These Women Leaders Talk About the Future of Marketing
Staying current and ahead of trends is no easy task. However, it is the job of marketers to not only meet consumer needs and find solutions to pain points, but anticipate them as well. Technology, in its most ideal form, should make people's lives better, more efficient, and provide ways to bridge gaps, whether it's helping communities dispel bias or creating more personal ways to connect people together.
For instance, creating ways for technology to be more of a force for good and help people who have disabilities is one way companies can innovate. Corinne Feight of marketing consultancy Area 23 pointed out during an ANA Marketing Future podcast episode how technology often isn't built for everyone's needs in mind, "Think of how many deaf Americans that there are in the United States. And that's a huge market of people that want technology like this, but it isn't being built for them."
Kristen Bell, also of Area 23, went on to say how technology still has a bias problem, stating, "In the hearing world you have all these like really great appliances. You have Google home, you have Alexa, you know, they make, you know, living at home like great, you know you can talk to it all day. But these devices are not accessible to deaf and hard of hearing at all because they're all audio based."
Three experts in marketing and innovation shared their perspectives during episodes on the ANA Marketing Futures Podcast. Check them out below:
Selle Evans, founder and CEO of Masterly Business Solutions, a marketing agency focused on leveraging personalization to help brands, discussed the power of personalization and mistakes companies often make when starting out.
Twain Liu, an inventor, engineer, and former UBS board observer for more than 20 major tech investments, discussed why binary logic is insufficient when trying to replicate the human thought process in machines.
Corinne Feight and Kristen Bell of Area 23 were determined to find a way to help deaf or hard of hearing community through technology; thus, they began a journey that culminated in the creation of "See Sound." See Sound by Wavio uses AI-powered machine learning to listen for common household sounds. Once detected, the technology sends a smartphone notification to the user. Corinne and Kristen discussed how AI was "trained" to recognize and differentiate sounds.
Joanna Fragopoulos is a director of editorial and content development at ANA.
The views and opinions expressed in Industry Insights are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.