Four words
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View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) Here are four words that are going to influence how you work, where you are going to work and what you define as being of intrinsic value as a professional creative in the years ahead.
Network Humans are a networking species. Up until recently, much of that capability was limited to people connecting to other people via institutions and traditional media. Mobile devices have put us on a new vector. We are already halfway to connecting everyone on the planet. Today, there are 5.5 billion people over the age of 14 and close to 5 billion of them have mobile phones—about half of which are smartphones. The closer we get to the goal of connecting everyone, the more we’re going to see the benefits of what’s called the networking effect: the more people that get added, the better an experience can get. The deeper we network, the more our perceptions change about what’s possible.
Automation The part about automation that interests me the most these days is machine learning. It’s the part of technology that’s capable of making predictions. And that’s a powerful ability in marketing. You already see its presence in the amount of personalization that’s happening online—in cloud-based services, targeted ads, product recommendations, news articles and other digital experiences. Look at what it’s already done to the advertising industry. Today, one third of all ads are online. The lion’s share of that is going to just two places: Google and Facebook. Nearly all of that has come at the expense of newspapers. And TV ad sales are next on the hit list: they’re already reporting their biggest revenue drop in 20 years. It might hollow out entire industries, but smarter predictions and greater personalization means creative work can be much more niche focused than ever before.
Blockchain The blockchain is still a new idea, but it’s on track to change the way we work and do business with each other. In essence, it’s a digital leger: a decentralized database that keeps a permanent record of who owns what, backed by encryption with exceptionally high fault tolerance. Yes, the energy cost of running a blockchain application today is massive, but those costs will shrink—as they do with every technology. Money is just one application for it. This innovation is going to start making sense in a lot of other industries. Intellectual property, contracts and personal records all have a stake in this, too, because each of them depends on costly centralized systems to be trusted. Power is concentrated in centralized systems. It’s diffuse in decentralized ones. Creativity thrives best in the latter of these, because it’s where randomness and the unexpected tend to get rewarded best.
Skills The value of education is shifting from hard to soft skills. Most of the hard skills that schools used to have a monopoly on can now be acquired online. Soft skills can’t. And that makes them more valuable than ever. For a creative pro, it means seeking out places and people who can teach negotiation, resiliency, the application of compound interest, the ability to take criticism, how to work with difficult people, as well as opportunity cost and diminishing returns. Find those people, places and experiences that can teach you soft skills: your future hinges on it.
Each of these four words points to a fundamental rethink about who, what, where, why and how we are going to connect with each other in the future. Understanding that shift is going to be essential for anyone dedicated to the business of being creative.
Very best, Patrick
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