Digitization brings us closer to new trends at ever shorter intervals that overwhelm us humans both at work and at home with buzzwords like Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, smart homes, autonomous driving or artificial intelligence (AI). What we shouldn’t forget is that these trendy technologies are supposed to make people’s hard everyday lives more comfortable.

ESET, a global leader in cybersecurity, released the results from its APAC Consumer Cybersecurity Survey, which has been conducted earlier this year with 11,200 respondents from Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, unveiled Tingwu, an AI-powered meeting assistant, alongside a new version of its cloud computer.
The solutions are tailored for the new world of work and address surging demand from corporate users looking to work remotely with more automated support, a trend accelerated by the pandemic.

Today's users expect a lot from technology, like connecting us or giving ubiquitous, up-to-date information at all times. We expect technology to adapt to our specific user profile, to inform us about the future for unknown events, and to support us in decision-making.

A new IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study revealed CIOs' influence on business strategy and operations is growing as technology pervades surveyed enterprises, surveying 2,500 CIOs from more than 45 locations and 29 industries. It was conducted in cooperation with Oxford Economics and benchmarked against nearly 20 years of IBM's C-suite surveys.

Consumer advocate organizations, such as the Center for Digital Democracy, are criticizing neuromarketing's potentially invasive technology.

The privacy concerns come from consumers being unaware of the purpose of the research, how the results will be used, or haven't even given consent in the first place. Some are even afraid that neuromarketers will have the ability to read a consumer's mind and put them at "risk of discrimination, stigmatization, and coercion."

However, industry associations across the world have taken measures to address the issue around privacy. For example, the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association has established general principles and ethical guidelines surrounding best practices for researchers to adhere to.

Below are some guidelines that intend to mitigate the risk of researchers breaching a participant's privacy, if they want their research to be academically recognized.

1. Do not bring any kind of prejudice in research methodology, results, and participants.
2. Do not take advantage of participants’ lack of awareness in the field.
3. Communicate what participants should expect during research (methodologies).
4. Be honest with results.
5. Participant data should remain confidential.
6. Reveal data collection techniques to participants.
7. Do not coerce participants to join research and allow them to leave when they want.
   
   

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, for instance, claims that neuromarketing is "having an effect on individuals that individuals are not informed about" and though there has not historically been regulation on adult advertising due to adults having defense mechanisms to discern what is true and untrue, regulations should now be placed: "if the advertising is now purposely designed to bypass those rational defenses . . . protecting advertising speech in the marketplace has to be questioned."  (Source: Wikipedia)

By MediaBUZZ

A study by the German Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the American North Carolina State University, performed the first large-scale analysis of Alexa Skills. Skills are Alexa’s versions of apps, that are used via voice-commands and can be loaded onto the Amazon voice assistant. The study group’s examination revealed that this could bring not only advantages, but security risks and data protection problems for users, too.

Predictive analytics are regularly used in marketing to create individual and relevant customer communication. It is a forecasting method that aims to determine future and unknown events by identifying repetitive patterns, e.g., in customer transaction data, that make it possible to deliver reliable projections. Therefore, the starting point for predictive analytics is always the largest and most meaningful amount of data available.

Statistics on the use of Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Cortana from Microsoft or Siri from Apple, point to the same direction, namely the fact that the users have focused on a small, sharply defined area of application that is far below what was expected at the height of the hype two years ago.

The idea of designing creative advertising banners, captivating headlines, and trying to receive as many likes as possible for social media postings is increasingly giving way to a tough, data-driven mentality in marketing. “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it”, the management guru Peter Drucker once said. And indeed, the shift in the customer journey and the associated development towards digital marketing channels brought with it a decisive factor – measurability! Marketing has changed, and it will continue to change, but what does that mean for required job skills in marketing?

Until now, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) were only a distant vision of the future for many companies; however, the democratization of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies will move forward this year, predicts enterprise search and AI specialist IntraFind.

"Artificial intelligence and machine learning will increasingly arrive at companies in 2022," Franz Kögl, CEO at IntraFind states, explaining that "new methods are democratizing technology and enabling more and more companies to reduce costs through automation.” “Customers will also benefit from this development, because intelligent searches, chatbots and voice assistants also improve the user experience", he concludes.

