Time to unplug? A combination of too much messaging, overloaded formats and concerns around data are leading to the rise of the “unconnected consumer”, Charlotte Tilbury’s digital lead has warned.
Speaking at Mediatel’s Connected Consumer Conference on Wednesday, Anna Bateson said there has been a “loss of humanity” between brands and consumers, causing people to actively switch off from digital.
“There are lots of exciting things happening – there’s plenty of creativity, good use of data, measurement and innovation…but it’s almost like we’ve taken a step back,” Bateson said.
“We’ve forgotten that the consumer is a person and ultimately there has been a loss of humanity in the way we think about the task of marketing and how we set about it – and that has led to the fact there’s been this incredible loss of trust.”
This, she says, has been the catalyst for ad blocking and issues surrounding data privacy – as well as causing consumers to be cynical of, and increasingly “blind” to, the ads they are served.
“People are beginning to tune out and protect themselves. You have ad blocking; blindness to ad formats; you have a reluctance to give your data away or to allow your data to be used, which brings complexities with targeting; and you have, at the most extreme, people who are deciding to opt out of connectivity.”
Alarmingly, even those whose jobs revolve around digital and tech appear to be pulling the plug.
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Bateson, YouTube’s former director of global consumer marketing, said during her time working in Silicon Valley she found that a lot of the people at the centre of huge technology companies were actually choosing to disconnect themselves.
Crucially, this same generation was changing how its children interact with technology.
“In some cases they are actively disconnecting and ensuring that their children are growing up in environments where there are no devices, or where they’re not exposed to technology in a way that you’d think they might be just because it’s actually better to be disconnected,” she said.
“They go to schools where there are no devices and there is no technology…I think people are just overwhelmed generally, which is when you begin to see the rise of the ‘unconnected consumer’, which is the thing that you can’t ignore.”
While a disconnect from digital may ring alarm bells for brands, perhaps this is an opportunity for marketers to regain some of the humanity that many – including futurist Tracey Follows – argue has been lost.
“We’ve chosen to use digital to make everything more efficient…but we’ve forgotten how to explore and discover,” Follows said.
“It’s a loss of serendipity and we’ve lost a lot of the humanity. We’re becoming very reliant upon digital and the internet to make us incredibly efficient and we’re losing out.”
