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"If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation." — Don Draper, "Mad Men" (Read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 and Part 4 of this Death of Advertising series.) The advertising winds are changing. Prior to reading this article, how many of you clicked on a banner ad in Facebook? How many clicked on the thirty second spot prior to watching a YouTube video? How many of you clicked on the first one or two search (paid search) results after throwing a query to Google? And let's say one percent of you who read above did do this – how many of you actually purchased? And then of that percentage, how many paid with cash or credit card and didn't use PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay? Why is paying with PayPal, Apple Pay, and/or Google Pay good for the data business? It allows companies to reconcile advertising dollars with bought product. We are in the throes of going through the same radical change in the late 1990s and early 2000s as online advertising did when they said hits were no longer important. It was page views that meant anything. And then later it became the 'visit' that the view consisted of. Was it an anonymous visit or an identified visitor via social sharing, newsletter sign up, cookies, or using data forensic tools? The change is showing the difference between the concept ad recall lift versus real consumers, watching real ads that are pertinent, to actual product purchase. To the rescue – maybe Social media was the supposed savior for locking real advertising to real eyeballs. However, followers are not always real. Either followers are bots or they are bought . While in the Philippines, I personally encountered several startups whose revenue was promising social media followers in the tens of thousands for monthly subscription rates creating a social media black market . E-commerce with recommendation engines were the next way to lock in a golden grail of advertising such as the one created by Amazon . However, how many ads show up after you have purchased a product? As I am typing this article, I am receiving several banner ads for a product I already own and purchased weeks ago on Amazon.com. Web cookies and browsing history predict the future on the recent past – even if that means you have already spent money. Regardless, the digital advertising space is heating up as Walmart last year purchased ModCloth for $75 million USD after a year earlier purchasing Jet.com for $3 billion USD. And it's more than Walmart ($121 billion USD) trying to compete in the e-commerce space against Amazon's $177 billion USD in e-commerce revenue. Sellable data oil As Facebook earlier this year revealed , it was selling your data to the highest bidder in order for its services to be free. Finally, it was acknowledged that all these online companies are generating this new sellable data oil but keeping it in a black box away from the peering eyes of the consumers who generate it. Another source of this new data oil is coming from media companies such as Netflix. When people talk about this current golden age of television with the help of Netflix changing all the rules, especially exploding the budgets of normal content production, people are less likely to talk about the free cash flow and the $6 billion USD in debt that Netflix currently holds. While it talks up its $8 billion USD in content budget for its pipeline of upcoming shows, documentaries, and series. One of the reasons you won't see Warren Buffett or Berkshire Hathaway not investing in Netflix anytime soon or better stated – ever – is the lack of sustainable value. How is Netflix attempting to generate value? Netflix has been circumventing the demographic dominance of Nielsen Ratings by harvesting viewer patterns of its content called " taste clusters ". Its value then is derived from its big data strategy . A lesson to learn On another front, Netflix says it’s keeping costs internally by getting rid of the outsourcing model of creating content by keeping everything in house. However, the company could learn a thing or two from the failure of ABC's mid-1980s show "Moonlighting". ABC attempted to create its own IP when it debuted "Moonlighting" with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. It also created a brand new category of series called dramedy. But ultimately, the cost per episode and lack of new episodes caused ratings to plummet. "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" episode for "Moonlighting" cost a then-unheard-of sum of $2 million in 1986 dollars. It wasn't a total failure. "Moonlighting" did inspire recent favorites such as "Community" that introduced meta concepts and breaking the fourth wall thanks to writers such as Donald Glover. Also, both won accolades by several Emmy nominations and generated huge followings. Netflix's "Stranger Things" season two cost $8 million USD dollars per episode. This overpricing of price per episode is said to be what finally leads to an implosion within the industry. However, Netflix's strategy to drive profits is to keep pushing subscriptions, especially internationally. However, the more content that people want to watch, the more sharing of Netflix logins are occurring that is plateauing the rise of its subscription base. That's why they are always toying with a concurrency strategy. Note that there is a direct correlation to the rising price Netflix charges for this monthly subscription to the aggregation of subscribers under the same login, especially when you look at international markets. The commercial