Three AM Trends For The Future - That Didn't Make It Into My STM London Talk (10)
Three AM Trends For The Future - That Didn't Make It Into My STM London Talk
People who were there may not believe this, but I originally had nearly twice as much material for my STM London 2015 talk as ended up in the final version.
For those of you who weren't: before I narrowed it down to "Rise of the Robot Affiliate", my London talk was going to be a general futurology discussion about upcoming technology and what it means for affiliates. But that topic proved way too broad, as there's far, far too much interesting stuff happening right now. So I narrowed my topic down for STM London - and that means that there's lots of other interesting stuff that didn't make it in, which I will be covering over the next few weeks.
To start us off, here's one thing that can make a difference to your campaigns right now, one thing that could be a mobile-sized opportunity very soon, and one thing that will just blow your mind...
Practical Right Now: CSS animation
Animated images are a pain in the ass. On the one hand, they catch the eye, provably boost engagement, and generally do Very Good Things on any campaign element where you introduce them. On the other hand, they bloats file sizes like crazy - a big GIF on mobile carrier, for example, will bring the entire thing to a screeching halt.
But over the last few years, there's been a bit of a revolution in animation on the Web, as browsers are increasingly capable of doing very cool things with animated elements using CSS and a bit of Javascript - meaning that you can introduce animated elements for the cost of a few bytes rather than a few megabytes.
Snabbit.js is currently my favourite library for Web animation. It's very lightweight - 5kb. It's easy to use for simple things - creating an animated CTA is a matter of a few lines of code, for example. It's capable of animating large numbers of elements, and it works in 3D as well as 2D.
Here's a short list of things that you can do with Snabbit or similar tools in your campaigns:
- Introduce very natural animation to your Call To Action - pulsing, bouncing, physics-based, whatever. This has been shown to be a simple, effective way to increase clickthroughs.
- Create animation within your images on adult and dating landers. Adult landers in particular do very well with animated elements, but on mobile you get into the filesize hole. Using CSS/JS animation, you can have your cake - animated elements - and eat it too - low filesizes.
- Make your landers stand out. Animation provides a very simple way to make landers stand waaaaay out from the competition. For example, rather than a simple grid of images for a dating lander, you can do something like this with your images.
- Make your landers more interactive and dynamic. It's a very human response to enjoy interacting with something and making it move. Simple animations within your lander can encourage your users to interact, and once a user has interacted once they're far more likely to interact again - say, by signing up for your offer.
I'll be writing a tutorial on using Snabbit to animate your CTAs very soon - look out for that.
If you're not into the coding, there are a number of graphical tools also appearing that offer CSS animation functionality. Adobe Edge Animate and Google Web Designer both offer some pretty sophisticated animation options - I've seen some landers that Zeno made using Edge Animate, for example, which look really awesome.
Get In Early: Virtual And Augmented Reality
What do Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Valve and Sony have in common?
They're all working on Virtual Reality as one of their top priorities right now. And if you want to be ahead of the curve in advertising and technology now, you should at least have it on your radar.
I've been testing the latest wave of Virtual Reality headsets for the past two years, and I can tell you this: they work. They're not just hype. And given the scale of investment that's going into this new technology, it seems at least a reasonably good bet that VR will be the next wave to hit on the scale of the smartphone revolution.
But isn't VR just for games? Not at all. Sure, gaming in VR is going to be huge, but the more interesting spaces are:
- Augmented Reality. Think Minority Report: glasses that augment your physical space with everything from contacts data to physical representations of documents to, yes, adverts. Check out Google's Magic Leap technology.
- Virtual Office Technology. On a plane and want to use your 3 4k monitor setup to get some serious work done? Put your mobile VR glasses on and get to it. Virtual Desktop already does this, and I use it for Actual Work.
- Virtual Movie Theaters. Or on that same plane, watch a movie on an IMAX-scale screen - with all your friends around the world, thanks to telepresence. Check out RiftMax - it's already here.
- Porn and adult content. VR porn is going to be massive. There are already startups in the space, and some of the big names in porn are starting to poke around in it too. See VirtualRealPorn for examples (NSFW, obviously) - these guys are selling significant numbers of memberships to a conventional video-based porn site on the strength of offering VR content. .
[*}Telepresence. We need to get eye tracking to work for this to be practical, but Oculus and others are already working on that. Once we're there, everything from virtual board meetings to telepresence-based conferences are a possibility. - VR movies. Hollywood and TV is eying true VR experiences as the next big thing. People currently working in this space include Alfonso Cuarón, the guy who made Gravity.
So what does this mean for affiliates?
Firstly, in the early wave of VR devices - starting at the end of this year or early next with the consumer-release Oculus Rift - users will be desperate for content. If you've got the ability to market a product that works on VR devices, either as an affiliate or an owner, the sales will be incredibly easy.
