AI, climate change and the age of consumer [ec]centricity

It’s exactly 20 years since I secured a place on Carat London’s graduate scheme.

One of my enduring memories of those early days in the industry is an all-staff meeting in a huge, Leicester Square cinema.

At that meeting, the CEO of Aegis Media, Carat’s then-parent company, spoke about an impending “paradigm shift” in the world of media. An event so significant that it wouldn’t just reshape brands and agencies but the fabric of society itself.

That paradigm shift? The emergence of ‘interactive media’.

Sadly, we dropped the ‘interactive’ part – imagine the new era of creativity that may have emerged had we protected it – in favour of what we now call digital. Regardless I think it’s fair to say they got it right.

That was a paradigm shift.

Fast forward 20 years and I’m working for Carat’s dentsu-stablemate, iProspect, albeit on the other side of the world, and it feels like we’re on the verge of another fundamental wave of change. This time though, the forces shaping the future and what this may mean for brands, consumers and culture may be even more profound.

Whether it’s served us or not is open to debate, but it’s inarguable that one of, if not the defining aspect of the digital era has been the preponderance of data, and with it our obsession with mining **cliché alert** ‘real-time’ insight about the customer.

At iProspect we believe the two most influential forces in the next 10 years will be AI and climate change. But if we’re to help accelerate the growth of our clients and navigate this future we must understand – and forecast – the expected shifts in consumer attitudes, values, and behaviours that will shape the future for brands.

We must move from insight to foresight.

Through a collaboration with Foresight Factory, interviews with global trends experts and the analysis of survey data from 30,000 consumers in 27 countries, via dentsu’s Consumer Vision platform we set-out to forecast the dynamics that will reshape everything from technology to brands by 2035.

But it’s the results of the consumer part of the study I want to focus on here.

The Consumer Vision study demonstrated that consumers are starting to feel that technology is cocooning their lives and that the resulting disorientation will push them to eccentric extremes.

As more of our lived experience take place in online environments, increasingly managed by AI, our attitudes towards expressing ourselves are evolving. 5 in 10 Australian respondents agree that “worrying about what other people think of me keeps me from experimenting with new things in my life and exploring new aspects of myself.”

Nestled in optimized, controlled and curated environments, unwilling to fully express ourselves for fear of judgement or unable to seek respite in travel to the extent we once did, by 2035 we’ll need to be catapulted from everyday routines and comfort zones. To exert control, humans will aspire to feelings, activities, and goods that may be scarce by 2035.

Indeed, this desire to ‘re-sensitize’ ourselves will, at times, manifest in the pursuit of experiences and products that feel out of the ordinary or risqué. Already, 21% of global consumers feel they need to do dangerous or forbidden things, rising to 31% of Gen Z.

In terms of purchasing behaviours, these attitudes will likely be reflected in the idealisation of the look and feel of materials and goods that have been phased out due to climate change and other evolving social norms.

Bottega’s $10k bubble-wrap Cabat bag anyone?

Consumers will be drawn to media experiences, brand encounters, products and services that elicit more visceral emotions. Marketing effectiveness studies by the likes of Orlando Wood have proven that emotion-led advertising is already more likely to create major business impact. Based on our Consumer Vision results there’s a strong case to be made that this will only become more important as emotion-driving brand experiences become more appealing.

Fast forward to 2035 and presenting consumers with emotive and instinctive solutions will dictate not only levels of brand preference but in an AI-filtered and culturally reshaped reality, whether a brand registers on their radar at all.

Brands need to begin laying the foundation now to future-proof themselves, developing and adopting the predictive capabilities and anticipatory behaviours needed to differentiate and grow.

Perhaps that new era of commercial creativity may be just round the corner after all.

Nick Kavanagh is chief strategy officer at iProspect.