cataclysm So we are facing an oncoming train wreck – advertising that can't be directly linked to product purchase, content that is overpriced by those who create it, and consumer data that is not usable because it's an invasion of privacy especially as Europe passes new data privacy legislation GDPR. That means over the next decade a media technology startup must rise that will find a way to create original programming that lures audience with an optimal pricing (not too high, not too low) per episode, create commercials that consumers actually want to see, and give them a one- button solution to purchase without seeming like they are stalking them online. Amazon Prime is nearly there. It offers retail and it offers products to purchase, but it's dependent on its recommendation engine – based on past, rarely present experiences to link the two together. However, 108 Media , the decade-old international media company originally out of Toronto but now with offices in Singapore, Tokyo, and soon-to-be Hong Kong, thinks that there is a simple, easy way to solve all these issues. Full disclaimer – I am the director of innovation. As I have asked during numerous conferences: "Have you ever looked at someone else's ATM receipt which is lying around while you are withdrawing or depositing money?" I pause and then answer, "I always do." The reason I look at ATM receipts is I want to know where I belong. I want to compare myself with others to gauge my success or my "tribe". This is based off of a Map of Me analytics engine we built with SAP HANA back in 2010 – that we have later ported to other open source technologies. I have believed for nearly a decade now that allowing the users to see themselves, or what I call the "art of transparent data science," and allowing consumers to change their behavior on their terms. I have even gone so far to say that banks should give the seven-year-old expired data from their data warehouses back to the customers themselves. Media shouldn't be any different. Allow customers to pay for subscriptions if they do not want to be bothered by ads (as it stands now). But if they want free content, allow your customers to choose the ads based on tasks – grocery shopping per day, per week, per month. Or allow customers to choose tasks such as home improvement or back to school to have ads be shown as options. Also give them the option to choose the things they like such as favorite actors for branding, favorite products they use on a regular basis, and favorite locations – cities, city blocks and/or neighborhoods. Then the customer chooses a piece of content they want to watch and swipe a commercial into the three available slots pre-defined. Now the ads that show up at the top of the options are called "lazy ads" and are bought such as paid search. They can be branded and paid for optimally using Google AdWords. The commercials will be subset by customer preferences but will not be limited. The target for these commercials are simply by lazy consumers who just want to watch the content already. There have been some options of this already, especially if you have watched the recent TBS show "The Last O.G." with Tracy Morgan and Tiffany Haddish where viewers can choose to watch a pre-cued advertisement for 60 seconds or choose an interactive 30-second ad. Other options offer "you watch us, we watch you" analytics where we show you what other people of your same demographic, location are a watching much like Spotify shows your social media friends of what songs they are listening to while you are watching. Mostly importantly, when the credits began to show, all the commercials you chose turn into QR Codes that can be downloaded into an e-Wallet or emailed to you to be used at your favorite retail store. So the more you watch, the more you save. See a demo of the 108 prototype below. The creative cataclysm Right now commercials are thrown at us sometimes at random – as I say, "Like a wacky wall walker ." Sometimes it's entertaining, but mostly it’s a waste of time and you just end up throwing it away. Giving the consumer the choice to choose content plus commercial allows the creative a lot of freedom. Imagine finding the organic clustering of which content goes with what ads. And because of the "choose your own adventure" aspect and allowing consumers to only cue eight commercials in a row to watch content and not create endless playlists of commercials and content you can never get to – it allows for a more real-time analysis of what shows are hot. Also shows branding opportunities for creatives to utilize when locking funds for projects. Because your show makes the products being sold money, they will likely sponsor or do product placements to keep costs of production down. More importantly, it allows for creatives to dictate the story arch of their online shows. A writer or director can choose where the commercial goes – as each story has a three-chapter arch – allowing them to build a show to a pitch and the consumer chooses the commercial break. As opposed to video on-demand services such as Hulu that allows you to select certain types of commercials but arbitrarily they slice content to put in an ad. Maybe they prevent a much-needed beat to happen in a show to build tension. We are a long way from the days of the 1950s New York’s Madison Avenue ad executives such as George Lois (who Don Draper was based upon). Or are we? A radical idea What if the inventory of ads that have been collected over time can be loaded up as options? That one of the preferences of the system is to allow consumers to choose their favorite commercials