Secondly, where content goes advertising follows. VR advertising will be completely unlike any other medium. We don't know how effective it will be, but generally increased immersion and personal contact equals increased sales, so it's a reasonable bet that it will be very effective indeed. In addition, just like with mobile, a new space means an explosion of new traffic sources, and just like with Facebook, Adwords and mobile, they'll probably start out very cheap and pretty unregulated.
And given that the potential audience for this technology is almost as large as the audience for the smartphone (perhaps even larger), that's a huge opportunity right there - starting, quite literally, this year. Get in early!
Coming Soon-ish: Telepathy
No, really. Machine-assisted telepathy is a reality at this point. Using a combination of ECG "mind-reading" headsets (which are, incidentally, down to consumer price points just now) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), thoughts were transmitted over the internet from India to France, from one person's brain to another.
Obviously, this technology is a while away from prime-time - although STMers may recall me talking about the applications for ECGs in affiliate marketing last year. It's well worth remembering the Gartner Hype Cycle, too:
But telepathy tech looks very usable, and that means that sooner or later, we're going to be talking inside other people's heads. Or having machines talk inside our heads. Or - yes - having adverts directly beamed to our heads.
Ever wanted to just be able to read your visitors' thoughts and see why your campaigns don't work? Or beam affiliate messages straight into your target demographic's heads?
Well, soon you might be able to.
Welcome to the future.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? You can't beam them straight to my brain ... yet ... so for the time being, leave 'em below!
Holy shit there are some serious things on the rise.. feel like such an idiot sitting here thinking whether i need 2 or 3 frames on my banner 
Thanks caurmen!
Heh, that kind of thinking, over and over again, is still important! Small details matter.
Great material caurmen!
These inventions always freak me out, making me wonder how I'm gonna cope with life as a grandma!
Well, given that life-extension tech is also coming along quite fast, you might have a loooooooooong while to find out 
Hey caurmen, awesome post!
We talked about this briefly at STM London and I think this changes that are coming are going to be huge.
Most of the stuff on your talk and here on this post are based around AM, but if you take a look what is happening in others industries as well, it is mind-boggling.
IMO the majority of people underestimate how much this changes will affect us and how fast they will come. Considering that technology has been growing exponentially for the past thousands of years.
I'm a strong believer that people from the same year of birth as mine (1989) will be able to live up to 180 years old. Think about how medicine was 50 years ago and how much different it will be in 50 years from now.
It's hard to imagine that.
Oh, definitely.
We're at an interesting point right now where technologies are cross-pollinating extremely fast - something which wasn't even true 10 years ago. A lot of that has to do with the increases in productivity we're gaining from increased automation, as I discussed at STM London. The philosophical shift in startup development has also had a significant effect, I think - the core concepts of the Lean Startup are very powerful - and crowdfunding has also unleashed a hell of a lot of innovation.
To take VR, for example - that's entirely the result of pressure from smartphones forcing the price and size of gyroscopes down, crossed with the rise in accessible 3D authoring technology from the games development world, crossed with the small, high-resolution displays that again come from smartphones. The first practical VR headset, the Oculus Rift, was crowdfunded on Kickstarter and developed in a reasonably Lean way.
And just taking one of those technologies and looking at what other crossovers they've had - the advances in gyroscope manufacturing are also the reason that robotics has suddenly leaped ahead. They're the reason that drones have hit mass-market, crossed with the advances in motor technology recently. They're the reason that the video world has been revolutionised by new forms of camera stabilisation, again crossed with motor technology and the "maker" world meaning that it's now far easier to manufacture custom controllers. They're the reason the Wii happened, along with improvements in computer vision tech. And so on.
It's an exciting - and mind-boggling - time.
Now when I read your posts I can hear your voice from your STM London talk, super frantic and enthusiastic, it's the future people! =D
Great stuff Caurmen! Being American it was a bit tough to keep up with all the content you presented at STM London.. But it was fun to catch up with you at the
Seeing a huge push for un-manned cars, I know this another trend I would expect us to see blow up in the few years.. Would be curious to see what other trends people are seeing..
Virtual reality headsets, machine-assisted telepathy, and self-driven cars will all very likely go the way of the Google Glass. Humans who aren't techies simply aren't huge fans of technology and they prefer the human element over the robotic. And, with the NSA in the US all up in the techonology, the average peep simply isn't going to trust the tech. At some point, just like we see with the Manosphere, there is a silent traditional element that will provide inevitable pushback. Might as well have sex dolls, mainline IV's instead of eating, and all of our experiences fabricated to us by machines, like the sleeping pod people in the Matrix. It'll get to a point where the average person, devoid of an organic existence, will say "what's the point of living like this?" while the Techies stare at them incredulous and dumbfounded.
Techies live in their own reality, and it is an artificial one. Lol, and Silicon Valley is a huge bubble waiting to burst.
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