AI and especially the sub-area of ML have developed into important and indispensable helpers in many areas due to huge amount of data available today.

Platform giants are collecting unimaginable amounts of data to feed generally available AI methods available for generalized use cases. However, companies can only use these generalized models to a limited extent in the specific context of use. For optimal adjustment, they must train the AI with real data, which is only available in small quantities in a specific context.

IntraFind predicts how the situation around AI will develop in the coming year based on the following three trends analyses:

1. More focus on Small Data and Wide Data

For a long time, Big Data was mostly indispensable when it came to training AI. The problem, however, is that in practice only a few companies and developers have access to enough training data. As a result, much of the business community is largely excluded from the technologies of tomorrow. New trends such as Small and Wide Data are therefore just in time to make AI and ML accessible to smaller companies.

Small Data approaches aim to extract value from smaller data sets with ML techniques optimized for them using new analytics techniques. Wide Data is about creating synergies from a wide range of different data sources and types to improve context for AI applications. With these approaches, companies can leverage their own treasure trove of data effectively and profitably.

A study by the market research and consulting company Gartner shows just how interesting the new approaches are: according to this study, around 70 percent of all companies will shift their focus from Big Data to Small and Wide Data by 2025.

2. Intelligent Document Processing on the rise

Intelligent document analysis enables completely new working methods, as companies can digitize and partially or fully automate processes. In this way, processes can be optimized and implemented much more efficiently. Public authorities and large companies have vast amounts of data, and new data is added every day. Often, several employees are entrusted with filtering the relevant information from documents that are required for further processing. This takes a lot of time, and the human factor makes for a comparatively high susceptibility to errors. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), i.e., the use of AI-based software for processing documents, is becoming increasingly important and at the same time enables the automation of workflows.

With IDP, companies and government agencies can automate their front- and back-office processes. Application reviews, order acceptance as well as updating customer and payment data are prominent application areas for this technology. In addition, IDP software helps with regulatory compliance or product tracking via supply chain systems in retail. Ultimately, the areas of application include all text-based work processes.

3. Advances in Conversational AI

Anthropomorphism, the humanization of technology, has always been a major topic in the field of artificial intelligence. At the latest with Siri on the iPhone and Alexa on the TV, this phenomenon has crept into everyday life. Experts call these smart, AI-based voice assistants and other dialog systems conversational AI. They will become even more important in 2022.

This technology is a real asset, especially in customer service. For chatbots and question answering systems as virtual assistants to be of real help to customers and thus also to companies, several challenges must be overcome: the AI must correctly interpret, "understand”, and provide answers to customer queries, as well as rely on a human expert as infrequently as possible. To make this experience as natural as possible, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used.

The better the conversational AI system works; the more customer inquiries companies can process automatically. This not only saves employee resources, but also makes customers less dependent on business hours. (Source: IntraFind)

By MediaBUZZ

Today’s customers demanding seamless cross-channel experiences, convenience, reassurance, and commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) values and the list keeps growing, states Forrester in one of its latest reports. Not to mention that the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and the “Great Resignation” remains challenging.

To fight the rising tide of entropy that has disrupted customers and employees, business leaders in Asia Pacific (APAC) will embrace controlled, positive change in 2022 — implementing future fit technology strategies, such as cloud-native approaches to improve business agility, and ushering in a new era of regionally aligned, hybrid work strategies to build customer trust and tackle climate change.

“2022 is a year to be bold. The old ways of working no longer work. The future is up for grabs. Leading firms will use the crucibles of 2020 and 2021 to forge a path to an agile, creative, and resilient tomorrow”, Forrester states, besides providing the following forecasts:

• Consumers see the world as all digital and have rapidly increased their technology adoption and usage since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Forrester data, 66% of Chinese consumers say they are buying more things online than they normally would. Even consumers who were once considered digital holdouts anticipate continuing the online behaviors they adopted in the pandemic. As a result, consumers have higher expectations that digital experiences work well. Although they’re generally willing to forgive companies struggling with pandemic-related disruptions, consumers expect them to double down on building a successful and sustainable digital customer experience. Given that almost two years have passed since the onslaught of the pandemic, it is not surprising that consumers believe that companies should have figured out by now how to manage pandemic-related disruption.
  
