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IAB Whitepaper Future Trends Volume 14: The Future of Robots

Introduction Bradley Moss, Marketing and Communications Assistant, IAB UK Welcome to Future Trends Volume 14: The Future of Robots. This paper will look at robots – what could be more exciting? We’re living in a world where human interaction with AI and robotics is becoming a daily occurrence. Machines are taking over the human in our supermarkets, banks, airports, becoming part of our society. This paper will delve into the future of the robotic world. Craig Lavine talks about the death of emotion. You may be familiar with the film Ex-‐Machina, whereby a human becomes emotionally attached to a robot? Could this be the future? Or will our emotions phase out altogether? The truth is, as Craig explains, scientists have been unable to truly identify what emotion is or indeed how many emotions the average human genuinely feels. Craig looks into the changes that may occur as the humans and intelligent devices start inter-‐relating. Kate Osborne looks at the future of robots from an agency perspective. Kate questions whether you need a robot or simply a robot’s brain? She argues that there is already lot to learn from robots out in the real world, which will enable agencies to develop an even greater understanding of how humans behave, for example attribution. Just imagine if your robot brain could decipher and understand masses of data? You could have a hugely efficient business. Marc Curtis writes about how the landscape may look for the world of digital advertising and content within a robotic world. Curtis argues that although we are still in the early days of programmatic, it's not a huge leap to imagine a world where consumers are served up a seamless narrative of content and advertising weaved into every facet of their personal lives. Furthermore, with the likes of Google, Amazon & Jibo wanting to put voice enabled hubs in our homes and driverless, robotic cars a stones throw away from ignition – imagine all the data that would be produced? It could captivate the everyday essence of human life! As with most things in life, the robotic world is not going to come without a price. Marcos Angelides tries to solve the question of who’s going to pay for all this technology? Well there’s already an acronym for that – AFR (Ad Funded Robotics.) Brands will pick up the pay check. These ads could come contextually and personalised through the robot (i.e. if the robot is cleaning, it could purchase the household products.) As Marcos explains, this could give the brand endless access to their customers and their customers data, however this won’t come without concern. Privacy is already a huge issue today, let alone in the future. For now let’s watch this space. Dan Calladine writes about the new opportunities that technology is creating within the business and job sectors. Dan gives examples of companies that have already implemented robotic technology. Who knew that it’s now possible to hire a drone to take aerial videos and gather aerial data in the US? Alison Sprague also investigates whether robots will take our jobs and our careers-‐ indeed, some already have! With coverage already presenting us with statistics such as: ‘35% of existing UK jobs are at risk of automation in the next 20 years’ perhaps we should be worried? However, Alison comments that most changes in technology enable complementary employment. Furthermore, using additional data and tables, she argues that it is not unreasonable to predict that as we get increased leisure time on our hands as robots remove some of the daily drudgery. A winner for us human’s perhaps? Finally, Tim Elkington uses pieces of IAB research to speculate about our future relationships with robots. The findings suggest that technology is a trusted source of advice, a vital piece of people’s lives and something that consumers get anxious about leaving behind. Tim argues that down the line, people will


have a tendency to anthropomorphise technology – which could have various consequences and challenges for marketers. Tim exemplifies this, saying that if purchasing decisions are to be made by trusted technological advisors, what will be the best way to influence these advisors? Definitely, food for thought!


Contents Will AI be the death of emotion? Craig Lawrie, Strategy Director, Partners Andrews Aldridge / The Engine Group The future of robots: an agency perspective Kate Osborne, Deputy MD, ARC an Omnicom Media Group Company How will personal robotics change the way we interact with content and what will this mean for digital advertising? Marc Curtis, Head of Labs, TMW Unlimited Who’s going to pay for the robotic revolution? Marcos Angelides, Strategy Director, OMD With technology comes opportunity Dan Calladine, Head of Media Futures, Carat The future of robots: is your job safe? Alison Sprague, Partner, CEG Europe Robotic assistants and the death of brand advertising Tim Elkington, Chief Strategy Officer, IAB UK


