Being meaningful and useful is core to using technology, according to Cheil China ECD Jacky Lung, while Cheil PengTai Beijing associate innovation research director, Alex Liu, says technology is a weapon in a war of time.
The senior Cheil network staffers met with The Drum at Adfest in Thailand this week, discussing the delicate balance between technology and creative and noting the importance of making people comfortable using tech, so that theyll give you their time.
Liu went as far as to say that tech is a weapon in what has now become a war of time. I think the tech we use is a weapon. If you want to go to war, you must have a weapon and we think the future is a war of time. Inn China there are 700m internet users. What we are facing now is to develop the user to use the internet but to also have their time. When users see ads or use a product, you are asking them not to pay money but to pay with their life.
We think we should use new technology to help build the long-term relationship with the customer, so we can have their time and communicate with them. We can then use the data, share with them and enrich the user experience, he explained.
Liu believes this is what he now sees as IoME - the internet of marketing experience, which he believes is what helps to connect technology to the all important insights.
Lung agrees, as he says it cannot be technology for the sake of it: I think technology must be used in our daily life and make people feel comfortable.Technology should support creative to make new ideas that really could help common people. If not, I think that's meaningless technology.
Technology could help brands to be close to customers, to communicate with customers and help to change their life, to make everyone's life better. That's really useful technology, added Lung.
One of the oversights people make is making things complicated, both Liu and Lung advocated using technology such as HTML5 to power online experiences because it meant that it could be easily integrated into platforms like WeChat.
To illustrate how Cheil China and Cheil PengTai Beijing were applying the idea of using tech to make peoples life better, they gave three examples of recent projects.
The first is a piece of connected tech that tracks vital health signs without people needing to alter their behaviour. Doctor on the way is a connected handle on the bus that reads heart rate and scans for body fat, displaying it to the commuter to show them how healthy they are.
Liu discussed a connected T shirt, called Super-T, that links to an app, which users can personalise by drawing in the app and sending to the front of the shirt.
Thirdly was a connected water bottle, Gululu (pictured), that aims to encourage children to drink more by showing a Tamagochi-style digital pet on the front that grows as the bottle is drunk from. The bottle is also connected to an app that informs parents about their childs consumption habits.
According to Lung, the insight and idea was driven by the creative side but the client, Bowhead Technology, drove the manufacturing. After being on Kickstarter, the bottle is now set for a US release, as well as being available in China.
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The internet of marketing experiences: Cheil China on using tech as a weapon in a war of time - The Drum