of all time? Or choose the decade of ads they want to see as a selection prior to watching content? But what if the future ad agencies – equipped with what shows sell exactly what products and when – can create branded ads that link directly into shows or messages being told in stories? Imagine a day when consumers watch all the commercials with the same enthusiasm as those in the United States watch Super Bowl ads. Also imagine the day that the decades of advertising sitting in digital vaults no longer have to be YouTube fodder but can now be loaded up as options to be chosen as commercials to be watched prior to watching any content. Such as Coca-Cola re-releasing its Mean Joe Green ad for you to choose. But that would mean a drastic shift in how media and advertising currently works. It's a radical idea to give the consumer the choice to know what you know about them from a data perspective, allow them to change their own viewer behavior, save money on the products they want to purchase already, and all the while entertain. The future of the creative and commercials is throwing caution to the wind. Allowing the consumer to choose in what direction they want to go. Allowing them to dictate their own conversation. "You can be careful, or you can be creative, but you can't be a Cautious Creative)." — George Lois Article written by Gary Jackson Image credit by Getty Images,  Moment, MirageC Want more? For Job Seekers | For Employers | For Influencers

American writer, futurist, and businessman Alvin Toffler observed major technological innovations – including television, the birth control pill, and travel by jet aircraft – and the cresting of the transformative wave from an industrial to a post-industrial society in which brain work was dominant over physical labor. Looking forward, Toffler saw more and more rapid innovation and greater social dislocation. In response, Toffler suggested that we need to develop a more “anticipatory democracy” as a cure. AI comes to the rescue With that in mind, it’s important to note the massive potential advantages that artificial intelligence presents. A modern example would be where AI is being used for stroke and cancer treatment, making recommendations based on medical records. According to Bernard Marr, in his recent Forbes article “ The Amazing Ways Infervision Uses AI To Detect Strokes ”: “It is hoped that the [Infervision] technology will soon go into widespread use and save lives by allowing doctors to more quickly and accurately diagnose strokes and assess the damage they have caused. It is the second medical technology based around machine learning which Infervision has reported success with – I previously mentioned their platform which detects early signs of lung cancer in X-ray and CT scans. Over 100,000 annotated medical image scans were used to train the algorithms, which given more live data will become increasingly efficient at diagnosing the two main types of stroke, hemorrhagic and ischemic," wrote Marr. “Infervision founder and CEO Chen Kuan told me that ‘X-ray is a very old type of medical check-up – in China, for example, no one had mentioned chest X-ray in academic conferences for more than 15 years. Until very recently with the arrival of AI. AI has helped radiologists discover problems they previously weren’t able to see. So we are very proud to see radiologists starting to discuss some very interesting and fantastic cases involving AI.’ It’s certainly a fantastic example of the ways new technology can unlock value from data which has been around for a long time.” Marr continues, “One of the major problems it solves is how to measure the volume of blood lost in hemorrhagic (bleeding) strokes. When every second is critical following a stroke, doctors generally use a simple mathematical formula to “guesstimate” as best as possible how much blood is lost. Research shows the more accurately this volume is assessed, the more likelihood a patient has of recovery, due to how it affects treatment.” Applying AI AI is a computer system and a collective of advanced technologies that allow machines to sense, comprehend, and learn. Organizations across sectors are amplifying their reach and impact with the use of technology like AI, which is a mimic-human intelligence that is being accepted into various fields including medicine. One of the most important areas of application is stroke medicine. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. and is a major cause of serious disability for adults. About 795,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke each year. The main reason is known as occlusion, which is caused because of lack of flow of blood to a portion of the brain is blocked. AI is applied for improving the accuracy of diagnosis and the quality of patient care, and it is applied to decipher the data from stroke imaging. Modern researchers have created an AI system that scans routine medical data to predict which patients will have strokes or heart attacks within 10 years. The AI system is more accurate than doctors using standard techniques, but it faces regulatory hurdles. In the near future, similar therapeutic methods, including predicting the treatment for the stroke patients, will be carried out efficiently and provide the most effective treatment which brings valuable insights, implicit knowledge, and unique perspectives. Existential challenge of superintelligent machines In a national survey by Pew Research Center, Americans expect that within 50 years robots and computers will “definitely” or “probably” do much of the work currently done by humans. These challenges require