Will AI be the death of emotion? Craig Lawrie, Strategy Director, Partners Andrews Aldridge / The Engine Group The press recently had a field day when a new lobbying group, ‘Campaign Against Sex Robots’ was created. This was directed at “people with money to burn and an itch to scratch” laughed The Inquirer. Whilst US lad’s mag Maxim understatedly wrote: “It’s pretty unlikely that many people will form an emotional connection with an animatronic mannequin that makes mechanical moaning noises and can’t blink”. Yet whilst “Roxxxy” (retailing for £7,000 and coming in a variety of emotional attachment types) is a bit far off the vision laid out in the film, Ex Machina, has the team behind “Campaign Against Sex Robots” cottoned on to something? In an age when more everyday tasks and jobs are becoming automated, is this having an affect on our own emotions? Does Roxxxy mark the start of the human retreat towards primal instinct over the power of emotion? And how does this affect the future of sentient devices with the power to emote as well as rationalise? Actions are made on instinct. Behaviours are taken on emotion Two fundamental factors separate human behaviour with the likes of Roxxxy.

• Roxxxy may have been created as a sex toy, but she has no built-‐in need to have sex. As a robot, she is devoid of any sense of instinct -‐ even if she is engineered to express 'emotion'.

• Although we, too, are machines, (albeit biological ones), we make choices based on emotional as well as rational factors. Humans are unique because we are able to differentiate between the two. And it's this ability to separate the emotional and the rational that makes humans "intelligent".

Whilst there is increasing debate as to whether sentient devices will one day be able to determine their religious beliefs as it currently stands, humans are the only species (biological or otherwise) whose behaviour is ruled by emotion. Although emotions by themselves are simple to feel, they are actually rather complicated and little understood. We just have to look at the human brain to understand why: Each emotional experience is triggered by more than a billion neurons in the brain (made up of 100 trillion connections!), resulting in a sensation personally felt and unique. This makes the true definition of "artificial intelligence" very difficult to truly define. The "artificial" is simple to recognise but the "intelligence" is not. Emotions are personal, intense and unique Even now, scientists have been unable to truly identify what emotion is or indeed how many emotions the average human genuinely feels. Psychologists Hockenbury & Hockenbury argue that "An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioural or expressive response.” In short, this means that

• each emotional experience is open to interpretation and is highly subjective • emotions cause physiological reactions • emotional intelligence teaches us how to judge others through their expressions or behaviour

However, what this theory doesn’t do is clearly separate ‘emotion’ from what can be commonly described as ‘moods’. Unlike moods, emotions are intense, short lived and often have a cause. For this reason, it’s now thought that we can only possess 4 truly emotional behaviours:

• Happiness


• Sadness • Surprise • Anger

Given that much behaviour is learned, as humans and intelligent devices start to inter-‐relate, what scientists can’t yet decide is whether humans will start taking on ever more mechanical behavioural characteristics or whether emotion will be the one point of difference between biological and synthetic machines. Will humans increasingly used to co-‐existing with robots in ever automated lives live off default behaviour and instinct or are emotions so deep rooted in to each and every one of us that emotions will continue to separate man from machine? Is Roxxxy there to be abused at will or loved unconditionally? Artificial Intelligence, Human Emotion AI has an in-‐built need to perfect itself through logic rather than imagination. Therefore, there’s a legitimate concern that increased automation will stunt human emotional behaviour. However, we are finding that this isn’t actually the case:

• Manufactured happiness through imaginary friends o The world’s “first emotional AI”, the EmoSpark, alters its own personality dependent on

whether its human owner is happy or unhappy • Grief will become more common

o The increased adoption of so-‐called ‘robopets’ capable of learning companionship, love, obedience and dependence is leading to certified cases of human grief and a rise in the number of cyber pet funerals once they have been pre programmed to ‘die’

• From 'Surprise' to 'Dependence' o Facebook's "M" is being trained by humans to start recommending services based on

what it knows about the user's location, phone contacts as well as Facebook profile. The more it learns about its user the more it aims to surprise and delight by being able to buy items, send gifts to loved ones and book tickets, taxis and doctor's appointments

• The march to Anger o In an advanced machine age where society is dominated by machine learning, feelings of

disempowerment, dispossession, neglect, anger and hatred would be two directional: towards the 1% human elite and the machines that are increasingly taking more power. This isn’t something out of a science fiction story. Although the London Docklands Light Rail service has run off rudimentary artificial intelligence for nearly 30 years, the announcement of a driverless Tube network brought with it a wave of strikes to the capital city in 2014. And this is just the very start of the revolution.

