News 06.08.2019

Need to Know

Snapchat focuses on friendship, leading tech brands fall off top innovators list, and how brands can navigate the Nigerian retail market.

BT Sport brings machine learning to the Premier League

Unscripted, BT Sport by Wunderman Thompson London

UK – The Script is a 61-page fictional forecast of the upcoming Premier League football season created by artificial intelligence (AI).

Sports broadcaster BT Sport worked with data scientists and real-time sports analysts and used historical data to predict the placements of the league’s 20 clubs and the top goal scorers. To get fans involved with the campaign, the brand has released a free copy of The Script online, as well as publishing a shortened version in Metro.

BT Sport is asking fans to watch the Premier League season live in order to see how the predictions play out. The campaign, created in partnership with Wunderman Thompson, demonstrates how AI can be used playfully to create fictional forms of entertainment.

The football industry is becoming increasingly innovative, as brands race to embed technology into the sport and fan experience.

A festival urinal designed to end gender inequality

Lapee Lapee
Lapee Lapee

Denmark – Co-founders Gina Périer and Alexander Egebjerg have launched the world’s first industrially produced female urinal.

Lapee comprises three sections built in the shape of a spiral that allows people to use it in privacy while still staying connected to friends and maintaining awareness of their surroundings. The designers explained that they aim to offer women ‘safety, dignity and hygiene’ during their festival experiences. The urinal is moulded as a single unit from recyclable polyethylene with a built-in storage tank, making it the first scalable design suitable for festivals and large outdoor events. Lapee was trialled at the 2019 Roskilde Festival, in Denmark, which was attended by 130,000 festival-goers.

‘We wanted to create the female version of a product that exists all over the world,’explains Périer. ‘I don’t think it’s that complicated to make a urinal for women. I just think it was something which was designed by men and they only thought about themselves.’

Over the past few years, brands have been rethinking the festival experience, from the services provided to the programming. Read our Festival Market to find out more.

Perceptions of innovation are changing

New York – Eight brands that were thought of as top innovators last year are now deemed by consumers to be inactive, according to the 2019 Most Innovative Tech Brands survey by Brand Keys.

The brands that this year forfeited their high rankings include YouTube, Uber, Tesla and Airbnb. As good as these eight brands are in their categories, expectations move at the speed of the consumer and what’s currently on offer is viewed as conventional,’ says founder and president of Brand Keys, Robert Passikoff. ‘Besides always wanting more, consumers see brands’ abilities to deliver something that emotionally engages them as the gateway to innovation.’

According to Passikoff, the results indicate that consumers see innovative brands as those that are able to address ’old problems [with] new technologies and new creative strategies’.

As the mantra ‘move fast and break things’ becomes redundant, brands are beginning to rethink what innovation looks like by creating a new moral code fit for the digital age. Read our Morality Recoded macrotrend to learn more about the backlash against the reckless use of technology and how brands can redeem themselves.

Uber, US

Snapchat wants to be the app for friendship

Real Friends, Snapchat

Global – The photo-sharing app’s first global campaign stars real friends around the world who use Snapchat to stay in touch.

The campaign features 37 Snapchat users from countries including Australia, Brazil and India who each use the app to foster their close friendships or keep in touch with family members. ‘This campaign is really about us celebrating friendships and the importance of friendships and the role that friendship plays candidly in our platform,’ says chief marketing officer Kenny Mitchell.

The work was created in response to the brand’s recent Friendship Report, which found that a person’s average social circle consists of just 4.3 best friends and 7.2 good friends. This contrasts with the high numbers of followers young people have on platforms such as Instagram, positioning Snapchat as a platform for true friendships.

While social media platforms have a reputation for being narcissistic, they can also help foster cross-continent relationships with friends and family. For more, read our macrotrend Neo-kinship.

Stat: The future of Nigeria is urban

Nigeria is set to experience a 50% urban growth in the next six years – the fastest urban growth globally – according to Nielsen. The insights were unveiled at a recent Nielsen event in Lagos, which explored whether retailers are equipped to enter Nigeria’s huge consumer retail market.

Nielsen also found that many Nigerian consumers are upbeat and confident, with 81% feeling good about the state of their financials and 41% feeling positive about their quality of life. However, there is clear polarisation within the market, with 60% saying they can only afford basic items.

Nigeria is a deeply complex market, with many individuals facing poverty and fractured political and education systems. To see how the country’s youth are rising up against these societal challenges, read our Emerging Youth: Nigeria report.

Thought-starter: Can the tourism industry fix its waste problem?

New government policies are driving a wave of environmental initiatives at high-end hotels, working to offset their impact while educating and inspiring visitors.

The tourism industry is the second-largest contributor to the global economy, with international tourist arrivals totalling 1.4bn in 2018, a figure that is predicted to rise a further 3-4% by the end of 2019 (sources: World Travel & Tourism Council, UNWTO).

The amount of waste produced by the industry is taking a massive environmental toll and is only set to increase in the coming years. The industry is beginning to be held accountable for the ecological damage, and in response, brands are finding future facing ways to become sustainable.

For example, the Arlo Hotel group’s ocean clean-up programme, which took guests to New York’s Rockaway Beach for a day of litter picking, to ‘leave it a better, more sustainable place for our local community’.

Look out for the full microtrend launching on LS:N Global this week.

Arlo Cares platform by Arlo Hotels, New York
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