Shopping Bots and the Great Worm Wars of the Future
(A light hearted view of the future with some serious implications for marketing extracted from PR Smith & D Chaffey’s eMarketing eXcellence book & eMarketing eXcellence CD)
Web access via PCs will decline as a proportion as more people use mobiles, handheld devices, cars, clothes and Virtual Worlds to engage with the Internet . Things are changing. Here’s a view of the future, its environment and what the post-PC customer might be like. By the end of this section you will have a glimpse of the future and the customers within it. Let’s step into the future now.
The post-PC customer may occasionally accept payment to view some ads. The rest are screened out by both filtering software and PVRs (personal video recorders) with wall-to-wall screen TVs.
Neither governments nor society permit old style intrusive advertising anymore. No more intrusive evening telephone calls from script reading intelligent agents. It is also illegal to litter anyone’s doorstep or house with mail shots and inserts. Heavy fines stopped all that a long time ago. The only ads that do get inside are carried by the many millions of private media owners who rent out their cars, bikes and bodies as billboards.
The tedious task of shopping for distress purchases like petrol, electricity or memory storage is delegated completely to embedded shopping bots.
Non-embedded bots spun out of control some years ago when they first appeared in three-dimensional hovering holograms – always at your side, always double checking the best price for hire cars, hotels, even drinks at the bar. Some are programmed to be polite, others aggressive or even abusive. All are programmed to be intrusive whenever anything is being bought.
Delays on buses and traffic jams regularly occurred when argumentative bots engaged in lengthy negotiations with bus drivers. Frustration broke out. Bots attacked bots, people attacked bots and bot owners. Eventually bots were banned from buses, planes, trains and several ‘peaceful supermarkets’.
Next came the great worm wars. Programming bots so they only buy your brand – for life. But, unlike humans, bots can be re-programmed by a competitor. The advertising agent worm was born. Agent eaters soon followed.
Despite being information fatigued and time compressed, the post-PC customer lives a lot longer than many bots. And certainly longer than most of the new brands that seem to come and go. The 150-year-old person has already been born.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, microwaves insist on offering suggestions of ideal wines to go with your meal, offering instant delivery from the neighbourhood’s wired-up 24-hour roving delivery van. Your fridge offers special incentives to buy Pepsi when you run out of Coke (or whichever brand owns or hires the ‘infomediary’ or the fridge-linked database). Children happily play chess and interact with their opponents on giant vertical screens (which are the side of the fridge). Voice-operated computers are considered noisy and old fashioned as discrete, upmarket, thought-operated computers operate silently, but extremely effectively.
And all the time Bluetooth type technology facilitates ubiquitous communications which allows constant interaction between both man and machines, and machine and machine. The tectonic shift will continue.
Think of a world without TV ads, billboards and direct mail – a world where customers choose the information they want to receive. How will businesses reach their target markets in this new environment?
And all the time, the technology, if truly mastered, can free up time to do the important things that give the post-PC customer a genuinely higher quality of life.
Now step into today’s virtual worlds and consider virtual customers in virtual worlds ..
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