The Death Of Emotion? Rather than a world where machines are the property of Man to be abused and subjugated on the whim of primal carnal desires, is it more likely that Roxxxy's descendants turn on their erstwhile masters to enslave the human population and rule by fear? This scenario, whilst possible, is also rather unlikely. Emotions may not control us but they do play out as consequences following actions that we make. And whilst humans are the only beings able to differentiate between the rational and emotional, they are also the only beings consciously able to know the difference between right and wrong. And so, it is this fundamental principle that is being engineered in to AI systems to ensure that machines behave in a knowingly ethical way.


The ethics of AI are certainly nothing new. Even as the Hot War was turning ever Cold, scientists, philosophers and lawyers started to seriously consider the threat of autocratic regimes run by robotic beings. Asimov's '3 Laws of Robotics' have been treated as the blueprint for how sentient machines should behave in a co-‐existent world with humans. They pretty much stand today, with Google's London based 'Deep Mind' unit, instilling these values in to the AI code it is creating. The fundamental problem with Asimov's laws is that they were written for his novel, I Robot ,they were never intended to be applied for a real world situation. And so here is the rub. Given that AI is taught that

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

will sentient machines which had previously learnt to choose via rationality, begin to learn emotion through the injustice of being a second class 'citizen'? Could the surprise of being different turn to sadness that leads to anger? Will machines only ever be 'happy' when in the company of other devices? Will Anger be a double-‐edged emotion, suffered by both humans and machines alike? Even in an automated world, it seems unlikely that AI will be the death of 'emotion'. But as humans and machines start to live side by side, it's the intensity of those emotions that is still an unknown factor -‐ especially as humans will have the added advantage of 'instinct' to survive. The question is, whether abuse suffered from the likes of Roxxxy, will be the catalyst for a new, raw and as yet undiscovered emotion that destroys the laws for it that Asimov once created. The end of the brand experience? So what then does all of this mean for brands and the people that look after them? Firstly, whilst robots may become more human, it’s unlikely that humans will become more robot. Whilst rational behaviour may drive more of our decisions as the world becomes more automated, emotion will still determine who we are, how we are feeling and how we relate to others (humans, animals or robots). Emotion, will therefore, be even more important to drive a connection with a consumer, who will increasingly see the sentient as well as the salient in everything. Indeed, the role of the brand should play an even more pertinent place in people’s lives as we build deeper relationship with the synthetic. And as the likes of Facebook M aim to surprise and delight us by knowing more about us than we know about ourselves, the future will not just be one based on an emotional connection with brands, but one built on emotional dependency instead. Sources: The Rise Of The Robots: Technology & The Threat Of A Jobless Future, Martin Ford, 2015 Humans Need Not Apply, Jerry Kaplan, 2015 Emotional Intensity, magnestism and sensory experiences: the ingredients of influential ideas, Lena Roand, WARC, 2014 The conflict of the conscious and unconscious mind, Prof Joel Weinberger, Admap, January 2014 The Sunday Times, 20 September 2015


http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2425991/campaign-‐against-‐bad-‐robot-‐sex-‐launches-‐in-‐the-‐uk http://www.maxim.com/maxim-‐man/art-‐seduction/article/campaign-‐against-‐sex-‐robots-‐2015-‐9 “Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL”: Machine Intelligence & The Law, Prof Andrew Murray, LSE Seminar, September 2015 http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/when-‐robots-‐come-‐to-‐pray/ Discovering Psychology, Don H Hockenbury & Sandra E Hockenbury, 2007 Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity To Maximise Machines, John Havens, 2015 http://emospark.com/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/10/15/how-‐artificial-‐intelligence-‐is-‐moving-‐from-‐the-‐lab-‐to-‐your-‐kids-‐playroom/ The Daily Mail, 25 February 2015 Huffington Post, 15 May 2015 Social and moral relationships with robotic others, Peter H Khan Jnr, University of Washington, 2004 The Telegraph, 20 June 2014 https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195 The Daily Mail, 7 April 2015 http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/26/elon-‐musk-‐compares-‐building-‐artificial-‐intelligence-‐to-‐summoning-‐the-‐demon/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-‐2940444/Will-‐religions-‐try-‐convert-‐artificial-‐intelligence-‐Reverend-‐says-‐Christ-‐s-‐redemption-‐not-‐limited-‐humans.html


