Using these, I have launched a number of online publications over the years, including FutureofSex.net and Creating the Future of PR, among others. One of the possible paths for my business was to launch many future-oriented publications in parallel. I accumulated close to 400 domains to support possible projects.

While I intend to be doing a lot more in publishing in years to come, my core business model is fundamentally shifting (more on that another time). As such, apart from a smaller collection of domains I will keep for my own projects, I am offering these domain names for sale.

These domain names are perfect for thought leadership content projects. For example, one of the few domains I have sold was TheFutureofStrategy.com, which AT Kearney bought for a web publication featuring the firm’s thought leadership.

Having sold that, I still have FutureofStrategy.com available, not to mention FutureofBrands.com, FutureofContent.com, FutureofCustomerService.com, FutureofEvents.com, FutureofRisk.com, ThoughtLeadershipContent.com and many other similar domains.

Agencies can use these domains to suggest very interesting projects to their clients, marketers can use them to demonstrate their understanding of the future of their clients’ industries.

Below is a list of some of the more interesting domains I have available. We are also very capable of creating exceptional thought leadership content for any these sites if you wish, or more than happy just to sell the domain.

Please get in touch if you’d like to buy some of the domains or discuss. :-)

Premium Domains for Thought Leadership Content Marketing by Ross Dawson on Scribd

City of Melbourne’s over-arching vision for the annual Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is to position Melbourne as Australia’s premier fashion destination, and have a real economic impact by driving increased sales for retailers in the city.

In partnering with IBM for the second year the intention was to extend the impact of the event beyond the week and to drive ticket sales and in turn sales by tapping the social currency of influencers.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is unusual in fashion shows in that everything on the runways can be bought at stores in the city. This contrasts to the traditional role of fashion shows as breaking new fashion, which may not be available for many months after it is launched.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week used IBM Social Media Analytics on Twitter and Instagram to uncover the top 50 relevant fashion influencers, used Watson Personality Insights to work out how best to approach them, and invited them to be MSFW “insiders”, asking them what content would be most useful to them.

Ticket sales have been considerably higher than last year, with 4 of the events sold out.

The initiative is particularly interesting in showing how social analytics and engagement can help drive shoppers into shopping centers and physical stores.

While individual stores can do a great deal to merge their digital, social and physical engagement, the real power comes in bringing people to a shopping center or area, or even an entire city center.

All shopping is becoming social. Retail strategies for merging physical and digital are best envisaged and implemented on a large scale, tapping collaboration and activating buyers.

Image credit: Eva Rinaldi

The central theme of my keynotes was the boundaries and relationship between humans and machines in customer experience.

Today, extraordinary insights from data and analytics enable us to address individual’s unique preferences to an unprecedented degree.

Yet the emotion, empathy and engagement of humans cannot be replaced – we all seek personal connection and a real sense of caring.

Virtual agents mimic humans in providing customer service. Until recently they have been very crude, little more than animated puppets. Yet the state of the art is very rapidly progressing.

The video below shows a real-time rendering of a human face being taken through a range of emotions. Have a look to see how far the state of the art has advanced.

This face takes 2 Teraflops of computing power to render. To put that in context, that is equivalent to 2,000 Cray2 Supercomputers, which were not that long ago the extraordinary pinnacle of computing.

This is the state of the art. But it won’t take much longer until this kind of technology can render a human face on a video screen that we cannot distinguish from a real human. We still need to improve at speech recognition and Turing test-passing conversation, but it is fascinating that we can already generate a human face that is virtually real.

The fundamental capabilities of PR professionals are more relevant than ever in our intensely networked world. Arguably, PR should be at the center of the marketing universe, since it is better able than any other discipline to deal with a world driven by relationships, fueled by connectivity, social, mobile, and power shifting to the individual.

The big question is: will the PR industry seize the immense opportunity before it?

Both in my own work and that of my companies we work extensively with PR agencies.

I have personally worked with a number of major PR globally agencies in framing the future of media. I am also frequently engaged by PR agencies on behalf of their clients to deliver keynotes at customer events and to act as a spokesperson for media campaigns.

