Staying Relevant to Younger Audiences - Digital Explorers' Diary #49

Welcome to the Digital Explorers' Diary #49!

A curated collection of thought-provoking topics about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.

Executive summary:

• How to stay relevant towards younger generations,
• Mixed Reality empowers people with Parkinson's disease,
• X is enabling ad share revenue,
• and Meta's strategic move to game creation.

On brands, relevance, and the digital worlds

Knowing in depth the spirit of your generation and the times you live in, you will be better able to exploit the zeitgeist. You will be the one to anticipate and set the trends that your generation hungers for.

Robert Greene — The Laws Of Human Nature

As we grow older, it’s very easy to dismiss the younger generation’s preferences. Quickly, we critique their passions, their heroes, their humor, or their vision of a better future. We think social media, influencers, NFTs, or digital currencies are just buzzwords without impact.
But still, we expect them to buy our products and engage with our brands. Surely, there’s a disconnect here.

This leads to the most important concept today for brands: relevance. To engage this new generation, brands need to understand them deeply and meet them where they are. We might believe that we are right, they are wrong, but that doesn’t matters. We cannot fight the generation spirit. We need to let our moral superiority go and analyze the current generation’s trends.

What are their values and ideas? What event happened in the world during their young age? How do they spend their free time? What makes them laugh or angry?
An economic recession, a global pandemic, a war, social media, social justice, exponential technology, climate change, work landscape shifts…

We can see a fast-paced generation, resilient, socially, morally, and environmentally conscious. They know a lot of changes are coming, and they are fully willing to participate in it.

To become relevant to this generation, let’s put aside the «it was better before» and embrace the zeitgeist of our times. And brands are on it!

Let’s take a recent example with Lacoste and its Web3 program UNDW3 (pronounced «underwater»). It launched last year with a collection of 11,212 NFTs that was sold out in 24 hours. But in June, it got a big upgrade, a completely gamified brand experience. With new quests every month, contests, and creative sessions, the experience is well-defined and in line with the current trends. And yes, they are not using Facebook but Discord to interact with the community.
By participating, users can earn loyalty points and exclusive goods, both real and digital.

You know what’s best? The quests are actually a dive into the brand's history through time, and its evolution, with the last one in December being, it seems, a projection into the future of Lacoste. Embracing the digital world doesn’t mean forgetting about the core brand values.

On top of that, they just launched their Virtual Store. It’s a dive into the brand universe with gamification, token-gated rooms reserved for the members of loyalty programs, new product releases…

That’s it, a straightforward digital strategy that blends Lacoste’s history with modern tools. And I won’t be surprised if this converts back into retail sales!

As usual, if you’d like to brainstorm this, book a quick call with me!

This Week's News:

1. As Meta is struggling to profit from Virtual and Mixed Reality, a new in-house studio was created and named «Ouro Interactive». Their focus is on creating multiplayer, high-end games on top of Meta’s Metaverse Horizon World. The first release is already out, a shooting game called «Super Rumble». And at the same time, rumors are out that a mobile version of Horizon World will be released soon. I’ve said it many times, but the current issue of Virtual Reality is not hardware; it’s software. High-quality content is rare. Is this news a turning point that will bring users’ adoption?
2. As a first step in X's (Twitter) new strategy, creators can now profit from ad revenue sharing. There are a few conditions to meet that seem to narrow down the possibilities quite a bit; see below: I quote: «Ads revenue sharing lets you share revenue from verified users’ impressions of ads displayed in replies to content you post on X.» Have at least 500 followers.
   Be subscribed to Blue or Verified Organizations.
   Have at least 15M impressions on your cumulative posts within the last three months.
   Is this a first step to counter OpenAI’s Worldcoin?
   This is part of Elon Musk's strategy to change Twitter's business model to become much more than a social network, a bit like WeChat in China. Will it succeed?
3. A very interesting and promising technology: by displaying colored lines on the floor in Mixed Reality, a company named Stroll aims to empower people living with neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease. Look at the video below for impressive demonstrations, where they also showcase the therapeutic games they developed.

From the Podcast

Every week, I’m teaming up with Guillaume Brincin and Sébastien Spas on the Lost In Immersion podcast. This week:

1. Last week, I went outside – yes, that happens! – and tested the latest Google Augmented Reality game, a collaboration with Taito on Space Invaders. The Space Invaders franchise is certainly attractive. The application uses the geospatial API that permits interaction between the surrounding buildings and the virtual objects. But here again, the game designers fell under a similar trap as the ones I mentioned last week: trying to fit a concept into technology without much adaptation. I would have loved to be able to play from anywhere without having to go outside necessarily and explore my neighborhood to hunt for aliens instead of having to stay in one place. Google & Taito
2. We discussed the debunked rumor that Meta would not pursue the next version of their high-end device, the Meta Quest Pro. Even if that rumor was false, we agree that Meta’s headset strategy is not clear and why it’s important for content developers. Indeed, as we have said many times, the VR market suffers from a lack of great content. If Meta wants to incentivize studios to create experiences for VR, they need a clear hardware roadmap so developers can plan ahead and not worry about having to cancel or adjust their game if the hardware stops being produced. Coincidentally, as I mentioned in the news above, Meta just created their own in-house studio. Meta Quest Pro
3. Some patent geeks noticed that Apple published a patent that shows EEG-enabled Airpods. We’re curious as to what type of information can be extracted from this, and it’s certainly years ahead. On the Vision Pro, the eye-tracking is AI-assisted and, to some early tester’s reports, feels like magic. Will these Airpods bring similar predictive technology to all Apple devices?
   Patently Apple

Watch the podcast below, and tune in at 10 am UTC on Tuesdays on Twitch, and listen to the replays on Youtube!

Did this newsletter spark some ideas? There are a lot of ways we can work together:

• A quick-fire, 30-minute brainstorm with me - book it here!
• We can ideate, prototype, and build your experiences - contact us here!