Having participated in both SXSW and Cannes Lions Innovation festival this year, we've uncovered lots of insights on the current communications climate and have put together 9 trends which should serve as guidance for the areas to focus on in 2016.

1. BYTESIZED
TRENDS
2016

2. 2015 has been a landmark year for Innovation. The Cannes Lions Festival launched the first ever event of its kind focused
entirely on this rapidly expanding field. Brands are waking up to the fact that it's better to out-think rather than outspend, and
that technology can offer innovative ways of doing things differently. Despite this, there is still a lot of tech for tech's sake, with
Gartner's Emerging Technology Hype Cycle giving an indication of what is and what isn't likely to stick.
For those unfamiliar, the Hype Cycle provides a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and
applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. From
this graph, we can see that Brain-Computer Interaction is starting to gain traction, the IOT (Internet of Things) is still very
immature and that VR (Virtual Reality) is starting to stick on the 'Slope of Enlightenment'… while consumer 3D printing enters
the 'Trough of Disillusionment'.
We've picked out nine trends that have come from reviewing a wide range of communications and tech innovations throughout
the year, and which should serve as guidance for the areas to focus on in 2016.
12 MONTHS OF INNOVATION

3. INFORMATION
OVERLOAD
We now consume five times as much
information every day as we did 30 years ago.
And although our brains have adapted
somewhat to this change (as we covered in our
SXSW talk this year – Neuroplasticity and Tech),
they haven't kept pace sufficiently. So, this year
was all about the 'Digital Detox' – with countless
brands creating 'No phone or Wi-Fi zones' in an
effort to get us to look up and be more engaged
in the world around us.
Going one step further, digital design studio
ustwo (maker of Monument Valley) created
Pause, an app for relaxation and meditation
aimed at combating the stress of our
technological multi-tasking, always-on lives.
Likewise, BrainPal – a project that came out of
the Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco –
combines data from consumer EEG headbands
and the Cloudbrain API to show you how your
favourite apps really make you feel.
In the future, devices such as Phylter may help
us to manage our digital dopamine addictions.
Still a software project, the idea here is that it
monitors the user's brain activity to read when
they are overloaded with information. If so,
notifications for texts and emails are turned off
until they're in a better state to deal with them.

4. EASY
PROCESSING
In order to deal with this information overload, brands
need to make communications that are easy to
process and don't disrupt people's flow. Programmatic
formats such as auto-play videos and banners that
expand without warning are unpopular – and have led
to a tenfold increase in the number of people who use
ad blockers – from 21m of us in 2010 to 198m by mid-
2015. A poll from the IAB UK and YouGov supports
this opinion, with 48% saying that they would be less
likely to use an ad blocker if brand messages did not
impinge on their experience.
GIFs are becoming an increasingly popular way to
communicate simple concepts quickly. Channel 4
unveiled a new website that aims to repackage online
news in a format more appealing to our shorter
attention spans. Called 4NewsWall, it is aimed at 16-
to 34-year-olds. In an similar vein, emojis can be an
incredibly simple way to get a message across, but
only when it makes sense to do so – for example,
Domino's popular one-click pizza ordering emoji.
Another brand deliberately making its communications
easy is Kit Kat, which launched a simple but
innovative TV ad featuring… well, nothing – as an
antidote to the Christmas chaos. The 30-second spot
featured only a grey screen as an accompanying
voiceover asked if 'just absolutely nothing' is nice for a
change?

5. VIDEO KILLED
EVERYTHING
Online video now accounts for 50% of all mobile
traffic. By 2018, it is believed that 79% of all
consumer internet traffic will be video. Speaking
at SXSW in Texas this year, Mashable's Pete
Cashmore said that it's only a matter of time until
most of its content will be video – similar to the
video-exclusive site Nowness. Facebook has
also already started to test a video-only
newsfeed.
Brands are finally starting to step up to the five-
second pre-roll challenge, demonstrating their
creative prowess to catch people's attention in
five seconds. MINI's YouTube Race, challenges
viewers to 'Take on the most powerful MINI
ever'; the pre-roll visually counts down '3-2-1' in
time with the ad-skip button and the user then
has to try to hit it before the MINI blasts off!
Another innovative use of video this year was
The Last Hours of Laura K, a pioneering BBC
online drama that placed the onus on the viewer
to solve a murder mystery set in London. The
story unfolded through 24 hours of CCTV
footage playing on a loop on a website, with
viewers invited to use it – along with Laura K's
online presence – to piece the puzzle together.