Among the many services that our companies work with PR agencies on, notably Future Exploration Network creates compelling futurist content to support media and B2B marketing campaigns, Advanced Human Technologies does organisational and influence network analysis for designing high-performance organisations and campaigns, and MemeStreme (to be launched soon) will offer world-class interactive information visualizations.

However beyond these direct engagement points, it is clear that in a networked world marketing is being completely transformed. I believe that leading PR professionals – whose business is relationships – are probably best equipped to truly understand a world of distributed relationships, and find successful pathways to the future.

Please have look at Creating the Future of PR, join the conversations in our Creating the Future of PR Facebook Group, and let us know if you would like to contribute to the publication.

We will also be running a Creating the Future of PR Forum in Sydney this October, and will collaborate with local partners to run events in other major cities around the world.

Please do participate and pass on word to those who would be interested in this, our intention is over time to build something that will be truly valuable for the industry.

If consumers are smarter, they are expressing it with not just increased expectations, but an increasingly active expression of their displeasure if expectations are not met.

The following chart, provided to me by IBM in response to a request for more detailed information, shows that in all major countries advocates – those who actively advocate for their primary retailer – have decreased, while antagonists – those who would actively discredit their retailer – have increased.

Source: IBM

In fact from 2012 to 2014, advocacy rates in Australia have declined from 34% to 10%, while antagonism has increased from 12% to 37%. Sobering statistics for retailers.

Increased expectations are supported by the shift to online and mobile buying. The pace of the shift to online buying is highest for the most expensive goods.

Where there is trust, customers are more willing to share information with retailers than before. However this is happening in conjunction with heightened expectations, meaning that they will only continue to do so if that information is used to create clear value for them.

And it is clear that consumers are want to be in control. They understand the issues and while they will share information if there is trust, their expectations include personal control.

In summary, people are less likely to actively support retailers and more likely to attack them in increasingly public forums such as social media.

However trust can still grow, but it will only create value for retailers if it first creates real value for their customers.

Zuckerman began by running through the severe challenges for the news industry, going on to highlight branded content as the next source of growth for the industry. Below are a few slides from his excellent presenatation.

BCG sees branded content growing at a 21% rate over the next 5 years. I believe it is likely to grow faster than this.
Source: Boston Consulting Group

A study across four countries showed some variation between countries, but overall a strongly favorable reception from consumers. Overall they identified a 21% net increase in likelihood to purchase due to branded content, and a 20% net increase in affinity for a brand. However if consumers already have a negative perception of a brand, branded content will accentuate that perception.

I was very interested by BCG’s taxonomy of branded content, in particular identifying native advertising as a distinct subset of branded content. There is much confusion over the language used in this domain, with ‘content marketing’ being commonly used, as well as ‘sponsored content’, ‘corporate publishing’, and of course still ‘advertorials’.

As made clear in this framework, one of the key distinctions is in the platform used. Many news publishers focus on creating content for their own platforms, yet they also have the capability to create outstanding content for use on other platforms, and indeed even the brand’s dedicated platforms. The intent of the content, from product-specific marketing through to emotion-based branding, implies very different types of content.

There is no question that branded content will be a massive part of the future of media. Its scope is far beyond traditional media boundaries. Brands are rapidly developing their own capabilities in both content creation and platform development. However established media companies have exceptional capabilities to play extremely successfully in this rapidly growing space.

Over 400 senior news executives from 45 countries are gathering to gain insights into the leading edge and path forward for news organizations globally.

My keynote provides a highly positive perspective on the extraordinary opportunities for the news industry. I am currently refocusing on the future of news and media, and will be sharing a lot more on this topic during this year.

For now, here are the slides to my keynote. As always, note that my slides are designed to accompany my keynote and not to stand alone, and also contain many videos that do not show in the slides below. However they may still be of interest to people who are not attending my keynote.

Click on the image below to view the segment.

The segment described some just-released research titled Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which says:

This study compares the accuracy of personality judgment—a ubiquitous and important social-cognitive activity—between computer models and humans. Using several criteria, we show that computers’ judgments of people’s personalities based on their digital footprints are more accurate and valid than judgments made by their close others or acquaintances (friends, family, spouse, colleagues, etc.). Our findings highlight that people’s personalities can be predicted automatically and without involving human social-cognitive skills.