The future of robots: an agency perspective Kate Osborne, Deputy MD, ARC an Omnicom Media Group Company As my mum always told me, it doesn’t matter what’s on the outside, it’s what’s on the inside that counts and I believe this is true when it comes to robots too. Especially if you work in agency land. Let’s quickly start at the beginning with a simple definition of what a robot is, easier said than done when even the Harvard Business Review says that “Finding an all-‐encompassing definition of a robot is actually a difficult problem, even for world-‐class roboticists”…. Brilliant. But having reviewed numerous definitions from as far reaching sources as NASA to the International Federation of Robotics I can conclude that robotics concerns the design, construction, operation and application of robots. And put simply a robot has the following characteristics; mobility, sensing, intelligence and autonomy. A robot is therefore a combination of hardware and software. An exterior that is designed in a way to best perform the physical task instructed and an intelligent brain that provides the robot with the means to autonomously carry out complex tasks turning data into physical action, automatically. So how can robots be of value to people working in agencies? I am referring here to marketing and communication agencies in the broadest sense, essentially businesses set up to provide a service on behalf of a client, be that PR, digital, social, creative or media. For the purposes of this paper, let’s simplify things and divide agency roles into two. The first is their intricate knowledge of consumers and their ability to understand how best to influence them and secondly the craft skills of their specialist discipline allowing them to best construct campaigns to achieve their clients desired outcomes. To a greater or lesser degree, depending on where you sit, data is what is defining and refining our knowledge in those two areas. Critics will rightly argue that overreliance on data ignores the nuances of human behaviour but I think few will disagree that the right balance of data and intuition can be a very useful thing. So can robots help those of us working in agencies? Are there physical tasks currently performed in your agency which are inefficient? hard to scale? dangerous even? and could a robot be designed to do them instead. While you can probably think of a few such as packing PR samples into boxes, the question you really need to ask is do you need a robot or just a robots brain?


Let’s use Google’s recent foray into robotics to bring that to life. Google too want to learn as much about the way we behave as possible and they have built a business on providing useful services based on this information. However in order to continue to learn and build up a rich picture of everyone on the planet, they realise that they need to get closer to people in the real world and avoid being disintermediated in this valuable ‘last mile’ by others. How they do this is by getting involved with hardware, the actual things that are closest to us and can provide the most insight into how we behave. That is why they built Android, that is why they are manufacturing driverless cars and that is why they are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into robotics companies. So what this tells us is that there is a lot to learn from robots out in the real world which will enable agencies to develop an even greater understanding of how people behave. Let’s just use Attribution as an example. Attribution data is hugely valuable but is still lacking sophistication when it comes to understanding offline purchases. Imagine a world where on a whim you can order a Mars Bar and that it can be delivered via drone within 10mins to your exact location. Suddenly makes the world of attribution and real time planning a whole lot more exciting. But to make real use of the continued proliferation of data, agencies also need to develop their own robot brain. Already programmatic is using data to automate media buying but imagine a robot brain that based on a simple set of parameters such as date range and budget and some clear objectives such as sales uplift could plan and execute the most effective communications plan. So to summarise. If you work in an agency there are two things that you can do which would be a smart move. Firstly, you should be looking to understand the data that robots are harvesting in the real world and how it could be useful to you. Think about what partnerships could be a smart move. Secondly, and most importantly you need to be developing and refining your own robot brain to ingest hugely varied and broad data sets and teach your robot brain to learn from this data so it can make highly intelligent decisions that make your business more efficient.


