In the very near future, sophisticated users of multimedia services and their fast followers will begin to put a price on their privacy and turn the profile data they create to their advantage, but only after service providers have earned their trust.
Of all the far-out and fabulous trends identified by Oracle and U.K.-based consulting group The Future Laboratory, in a report called “Capitalizing on the Digital Age,” trust is the most fundamental and requisite. The report examines how the digital world changes consumer behavior and the challenges that will present for communications and media companies in the future. It includes everything from augmented reality to the buying of virtual goods. But it focuses on the opportunity for service providers to become the hub of it all.
The study was supported by expertise from Martin Lindstrom, author of the book “Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Buy”; Hugh Garry from BBC Radio 1 Interactive; and Anders Sandberg from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, among others. It looked at how current and emerging social, cultural, economic and technological forces — such as the technical sophistication of consumers and advances in personalization — would impact the future business models of communications and media companies over the next decade.
The study predicted that contextual branding will enable companies to better target consumers through predictive and geospatial software. “Contextual branding will become the norm,” Lindstrom said. “The entire world will be based on timing and context in the future and few, if any, ads will live outside this space.”
The study also painted a future where “multi-screens” will allow different members of a household to watch diverse content at the same time, and the eye-appeal approach will be replaced by emotional profiling.
“There are a lot of words in this report we don’t typically use in the telecom world, like intimacy and emotional connections, that create a whole new way for information to relate,” said Gordon Rawling, EMEA senior marketing director for Oracle Communications. And because it begins to get personal, Rawling said that as orchestrators of new media content with unique access to customer information, service providers have to “establish a relationship of trust.”
The study said consumers will recognize the value of their personal data and stop giving it away for free. What they want in return is relevance. Whether it is content, advertising or advice, end users want it to be relevant to them in real time and in relation to their location.
“This future drives different requirements for BSS and OSS,” Rawling said. “At the root of all of this will be the ability to translate the incredible wealth of data that service providers have about customers every second of every day into relevant information and augment that with insights from social groups and combining work and personal use. I would be happy for a service provider to augment that and play it back to me in terms of services I might be interested in and which assume a level of trust that is, unfortunately, a step beyond where service providers and most customers are today.”
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