu available. This seems like such a simple thing to do to keep themselves going in these very challenging times. If I can't get this simple, basic information, how can you expect me to buy from you?

It’s always surprising to me how sometimes businesses miss the very simple easy things that they can do to make the sale. If you’re reading this and you own a restaurant, please make sure your menu is available!

Welcome Veda Labs!

We are excited to welcome Veda Labs as a member to the Brand Experience Lab! VedaLabs is an India based company who uses an AI platform that helps retailers gather real time insights. From their website:

Veda labs as an AI platform that offers deep insights powered by computer vision and machine learning. These insights allow a business owner to extract deep insights from any form of video data in real time.

VedaVision™ allows retailers the following:

• Real Time Reporting. A single dashboard that allows you to have a real time data on how your stores are performing based on the consumer insights.
• Actionable Insights. Move more inventory, make store design decisions, improve customer experience and product placement with consumer insights.
• Organizational Control. Having the hierarchy in control, as admin you get the right to allow who sees what in your organizational dashboard.

We're already working together on on a test of their Covid Safety Kit, a solution for retailers that allows you to monitor key parameters like social distancing, mask detection, fever screening, space occupancy & sanitization alerts in real time to keep your space safe.

We're working on their travel plans, but anticipate that they will be here by the end of the month. Please reach out to Jim Ackerman for additional information and to schedule a time to see what they're creating. I'm sure you'll be as excited as we are!

Do You Have a Bank for Times Like This

I know it’s hard to believe, especially for some of the youngsters who might be reading this, but there was a time when air travel was so much nicer than it is today. And no, I’m not talking about back in the 40’s! If you were waiting for a flight to depart and there was a problem, the airline might move you to a competing company to make sure you got to your destination. They might even do that if it was your fault, like getting to the airport late and missing your flight. Not that I have any firsthand knowledge of such a thing, I’ve just heard stories. You might have to pay the difference in airfare, but I don’t remember change fees and all the hoops we have to jump through today to change a flight. Back then, helping you get to your destination was more important and created better loyalty than the immediate loss of revenue.

Then, deregulation hit and yes, prices dropped and more people could fly. I’m not sure that made the experience better, but it did open travel up to a wider audience. But, that deregulation also came at a price, and not just monetarily. Where previously, almost all airlines realized that they needed to compete and cooperate, now they just competed. And with fares dropping, they started to add additional fees to everything they did. The said it was better for us, they really started to make a lot more money on all of these charges. In 2018 alone, airlines made a collective $5 billion in baggage fees alone. From a piece in the news today in the Washington Post:

Consumer groups have long pushed for airlines to do away with change fees, arguing they can be unreasonable, sometimes costing almost half the price of the original ticket. But airlines have steadfastly resisted because such fees have become a lucrative revenue stream. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. carriers made $2.8 billion from reservation change fees in 2019, roughly 1.4 percent of their total operating revenue. Airlines made even more on baggage fees, roughly $5.8 billion, about 2.9 percent of their total operating revenue.

Change fees have become particularly onerous these days. I’ve sometimes had to pay more than the cost of the ticket to make a change. I think United had a change fee of $200, it was absolutely crazy.

So now that the airline industry has been hit hard by Covid, they’re starting to make some changes. Effectively immediately, United will drop change fees on all of its domestic flights.

“Change is inevitable these days — but it’s how we respond to it that matters most,” United chief executive Scott Kirby said. “When we hear from customers about where we can improve, getting rid of fees is often the top request. “Following previous tough times, airlines made difficult decisions to survive, sometimes at the expense of customer service (Emphasis mine),” Kirby said. “United Airlines won’t be following that same playbook as we come out of this crisis. Instead, we’re taking a completely different approach — and looking at new ways to serve our customers better.”

The truth is, businesses have long been screwing over customers in their rush to generate more revenue. While all airlines have had their issues, United had some doozy’s! How many of you remember United Breaks Guitars? This was a pretty big deal back in 2009 and frankly, it didn’t seem to really change much. They had a very clear philosophy - “We don’t really care if you fly with us or not.” BTW, the video below has a solid 20,000,000 views today.

And no matter how many times airlines ran commercials about how important you, the customer, were to them, but at the end of the day, we knew the didn’t really care. As long as they got money from us, they would tolerate our public griping. There were certainly times that people got individual help (over the years, I certainly did), for the most part, they never acted liked they cared one way to the other.

Now they need us. They asked for billions in taxpayer support money, which they got, but travel hasn’t picked up at all. Now it’s important to put customers first. I appreciate that they’re doing this, but after years of putting money first, they’re maybe realizing that with our customers, they don’t actually have a business.

There are examples of companies that have put customers first, but they’re really few and far between. Those companies have built bank with their customers so when something does go wrong, they have something to withdraw from that bank. far too many companies don’t have enough money in their customer accounts for times like this. They have been drawing down on accounts without putting anything back for far too long.

How is your customer balance sheet? Have you been taking with out giving? Would your customers agree with your assessment? You can’t just show up in the bad times and ask for help.

Media, Marketing, and Gen Z - It's All About the Experience

Don't forget to join us this Thursday for a fun talk about media, marketing and #GenZ. Sydney Polinchock & I will be talking about:

• The relationship between Gen Z and technology. What media are they consuming? How is this influencing the way they spend your time and money?
• What is the biggest challenge in marketing to Gen Z right now? What are marketers getting wrong?
• Who is getting it right? What marketing campaigns are resonating right now?
• What trends are you most excited about moving forward? * What trends are you not excited about?

Hit the link here for additional information and registration. Looking forward to a fun and informative conversation!