How will personal robotics change the way we interact with content and what will this mean for digital advertising? Marc Curtis, Head of Labs, TMW Unlimited We already live in a robotic world. We surround ourselves with devices that automate, interpret and assist us with our environments. Much has been written about the move towards the outsourcing of our personal lives. However, we don't see our personal digital devices as robots -‐ we identify them as phones and wearables, but make no mistake these are the vanguard of the personal robotics revolution. Personal robotics will put a face (or a body) on the technology to which we have already become attenuated. They provide a conversational link with digital content, understanding what you want to see, when you want to see it, and then delivering it via an invisible interface -‐ or voice as we call it. By providing technology with a broader and more useful sensorium, enhanced by the fact of their physical presence and mobility, our robots will be aware of all of the nuances of our lives in much greater resolution that we can imagine. The home is where robots will become the most visible. Companies like Amazon and Google and startups like Jibo want us to place voice enabled hubs in our home to provide an interface with their ecosystems, products and the wider web whilst giving us greater control over our connected home. People are becoming less awkward about talking to their technology -‐ especially now that you don't have to repeat yourself eight times in order to open Explorer (ala Dragon Naturally Speaking circa 1996). Anthropomorphising voice interfaces by sticking on a couple of eyes and a tilting head, might be the final step we need to feel properly comfortable speaking to the internet. Outside of the home and beyond the obvious medical and military applications, the most ubiquitous example of personal robotics will be driverless cars. We will be spending large amounts of time sitting in a robot whilst we carry on consuming content and conversing (maybe) with our fellow passengers. And off the back of robots in the home and robots on the road will be data; terabytes and terabytes of data being produced every day. In some ways we can't imagine how data on our daily routines, our conversations, the way we dress, the food we eat-‐ (the way we prepare it!) might be used. But when you consider that we are still in the early days of programmatic, autonomous marketing systems, it's not a huge leap to imagine a world where consumers are served up a seamless narrative of content and advertising (if the two will be considered entirely separate) weaved into every facet of their personal lives. Timely, contextually relevant suggestions can be made based on the analyzed data of a thousand consumers whose morning ablutions matched your own, or whose journey to work consisted of the same route, entertainment media and argument with the kids. Having a conversation with your partner about buying a new car? The personal robot within earshot may be capturing that and serving you 'promoted' updates to help you spend your money. And if you think that people won't be happy with Google listening to and monetizing our private conversations, remember we all seem pretty comfortable with them doing it with our email. It's all about the value exchange.


Who’s going to pay for the robotic revolution? Marcos Angelides, Strategy Director, OMD The materials have been tested and the software is ready, so what’s taking the robotic revolution so long to get here? The problem, as always, is cost. Seeing as current smartphones and watches range from £500-‐£10,000+ it’s fair to imagine that a life sized robot who walks, talks, cooks, cleans, protects and provides will have a price point closer to a supercar than a sandwich maker. So how will people ever have a chance to own one? AFR (Ad Funded Robotics) The ad industry has bankrolled every media innovation since the 1950’s; so if it ‘aint broke, why fix it! Through this simple and familiar model, people will have the robotic companion they always dreamed of without having to worry about the cost. But if brands are going to pick up the pay check, what benefits can they expect? In-‐home Contextual Ads In this utopian future, Robotic Companions will be waiting for you us when we arrive home at night, always ready to respond to our questions and provide us with what we need. So if you were to take your shoes off and rubs your sore ankles, the Robotic Companion may suggest a new insole that better supports your feet. Or when you mention how miserable the weather is the Robotic Companion could share the evening flight times to Portugal. This will fundamentally change the way contextual ads are served. Messages will no longer be delivered against a short list of keywords in the hope that they are relatable; they’ll be pre-‐loaded into a Robotic Companion’s processor, ready to be retrieved when the time is right. The cost of these ads will depend on the amount of processor time a brand purchases. Those who buy a better package will be able to wait longer, increasing the chance of finding the perfect contextual moment. Personalised Discounts As our Robotic Companions will be doing all of the cooking and cleaning it makes sense that they’ll also purchase our household products. We will tell them to make these decisions primarily based on value, which will lead to a completely new buying model. Brands will be able to purchase psychometric data and historical purchase patterns of potential customers in order to determine their lifetime value. This will allow them to offer a personalised discount to convert that person, through their Robotic Companion, to trial. This will lead to the end of fixed-‐priced products, as the cost of a product will depend entirely on the individual.