  
• Tech execs leap from digital- to human-centered technology transformations. So-called “digital transformation” efforts have come and gone. In 2021, one in four APAC firms nominated digital transformation as a key action to address business model change. That number will drop to less than 15% in 2022, but that doesn’t mean pandemic-sparked technology acceleration will slow. Ongoing digital sameness and falling returns on IT investments are forcing firms to seek new means to demonstrate business value in crowded markets. Leading firms will unlock the creativity of their employees and surround them with intelligent technologies such as automation and predictions engines that focus on outcomes, not just financial results. This shift will establish a new era of transformation, comprising human-centered technology initiatives that form a tight link between customer experience and employee experience, drive competitive advantage, and deliver a 3% to 5% net gain in productivity. In 2022, 10% of technology executives will prioritize investments in strategic partnerships and innovation practices at three times the rate of their competitors to radically expand their organization’s creative and innovative capacity.
  
  
• Brands dance and spar with marketplaces. In China, 98% of B2C e-commerce sales flow through marketplaces today. For years, Western brands have leaned most heavily on Alibaba/Tmall and JD.com for online sales in China, along with closely integrated payments, logistics, delivery, and more. But marketplaces are as much enemy as friend, amping up sales volume at the expense of stealing a brand’s soul. So, in 2022, brands will fight back with every technology and weapon in their arsenal. Western brands will follow the lead of some mature (often luxury) brands and spend 2022 vetting and courting niche marketplaces as well as mini programs via companies such as Douyin, Little Red Book, and WeChat. Globally, brands will make direct relationships and better shopping experiences a priority to keep customers away from marketplaces and coming back for more. The mantra will become “Anywhere Commerce” as first movers and fast followers alike pursue presence in every possible shopping moment, from an owned website to an influenced marketplace or social slot to a paid retail media placement. Brands will also invest in the commerce building blocks of their experience architectures; order management, payments, and inventory control will make every touch a shoppable moment; investments in immersive experiences will turn browsing into virtual inhabiting; and subscription billing will make loyalty a business model pivot.
  
  
• APAC is well on its way to becoming a digital society. APAC governments lead the world in implementing the three pillars of a digital society: digital identity, digital currency, and data interoperability. The region also leads the world in central bank digital currency rollouts: e.g., more than 20 million Chinese consumers use the digital yuan, and trials are planned in the retail and wholesale industry in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Interoperable, connected government data frameworks like the Singapore-Australia Digital Economy Agreement and India-Singapore payment link are still new and thus fragmented. Nonetheless, tech innovators should seek opportunities to leverage all three pillars to build and offer differentiated capabilities to deliver better experiences for their customers.
  
  
• Trust becomes a key business imperative. The world is in a major crisis of trust, driven by concerns over public health, cybersecurity, data privacy, and sustainability. In response, companies and governments will use trust to demonstrate their commitment to customer relationships. In APAC, financial services will be the first industry to act. As prior crises have shown, people’s financial well-being and trust in financial institutions is a matter of systemic economic risk. In 2022, four to six financial services pioneers will begin measuring and codifying trust, as NatWest Group does with its net trust score linked to business KPIs like customer deposits. Some firms will also take advanced measures to protect trust, like the consortium of 25 financial services and tech firms participating in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Veritas initiative, which sets out principles for the ethical use of AI in credit risk scoring and customer marketing. Companies that ignore the trust imperative will lose 10% to 40% of their customers, starting with those unwilling to forgive firms for breaching their trust.
  
