Fresh off of our panels and events at ETH Denver it was onto the tech portion of SXSW in Austin. We had a lot of tacos (though you cannever have too many) and heard a lot of interesting stuff about the web3landscape and future of ecommerce. We’re breaking down our top takeaways below.
1) The Future Is (Not) Now
There was a general pumping of the breaks around phrases like “building for the future,” with more panelists and presentations focused on where we should be 10, 20 or 30 years from now, not 1 year from now. What is the point of focusing on the future if we can’t process what we’ve learned from the past? Gathering perspective about where we go next is key.
This was the crux of Mike Bechtel’s talk “A Brief History of the Future,” which was so popular, the Deloitte Consulting chief futurist delivered an encore presentation. If we’re not leading with customer’s needs, or with the problem, Bechtel stressed, we will overly fetishize the “new” and forget what’s already working for customers. It will only be when we build to improve, not replace, that users will have more simpler interactions with technology.
2) End Consumers are Just the Beginning
We caught Day 4 of the Brand Innovator’s summit, where Chris Garbutt, VICE Media Group’s chief creative officer and Olana Vlad, Coca-Cola’s global brand senior director, discussed how to make marketing more valuable for the end consumer, with brands providing better access to culture and co-creation.
But less present from this talk were words like “metaverse” or “NFT,” with Vlad instead focusing on the video and design collaborations Coke’s “Coca Cola Creations” platform [The Hub (coca-cola.com)]is creating with pop star Rosalia in both physical and digital worlds. The singer partnered with Coke to create a new limited edition flavor and released a video via a QR code on the can, sending customers to a platform where they could also design “Metaversion” avatars of themselves. It’s this in-between space of web2 and web3 is where brands are currently finding their customers and where we’re excited to be building at Dispatch.
3) People First
It’s easy to lose the point of attending conferences and festivals when you’re rushing from panel to panel: It’s all about the people. Dispatch hosted a dinner for people to simply sit, talk, and share ideas with our friends at definitive.io [https://www.definitive.io/], who, like us, are all about using web3 technology to provide more brands with the most useful analytics and ways to drive conversions.
Coming Up:
The Dispatch Studio at Showfields, April 11-13, in NYC. Book an appointment with Porter Geer for a demo of Dispatch’s new distributed commerce solution here.