Campaign Measurement “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. In the future, Robotic Companions will laugh mechanically at that comment. Measurement will be the lifeblood of the AFR model and provide brands with endless access to their customers. Claimed exposure will become redundant as Robotic Companions will be able to confirm when their owner has been exposed to an ad. As a result, the industry will finally have their ‘one unifying metric’ to link all media channels together and evaluate the attribution of each. But the real winner will be qualitative data. Brands will finally have a way to ask customers their opinions within their natural environments. For a premium cost, brands will be able to blend their questions into the Robotic Companion’s natural conversation so that their owners aren’t even aware it’s taking place. Anti-‐Robo or Pro-‐Robo? The idea of AFR may be a concern for some, questions about privacy and the increasing intrusion of big business is an issue today let alone for the future. But AFR may also have a hugely positive effect on society. The use of advertising will make Robotic Companions affordable for all – ensuring that the elderly, vulnerable and impoverished are not left behind during the technological revolution. From the perspective of consumerism, brands will also have a greater understanding of what people genuinely care about. This will allow them to improve the quality of their products and the nature of their advertising to add true value to people’s lives. But with great information comes great responsibility. If brands choose to use AFR unwisely they’ll soon be battling against a raft of Robotic Ad Blockers and the potential end to free robotics. Just like now, the future is in flux as it tries to determine the role of advertising. What happens next, even a robot can’t predict.

(Shoppers were given a taste of the future this year when OMD and Channel 4 created a retail space for Robotic Companions)


With technology comes opportunity Dan Calladine, Head of Media Futures, Carat Technology creates entirely new businesses and jobs – for example, it’s estimated that 6% of the UK workforce does jobs that didn’t exist in 1990 – and robotics will be no different. We’re seeing some instances of this already. In the US it’s now possible to hire a drone to get aerial video and data at a fraction of the cost of employing hiring a light aircraft to do it. The Drone Base site lets visitors input their location, and book a drone pilot to come out to fly over and do the work. It’s not completely automated, but the drone pilot needs a lot less training than a ‘real pilot’ and this is currently being used by people in real estate and construction industries either to investigate and plan work, or to market completed projects.

The Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ is using robots called Nao in its flagship branch in Tokyo to talk to customers in multiple languages and answer simple questions like how to open a bank account, and what to do if you lose a bank card. Mercedes is developing a fleet of self-‐driving cars to act as driverless limousines, able to be summoned, arrive and transport a customer without any human actions at all within the car.


The future of robots: is your job safe? Alison Sprague, Partner, CEG Europe In September this year, BBC online ran a number of scary stories about robots. Not so much along the lines of Dr. Who scary but along the lines of, a robot may replace you in the workplace. The stories were based on two studies with the following headlines:

§ Boston Consulting Group: up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots by 2025.

§ Oxford University: 35% of existing UK jobs are at risk of automation in the next 20 years.

Such headlines are not incompatible. The key issues are: what, when, who and how? Not exactly small beer. On scrolling down the various reports on the matter, what is particularly scary is that fact that the robots have already taken over some jobs. As the BBC reported:

“The chances are if you have recently read a corporate earnings report on Forbes or a sports story on AP, it was written by a robot. Companies such as Narrative Science offer software such as Quill that is able to take data and turn it into something understandable. Quill writes company reports ahead of earnings announcements and Narrative Science claims this means Forbes can now offer this sort of report for thousands of companies rather than just the handful that could be written up by a human journalist.”

Faster and just as good. Worrying? No, apparently not. Journalists will be able to extend their reach while the robots focus on the more mundane. So it is the lower-‐skilled jobs that are under threat? Not necessarily. The types of jobs earmarked for replacement by our robot friends are wide ranging: lorry and taxi drivers, journalists, hotel workers, lawyers and doctors. But in all of the stories, the importance of the human touch – in the office, the face dealing with the consumer, is always raised. Most changes in technology usually enable complementary employment and/or enable redeployment.1 So there won’t be masses unemployed, twiddling their thumbs and asking the newly redundant robots to pass them the remote control (apologies, of course there won’t be a physical remote control to pass).2 Instead, looking at the potentially positive outcome, we’ll all become a bit richer and have a bit more time on our hands. Let’s assume the average working week becomes 25 hours thanks to the robots. That’s around 2 extra hours a day to spend at our leisure. So how may it be used? First of all, a key fact is that how we spend our leisure time depends on age. Presumably, as the younger and older members of society have relatively more time on their hands, what they do should give us pointers towards how others getting more leisure time. The table below, and this too is confirmed by statistics released by Ofcom, shows that one of the most prevalent activities across most age groups is watching live broadcasts (on TV or on other devices). That said, there was an 11-‐minute decline in broadcast TV viewing overall (2014 compared to 2013).3