The personality-assessment algorithm was solely based on Facebook likes made by participants, with results compared to the assessments of people who know them well. As little as 150 likes was sufficient to provide a more accurate personality assessment than a family member such as a parent, while 300 likes enabled a better assessment than a spouse.

What was perhaps more interesting was the claim that “computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores.”

The potential implications are profound. Article co-author Wu Youyou said “In this context, the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as ‘Her’ seem to be within our reach.”

Being able to interact with people in a way tailored to their personalities and designed to generate particular responses is certainly a fair way beyond being able to assess personalities accurately, but we are rapidly heading in that direction.

These findings are unlikely to give pause to people sharing their lives – and personalities – on social media, but we absolutely need to be aware quite how deep the insights about ourselves we are sharing in our everyday online behaviors.

He gave the keynote at the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit I ran in San Francisco and Sydney in 2010, and his agency was featured as a case study of crowd business models in my book Getting Results From Crowds.

John has just published an excellent article on HBR Blogs titled The Future of Marketing, as Seen at Cannes Lions.

He reports that there was a marked change at Cannes this year. Last year he observed the event was predominantly populated by dinosaurs, yet this year there are, among the dinosaurs, many of the next generation of marketers, all based on open systems.

The shift to open systems in marketing disintermediates traditional agencies, most importantly giving companies direct access to their customers and community, and the ability to drive their own agencies.

John notes three things that brands can do to take advantage of open systems:

1. Adapt your business models to exploit new opportunities rather than try to apply your existing one. As discussed, open-system species are agile in part because they see opportunities and create new models to go after them.

2. Take more control. It used to be that brands needed an agency to communicate with customers. Today, with the falling price of media and the real time nature of the two-way conversation with consumers, brands can do more of this themselves. Some of the best-known brands including Patagonia and Apple are building their own in-house strategic agencies, taking control of strategic and creative leadership while using an open system to collaborate with great outside talent. Those brands realize that one of their most important assets is their relationship with consumers. There will still be a place in the ecosystem for lots of players and collaboration, including agencies, but brands increasingly can take the lead.

3. Seek out great ideas wherever they are. Companies and their brands need to get away from idea myopia, the notion that one outside organization, usually an agency, must be the sole creator of marketing ideas. Not only do your most passionate fans have great ideas and the tools to communicate them but there are ideas to be found from retailers, distributors and other outside partners. Likewise, internal team members have some of the best creative ideas but are sometimes afraid to participate.

The shift to an open world is highly challenging for traditional agencies, that look to be the conduit between brands and their customers.

Yet it is providing massive opportunities to agencies that understand this new world, can facilitate the connections between brands and communities, and tap the most relevant talent and insights from across the planet to bring a brand to life in a networked world.

Source: LUMA’s The Future of (Digital) TV

Digital video has exploded over the last 8 years however that has, in the main, being a complement to TV, with TV viewing eroding surprisingly slowly compared to earlier forecasts.

While it seems a foregone conclusion that traditional TV and digital video will merge in a number of domains, including ownership, viewing, and potentially even distribution, how that happens is a more challenging question.

This very interesting presentation – below – from Terence Kawaja, CEO of media technology investment bank Luma, tells a nice structured story on how this convergence may happen.

Clearly the bank is talking up the convergence opportunities (which would often result in juicy investment banking fees), however the case they make is solid.

The presentation looks at the TV Business, Trends, Issues, and Theses. The trends it distills are pretty apparent, but well articulated:

1. Fragmentation

5. Original Content Production

In this industry both many of the incumbents as well as new entrants such as tech giants are well-capitalized. This means the structure of the convergence could be structured in a wide variety of ways, not necessarily led by the established firms.

No-one doubts that moving images will be a primary feature of our future, both in the formats we are used to today and far beyond.

The jury is still out on who will carve out the bulk of the value. One of the most encouraging things is that across almost all scenarios, there will be a very rich ecosystem for smaller producers and players to create value. There will be more creators, and an exceedingly large pie to share.