both immediate and future action. Computing systems are already outperforming humans in many tasks that profoundly shape the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics, microbiology, radiology, robotics, and healthcare, as well as paving a way for future computer-aided software devices and machine learning. While clear upsides and opportunities exist, there is a chasm between the state of technology and the state of clinical practice, with technology far outpacing the readiness of clinicians to adopt it. There has also been a high level of public distrust in AI, particularly regarding job security and clinician concerns, which is being superimposed on medicine. Not to mention the possible, near-future reality of superintelligent machines. These machines are envisioned to be superior to human brains (even a collective of brains) in performance, scale, and speed. All signs point to modern corporations and health organizations continuing to apply machine learning and deep learning techniques to their existing business models in the attempt to create new medical advances, business opportunities, and profit centers with the help of AI. Article written by Raj Kosaraju Image credit by Getty Images, DigitalVision Vectors, Pobytov Want more? For Job Seekers | For Employers | For Influencers

"I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin." — Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World" This week it was announced Sears will be closing all its mall locations in Asheville, North Carolina. Sears has been the cornerstone of the American mall experience since the 1960s and 1970s. But if you have been to a mall lately, you will notice shopping malls have become a barren wasteland of mobile phone repair stores, manicure and pedicure salons, and gag gift shops from hell with the likes of Spencer’s or Hot Topic. In the United States, in the mid-1990s, malls were still being constructed at a rate of 140 a year. And in 2007, a year before the Great Recession, not one mall was built within the United States. The mall experience A lot has happened since the pinnacle of the quintessential mall experience and you can see it in the YouTube video documenting the heyday to the dilapidation of the Owings Mills Mall in Maryland. Online retailers such as Amazon and eBay are not solely responsible for the destruction of the mall culture that made up the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, but its decay was first hastened by the rise of hypermarkets such as Target and Walmart. Today, in the United States malls have become haunted shells of their former selves. The trend carries over to Asia. It's so bad that in Bangkok, Thailand a mall has become an aquarium for Koi fish. Malls are not the only places dying. Movie theaters have seen a significant drop off of in attendance since the rise of streaming with services such as Hulu and Netflix. The film industry is scared . But what if the two dying cathedrals of Americana – malls and movie theaters – could be reborn into one? And what if the very technology which is being used to kill them both could be its savior? Now reach out in front of you and don your virtual reality headset. Virtual reality has hit a stalemate in adoption (other than in the areas of porn and video gaming), but even those lucrative markets are not enough to create mainstream adoption. Nor have filmmakers found a runaway success in the new medium that is virtual reality. Not yet. Of course, there has been some popular immersive content pieces such as Dreamscape’s: "Alien Zoo" and The Void's: "Star Wars – Secrets of the Empire" which have been lucrative. But an amazing trend has developed for both of these successes: the abbreviation is LBVR (Location Based Virtual Reality) – physical places for immersive experiences. The Out-Of-Home entertainment sector is exploding. People trend towards experiences with virtual reality outside their homes or with others. Immersive storytelling is steering away from voyeur experiences and instead creating intimacy between the story and the person experiencing it. If Steven Spielberg and Hollywood’s biggest players including 21st Century Fox, Warner Bros, Nickelodeon and AMC Entertainment get their way, they hope to open up Dreamscape VR Centers in the lobbies of AMC cinema complexes around the world. IMAX is also getting into immersive storytelling by opening up IMAX VR Experience Centers across the United States, Britain, Middle East, Japan and China. So the future of storytelling could find it's rebirth in the closed-down Pearls Centre in Singapore. Imagine a re-opened mall where each store front is now a new film to be experienced. Or what if future binge watching is a return to 1985 and spending all day at the mall. The food court returns to being the crux of teenage courtship and getting your snack food energy boost between a virtual film marathon. In the book "Brave New World" , the feelies are movies that are experienced not only through sight and sound but also through touch. "'Well, that was grand!' he said to himself when it was all over. 'Really grand!' He mopped his face. When they had put in the feely effects at the studio, it would be a wonderful film." — Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World" So maybe a new brave new mall would mean the next decade of technology achieves what the decades before couldn't – attract people to physical a place to have a shared experience together. And it just happens to be where Sears used to be. Article written by Gary Jackson Image credit by IMAX VR Want more? For Job Seekers | For Employers | For Influencers