  
• Companies adapt to climate change or face extinction. Values-based consumers have furthered firms’ awareness of corporate social responsibility and sustainability, with 42% of senior business leaders in APAC reporting that these initiatives have increased in corporate importance due to COVID-19. Unfortunately, the sustainability plans of too many firms have remained performative and were put on hold during the pandemic. Only 30% of firms are taking real action, such as making their sustainability efforts more transparent and reducing their carbon footprint or e-waste. For most firms in APAC, sustainability efforts are driven by compliance and investor pressure, not strategic planning and risk management. This shortsighted approach checks the box but will not materially affect climate change. Forward-looking companies will appoint a sustainability leader and create a dedicated funded function — or risk alienating empowered customers who see right through merely performative actions.
  
  
• B2B marketers accelerate technology investments, with uneven results. Persistent digital engagement will become the norm, with 70% of marketers adopting an “always on” digital engagement strategy in 2022. For instance, three times as many B2B buyers (17%) said that the competence demonstrated during the buying process was the most significant driver of purchase choice, far ahead of the relationship with the sales rep (5%) or customer references (6%). To meet their always-on goals, marketing leaders will turn to “smarter” (more autonomous and automated) solutions with complex tech stacks. Marketing technology’s slice of the marketing budget, which has dropped to 19%, will increase to 25% in 2022. But 75% of efforts to create automated, personalized engagement won’t meet ROI goals because of inadequate buyer insight. In 2022, only 10% of B2B organizations will identify metrics to measure the value created for buyers during the buying process. B2B marketing leaders need to instill customer centricity into planning and execution processes to meet personalization goals.
  
  
• Automation is emerging out of the back office to become a potent enabler of new business and operating models. Companies with advanced automation programs will obliterate the competition if they defined an automation fabric — a framework to build, orchestrate, and govern a hybrid workforce of human and digital workers — that links AI-based and traditional automation components, along with a proactive program for innovation. As automation technologies such as robotic process automation, integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and digital process automation/low code converge on the supply side, expect a significant number of organizations to embrace an automation fabric to develop innovation culture, create business models, take new products and services to market, or rethink their customer experience.
  
  
• APAC’s future of work looks different compared with the rest of the world. As the pandemic stabilizes and vaccination rates rise, workplaces are gradually opening. Globally, Forrester expects that 70% of large firms will embrace some form of anywhere work in 2022. But region-specific pressures will force more than 60% of APAC firms to prepare to bring the vast majority of workers back to the office full-time. For example, only 32% of workers in the region’s large manufacturing sector can work anywhere. Similarly, outsourcing firms with purpose-built, secure campuses and high-availability facilities cannot provide the same level of service in remote locations with poor infrastructure. Employees, unions, and regulators will also push back on contact center operators that insist on surveilling employees working from home. Additionally, Forrester data found that 65% of APAC information workers are eager to return to the office, with high-density extended-family living likely accounting for this trend: 58% of employees say they are less productive working at home during COVID-19, compared with 46% globally. In response, firms operating in APAC need a region-aligned anywhere-work strategy that balances employee expectations with the feasibility of hybrid work approaches.
  
  
• Cloud native gains momentum. The scale mandate will reform as companies experience new levels of cloud scale considering the pandemic-fueled digital acceleration. Global cloud-native adoption rose in 2021 as developers reported increased usage of containers (33% to 42%) and serverless (26% to 32%) at their organization. Instead of adopting cloud solutions only for new workloads, some APAC firms will prioritize container-based, microservice-oriented architectures with distributed capabilities in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. They will use service mesh for microservice support, a key to increased business agility, as well as use cloud-native platforms to power tech- driven innovations. By embracing a cloud-native approach, these firms will accelerate enterprise modernization and implement future fit technology strategies. But this shift will be slow compared with the other regions and limited to organizations that also commit to modernizing their practices, such as infrastructure as code, DevOps automation, and composition over customization. Firms not embracing cloud-native strategies will see limited benefits as their cloud-first plans stall.
  
