The death of the printed news is old news, and the success of the driving app Waze isn’t really news. But together, they collectively represent a trend that portends a massive change that will span many industries. Not only will customers and industries expect accurate predictions of what is coming, personalized for their needs, the accuracy and length (timeline) of the accuracy of the prediction will become a common measure of success.
OK, let’s start with newspapers. We all know print news is dying fast. That’s because what used to be an industry all about knowing something we didn’t and telling us all about it (what happened yesterday). That was great when they had communications channels that allowed them to know everything first. What changed in the last 20 years is that with smartphones in our hands, between online web sites with breaking news, and our own network of friends and colleagues, we expect to know everything that is going on in near real time. Even if we didn’t care, we knew by dinner time Saturday that Nyquist lost the Preakness and there would be no triple crown winner. What that means is that for the Sunday New York Times, they had to print something the next day that told people something they didn’t already know (I will blog separately about how interesting it is to see what the news people are doing in response to this new reality). Someone knew the information in pieces, the newspaper used to bring it all together and that was the first time it was collected and accessible as data. Now it’s data in real time.
We EXPECT to know everything, every piece of news information, that matters in near real time.
Waze is the massively popular driving app that had an extremely clever adoption scheme (ask me about that if you don’t already know that story). Their premise was that if everyone on the road has the app, and they are willing to report accidents and traffic jams, and police cars, and road closures, we can all get real time guidance on the fastest and safest way to get from Point A to Point B. If you opt in to having your location be known, you can expect to get real time traffic information in exchange.
We EXPECT to know everything about traffic information in real time.
What this means is that we will expect this sort of real time information for every experience we have. Increasingly the data is there. From big data, to big information, to big intelligence we will go. When we are at the airport we will expect to know when our plane changes gates, or is running late and how that will ripple through to when we will be getting home and whether we will be late for dinner. In business, if we run a delivery service, we will expect our drivers to know that there is bad weather in Chicago and that we will need to find another supplier of beets for our customer, and notify everyone in real time of the change, and the reason.
These things are all happening now.
What’s going to be different is how far into the future predictions can be made. Waze will probably be able to tell me that it’s going to rain tomorrow morning, and know that I will plan to be in my car taking my son to school at 7AM and predict that there is an 80% chance of an accident on our route and that I should plan to leave 15 minutes earlier than usual. And if that doesn’t happen – I will complain to a colleague in disbelief that I wasn’t notified.
So as we get better about mapping customer experience journeys and operations impacts from those journeys, we need to start looking around the corner and see that these expectations of predictions are coming, and they are coming to most industries, digital and physical. Whether I am trending toward spending too much this month on food so that my savings plan for my kids college is in the red for the month – those digital things will come just as fast as the warnings about running out of oil in my car in the next 2,000 miles.
We will be seeing around corners.
We will expect it.
The companies that get their first will have an advantage.
Who will that be?
Are you ready?
What will we do differently with real time news? How will we make decisions differently? How will processes change?
Travel is a good example.
Generally, advertisers will need to deliver personalized, realtime, valuable messages, rather than pushing out a broad campaign to a broad market segment.