1 Unfortunately some people may be unable to re-‐train and there could be a new layer of structural unemployment. 2 As reported by the BBC, Martin Ford, on the other hand, author of Rise of the Robots, thinks we will face mass unemployment and economic collapse unless we make radical changes, such as offering humans a basic wage, a guaranteed income. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-‐33327659 3 See: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/cmr15/CMR_UK_2015.pdf


Source: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_327213.pdf Based on the table together with Ofcom data on how people spend their “digital day”, it is not unreasonable to predict that as we get increased leisure time on our hands as robots remove some of the daily drudgery (and assuming that we don’t all end up in the catastrophic scenario of depressed, unhealthy and on the dole), we will spend the time as follows:

§ Increased exercise – we will be increasingly bombarded with its importance as we transition towards fewer working hours. Add some increasingly sophisticated digital measurement devices and that’s got to be top of the list.

§ Something new – it is conceivable that many people will learn that language, learn cordon bleu, take up the piano and/or take up some obscure hobby that they’ve never go around to. That’s second.

§ Thirdly – it’s got to be more screen time. But this will be time-‐limited to an extra half an hour extra per day as the health warnings of the effects of its excess on the eyes and the brain will be taken into account.

So in theory, the UK’s well-‐being index will increase – we’ll be fitter and more satisfied. And it may be the case that the reduction in traditional TV advertising revenue is more than compensated for by the further increase in online. But no matter what the format, it will all be bought and sold by robots.


Robotic assistants and the death of brand advertising Tim Elkington, Chief Strategy Officer, IAB UK We don’t know what the future of robotics will be, whether domestic use of robots will be limited to physical chores or whether, as in the Channel 4 series Humans, there will be widespread adoption of robotic assistants. One thing we can speculate about though is the nature of people’s likely relationships with robots. We know a bit about how people relate to technology based on research we’ve done in the mobile space and we can use this to extrapolate future robotic relationships. Firstly, the IAB’s MOJO research, published in 2012 (and a lot’s changed since 2012!) showed that when shopping people would trust their mobile phone more than the person they were shopping with if they needed advice about which product to choose (18% vs 15%). The mobile was second only to the shopping assistant, who was most trusted on 32%. This already shows a tendency to trust technology over people when looking for advice. Our RealView research also explored people’s relationships with their mobile devices. Over half (56%) said their smartphone helped with their day-‐to-‐day tasks and a third agreed it was their ‘lifesaver’. Dr Simon Hampton, lecturer in Psychology from the University of East Anglia who helped us analyse the results of the research went one step further and said that mobiles should be regarded as an extension of one’s self especially as they are used to store so much vital information including phone numbers and photographs. Finally our Mobile, Tablets and Other Media research confirmed that 68% of people would feel anxious if they accidently left their mobile phone at home. So these three pieces of research point to technology being a trusted source of advice, a vital piece of people’s lives and something that consumers get anxious about leaving behind. All of these conclusions relate to technology without a face, a simple screen used for simple tasks like communicating, navigating and browsing. What would be the effect is we gave this technology a face, a physical form and a personality? My best bet is that this next evolution will increase people’s tendency to anthropomorphize technology and that robotic assistants will play an important part in people’s lives, not least in terms of influencing purchases. This poses an interesting question for advertising and marketing practices. If purchasing decisions are increasingly made by trusted technological advisors, what will be the best way to influence these advisors? In a similar way to the ‘pester power’ relationship between children and parents could messages be directed towards robotic assistants who would then ‘pester’ their owners into making purchases? Robotics could also usher in the death of the brand. With all decisions being made in an objective and algorithmic fashion it will become increasingly difficult to create value using branding, rather it might be better to appeal to the utilitarian nature of the decision maker and stress the functionality and value of potential purchases. Whatever the future holds, the introduction of robotic assistants into the purchase funnel looks set to disrupt established marketing models and provide another challenge for marketers.

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