Earlier this week, I helped film two days of panels devoted to data marketing. Appropriately called Data Marketing Toronto 2017, the conference attracted marketing heads from a huge swath of today's society, from Canadian Tire and SickKids to Canada Post, Scotiabank and Blockchain Canada.
What is data? It's our buying habits, credit card charges, Facebook Likes, Tweets, Google searches and anything we keyboard on our phones, 'pads and PCs (for those who still use them). Marketers take that raw info (or try get it from you) and determine how to sell you their products and services.
I'm not a marketer, though I write, do social media and make videos (which create marketing data), but I learned these things:
1. Data is the new oil. (Oil, BTW, crashed three years ago and is now only half its peak value.)
2. A goldfish has a longer attention span than a human being (about 6 seconds).
3. Keyboarding a Google search is so 2016. Pretty soon, we'll all be talking to Google (and other apps).
4. New software can interpret social media to read human emotions, such as joy and fear.
5. It's impossible for an adult to sit still longer than 65 seconds without checking his/her smartphone.
6. Smartphones are teddy bears for adults: we cling to them for security instead of facing other humans and risk unpredictable interaction.
7. Big companies collect data on everyone, a lot of it personal, but most of us don't care because we're used to giving it up in return for free software.
8. Data will keep growing, but there's too much social media for any human being to digest every day. (Hence, all these panels about how to cut through the noise.) Are we hitting peak data? Will there be a backlash and more of us join the Minimalism Movement?
9. The future is AI (artificial intelligence). The future is next week.
10. Nobody writes stories anymore. Everything written is a list.
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