  
• Third-party risks escalate as “just-in-case” supply chains gain ground. In 2020, 27.8% of organizations reported 20 or more supply chain disruptions, an increase from 4.8% in 2019, according to the Business Continuity Institute. Firms are looking to make supply chains more resilient without dulling their competitive edge, transitioning from “just-in-time” efficiency to the “just-in-case” contingency necessary to ward off disruption and volatility. At the same time, firms are accelerating innovation. The collision of these two priorities means that firms are effectively doubling the size of their third-party ecosystem, resulting in more security problems. While 87% of security pros in APAC say they manage privacy and security risks in their partner ecosystem, Forrester data reveals that 38% still reported that their organization experienced an incident or breach involving supply chain or third-party providers in the past 12 months. With cyberattacks continuing to target smaller vendors and suppliers, SolarWinds-style headlines will plague organizations that don’t invest in the risk management trifecta: people, process, and technology. Smart companies will ensure the tech stack includes risk assessment, supply chain mapping, real-time risk intelligence, and business continuity management.

By Forrester

Classic keyword campaigns will lose relevance in the future. Advertisers must finally establish alternative solutions to third-party cookies and encourage the user to accept consent management with good content. In addition, diversity is becoming more and more popular in advertising and social networks. The digital marketing world will continue to be dynamic in the coming year and advertisers should keep an eye on the most important trends for 2022.

Companies that are now putting their Internet advertising to the test can expect a conversion rate that is as good in the future as it has been before. At least that’s the conclusion of the Google Ads agency Smarketer that has put together the trends that will determine the advertising world in 2022.

An important trend in the coming year will be the cross-channel Google Performance Max campaigns, which Google presented this year as an alternative to the classic keyword campaign. Google Performance Max campaigns focus on conversion goals with the help of user signals instead of being based on keywords – and combine search, display, YouTube, Discover and other advertising platforms. Even if new AI algorithms take over many tasks that the account manager was responsible for in the past, this will not become superfluous. On the contrary: "The account manager must understand the KPIs across all channels, select and interpret the relevant data. By bundling the data and the interaction of all channels within campaigns, marketing goals can be viewed holistically, and audiences can be achieved better and more efficiently." explains Eric Hinzpeter, content marketing expert at Smarketer.

Google and Microsoft's search for adequate substitutes for cookies

Cookie-less tracking will remain one of the most important topics for advertisers in the coming year. Google has announced that it wants to establish the consent mode as an alternative that extrapolates the rejected consent management requests and inserts lost data into the Google Ads account.

At the moment, however, all of this is still a bit inscrutable and there is no panacea, so Smarketer advises companies individually on this. At the same time, Google is continuing to expand its own data protection initiative in the form of “Federated Learning of Cohorts” (FLoC). FLoC should group clusters of users and work out commonalities from the group characteristics. Although individuals can no longer be tracked, but tests still show that a large proportion of the conversions can be absorbed.

Microsoft is following a similar path as Google within the framework of the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN), where campaigns can be played out across services and target groups too. The ad adapts to the respective location and desired format and, with the help of an AI in the background, creates a conversion-optimized ad from various image and text variants. "Artificial intelligence is conquering ad management more and more. Algorithms take on a lot of manual tasks and this relieves the ad manager, who is given more freedom in his work, which is important since campaigns are getting more and more important regarding the data to be considered", reports Hinzpeter.

Like Google, Microsoft will increasingly have to look for an adequate replacement for the slowly but surely disappearing third-party cookies and develop its multimedia ads further.

Diversity and inclusion come across in advertising

Consent management is developing into an increasing problem for the entire advertising industry, and many users are now annoyed by it. It is important to recognize, however, that users tend to be more willing to give their consent if they receive attractive offers and good content.

The demand for diversity from many international customers has also developed as a cross-industry trend, demanding inclusive and correctly gendered advertising regarding the creation of advertising material and communication in social media.

The trend goes away from the one central social network towards adapted advertising material or even completely individual campaigns for certain target groups: TikTok and Twitch are currently one step ahead, especially with younger target groups, and Instagram remains extremely important for many companies. The trend towards more video advertising, which was also observed in 2021, continues, especially since YouTube will roll out more ad features and forms of advertising next year.

By MediaBUZZ

South Korea:

• Company: Brain & Research Innovation; Technology: fMRI, EEG, EKG, eye tracking, GSR

• Company: ThinkUser; Technology: EEG, eye tracking, GSR, psychophysical experiments