6. 90% of all the data ever produced has been in
the last two years. Data is the oil of the 21st
century; many companies and states don't know
what to do with it, but are storing it up just in
case. Creativity is the key to making sense of all
the noise – as many panels at SXSW this year
professed.
Brazilian architect and designer Guto Requena
was behind two standout data visualisation
projects this year, namely the Love Project,
which measured people's biometric data while
they were telling love stories, then turned it into
3D printed 'snowflakes', and Light Creature,
which saw a 30-storey hotel façade respond to
environmental stimuli (such as noise pollution
and air quality).
MoodLens is a tool from Glade's Museum of
Feelings that alters your online profile photo
according to your mood – based on biometrics,
the weather and your social sentiment. Another
project based on self-portraits is SelfieCity,
which analyses selfies across different locations
using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative
methods, discovering insights, such as: older
men post more selfies than older women on
Instagram.
CREATIVE DATA

7. Futurist and science fiction author Bruce Sterling
suggests that we should put Siri, Cortana and
Alexa – the respective artificially intelligent
assistants for Apple, Microsoft and Amazon – in
a room and get them to talk. He suggests that
The Singularity – the dystopian theory that one
day computer intelligence could exceed human
intelligence and control – should be called 'The
Singularious' and shouldn't be taken seriously…
Scepticism aside, 2015 has seen AI slowly make
its way into the mainstream and become a useful
part of our lives. Watson, IBM's AI platform, saw
many useful applications this year, such as the
Tone Analyser – which uses linguistic analysis to
detect emotional states, social propensities and
writing styles in written communication, to help
avoid email aggression. And recently IBM has
launched the Trend app – which analyses
conversations on social media and review sites
to forecast trends and help users choose gifts.
AI also has the capability to be creative, from
Ava the AI girl on Tinder who tricked many keen
matchers (a stunt to promote the film Ex
Machina) to Jukedeck a platform that uses AI to
create customised royalty-free music.
GETTING USED
TO AI

8. Since Facebook bought Oculus for $2bn, people
have started to take Virtual Reality serious.
There has been massive growth in the amount of
content being created, while the introduction of
Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR to the
space means that almost anyone with a
smartphone can now experience VR.
This year saw innovators raise the VR game by
making it literally tangible, with devices such as
Gloveone – an internet-connected glove that
allows the wearer to 'feel' any object they can
see on a screen or Virtual Reality headset.
Impacto is an armband that combines basic
'haptic' feedback (a tap or vibration on the skin)
with electrical muscle stimulation to push or pull
the user's limb in a way that convincingly
simulates a physical impact.
A VR ecosystem called Jump was announced at
Google's IO conference – it includes a 360-
degree camera rig, software to assemble the
footage and a player. These developments may
be the key to making VR more accessible to the
masses. Also announced this year was VRAN,
the world's first virtual reality advertising network
(thus the acronym), allowing advertisers to buy
media space within VR content.
NEXT-LEVEL VR

9. BIOMETRIC
INTERFACE
With the rise of Neuromarketing and the spread
of accessible biometric technologies, brands are
innovating to allow people to interact through
their biometric data alone.
UMood is a new experience launched by Uniqlo,
in one of its stores in Sydney, that uses
neuroscience to match customers' moods with
the perfect T-shirt. Participants don an EEG
headset that then measures their reactions to a
series of videos.
Don't Look Away is the title of Usher's interactive
music video for his new track, Chains, on
entertainment platform TIDAL. The video only
plays when the viewer is looking directly into the
eyes of the people on the screen (as monitored
via their webcam) – who have all been victims of
social injustice.
A new web app called Smile Suggest detects
which websites make you smile and then saves
them for you in a folder. The app runs silently in
your browser and uses facial expression
analysis technology, via your webcam, to take a
note of whatever pages make you laugh or
smile.

10. PIXEL
PROCESSING
Computers have only started to be able to
understand images based on visual
characteristics rather than metadata in the last
few years. Companies such as Cortexica have
been leading the way, with its algorithm that
mimics the visual cortex in the human brain –
starting with Tesco's WineFinder app back in
2009 and then moving into the fashion world.
Amazon's A9 subsidiary has also developed its
visual search capability – and this is what
Pinterest has used for its newly launched visual
search function. Now, if you see an element of a
pin that you like, e.g. a lamp within a photo of a
room, you can quickly crop the lamp and search
for only that.
Google also has its own visual search ability
and, at the RE.WORK artificial intelligence
summit, announced Im2Calories – its
prospective tool that will allow users to calculate
the number of calories in food by taking a photo
of it. The AI uses 'the depth of each pixel in an
image' and 'sophisticated deep-learning
algorithms' to identify a foodstuff, judge its size
and come up with a calorie count.

11. PLACE MATTERS
76% of adults now own smartphones in the UK
and, given that 63% of us admit to taking our
phones with us to the toilet, our location is being
tracked nearly everywhere we go. From a data
point of view, we now have rich insights from
people's location history and can build up geo-
behavioural profiles based on where they go in the
real-world, not just what they do online.
From a content point of view, we can now trigger
data based on people's location – which allows for
interesting creative opportunities, as Snapchat's
geo-located filters have showed. Meanwhile, KFC
created a UK first with sponsored geo-filters in 900
of its restaurants.
Traces is a messaging app that allows you to
record messages that can only be accessed
digitally at specific locations. This year, Oxfam
used the platform to spread awareness of its work
by leaving tailored messages outside each of its
650 UK shops.
Canadian band Keys N Krates partnered with
VICE and Fido on the world's first location-based
mobile music video. Once viewers allow the
video's website to access their location, they are
served up relevant geo-tagged images .

12. THANK YOU
HeyHuman.com
@HeyHumanAgency