Today is the 69th anniversary of the D-Day Landings, the day when 150,000 Allied soldiers plunged headlong into the chaos and bloodshed of the Normandy beaches in an attempt to wrestle control of France from the Nazis.  It was the biggest seaborne invasion the world has seen.

Today is also the day Channel 4 goes live with a hugely ambitious, humbling and utterly compelling campaign – D-Day: As It Happens will follow the stories of seven individuals involved in the Normandy landings. Regular updates via TV, social media and the internet over 24 hours will recreate the events of the pivotal battle in real time.

Factually, this is the tear-jerker to end all tear-jerkers – the photos of soldiers wading through the surf, the contents of letters and official records, the painstaking research by amateur historian Colin Henderson all combine to create a heart-rending account of one of the most significant battles in history.  The grainy black and white images are a far cry from our modern rolling, as-it-happens, experience-every-second-live news experience – and yet somehow feel far more real.

Technologically, this is an outstanding feat of ingenuity by Channel 4 – billed as a ‘twenty-four hour history event’, viewers can switch between multiple mediums to track the progress of real soldiers in real time, experiencing the terror as the same time as the D Day seven did.  This is second screening at its best – complex, layered, engaging, brilliant.  At a time when nearly half of all consumers have a smartphone; when 70% of 16-24s use the mobile internet daily; when 84% go online whilst watching TV and 6 in 10 online consumers use social media while they are watching TV – a campaign that reaches consumers at every touchpoint is an incredibly powerful way of creating engagement

This isn’t the first example of real time history – @HistoryNeedsYou @TitanicRealTime @RealTimeWWII, have been thriving for years; but for a generation of people moving farther and farther away from the events of our past, this is history brought vividly to life, lest we forget. 

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/d-day-as-it-happens/4od

Sometimes, when watching football coverage on TV, you could almost believe it hasn’t changed over the years. And with so much fast-paced innovation going on within consumers’ lives and across the technological landscape over recent years, it definitely feels as if the whole experience of watching the game is ripe for a major shot in the arm.

The future of football on television was the subject of a panel discussion I took part in last weekend at the Adidas Lab, alongside experts from from BT Sport, YouTube, YouTube football channel Copa 90 and Adidas Global.

We kicked off by exploring the future of football broadcasting. The key consumer trends impacting how football will be shown by mainstream broadcasters are Demanding Consumers, Everyday Exceptional and Authenti-Seeking. It is very likely that the football fan of the future will expect the broadcasting experience to be closer to the in-stadium experience, to be more tailored to them as an individual and more immersive. Broadcasters might, for example, be better able to segment their offering, recognising that not all fans have the same relationship with the teams playing in a particular match, and therefore require different things from the broadcast, depending their interest in the teams playing and the importance of the game. For example, on some occasions viewers might prefer partisan rather than impartial commentary. They might like to suppress the commentary entirely and replace it with crowd noise (including banter, chanting and swearing) from a specific section of the ground.

Then we moved on to the future of online football, which clearly offers up new horizons to fans, in terms of content and access. Consumer trends such as Mobile Living, Native Marketing and Free! are highly relevant here, highlighting fans’ desire to access the sport they love via smartphones and tablets, wherever and whenever they want, to find the content they want without paying for it, and to immerse themselves ever deeper in the stories and characters that inhabit the beautiful game. Many clubs are already active in this sphere – Manchester City were cited as a good example, offering a “Tunnel Cam” that gives subscribers a new access point to see the players before the come onto the pitch.

From there we moved on to second screens. Second screening refers to viewers simultaneously doing something else like texting, web-surfing or status updating at the same time as viewing, driven by consumer trends like Smart Boredom and Smart Networking. In the context of football the second screen can be used for all kinds of things:

• Exchanging the banter that is so much a part of the football community using either dedicated apps such as Vubooo and Squawka Zeebox or traditional social media sources (Facebook, Twitter, and so on)
• Betting on the changing match situation via in-game gambling options
• Keeping tabs on the progress of one’s Fantasy Football team
• Ordering pizzas and other in-match provisions

We finished by considering the future of data in football (on TV), where consumer trends like Total Recall, Quantified Self and Consumer Capital become highly relevant. Data, in particular statistics from Opta, now characterise in- and post-game analysis like never before. Some of the high-tech gadgetry on show at the Adidas Lab will make data even richer and more accessible. But there is clearly a question about how much of this is desired by the viewing fan, as opposed to the football community itself.

From the 2013 season onwards, shirts worn by players from all participating teams in the US’s Major League Soccer will carry small chips powered by the Adidas miCoach Elite System that track a number of performance measures – including heartbeat, acceleration and speed. Spectators can access the data via a dedicated iPad app.

As the amount of data that in-ball, on-pitch, in-goal and on-player devices offer skyrockets, so do the dangers of data overload. I think the emphasis will continue to be on the usage of statistics to tell compelling stories through the usage of increasingly cool visualisation tools, rather than the stats being an end in themselves.

Overall, what seems clear is that the future of the beautiful game on TV is exciting. Football arouses passions that are often difficult for those not swept along by them to understand and which are diverse – from anger to frustration, sometimes joy, often humour. And all of these need to be retained in whatever form the high-tech future brings to us. Provided they can be kept the future of football can be both real and high-tech.

Last weekend, Future Foundation was lucky enough to be invited to take an exclusive peek into the adidas psyche and its vision of the future of football, at the adidas lab in Victoria House. This was the first in a series of events showcasing adidas products of the past, present and future. Inspired by the UEFA Champions League on Saturday, the event focused on innovation in football and provided fans with the opportunity to test unseen products and engage with a range of high-tech, interactive experiences.

Adidas CEO Herbert Hainer and football legends Zinedine Zidane and Michael Ballack kicked off with a day of interactive and inspiring football innovations. Hainer stated the need to keep things ‘smart’ and ‘fast’, describing the cutting edge of football as ‘smart’ and ‘digital’, where revolutionary advances in monitoring and tracking the biorhythms of individual players will have implications for broadcasting and coaching.

Then the fun really began! We were treated to sneak previews of 4 cutting edge innovations, all designed to super-charge the beautiful game. First under the spotlight were speed enhancement technologies – the adizero 99g boot weighs less than an iPhone 5; while the 630g kit includes shirt, shorts, shin pads, socks and boots all designed to provide a lighter look with more game time speed.  A limited number of both will be available in 2015.

The base layer of the kit is also fully integrated into another innovation – the miCoach Elite team system. This is the first system of its kind to take real time physiological data and send it back to a coach’s tablet on the sidelines. Measuring everything from power, speed and distance to heart rate and field position, it provides instant insights into player performance and work rate to keep players at their peak and in the game.

The final innovation, the Smart Ball, adds another element of smart-technologies to the sport with the ability to measure power, strike point, trajectory and bend through its built-in sensors. Its automated coaching system feeds back this information to the player through an app to improve technique.

All four were on display and available to interact with. I even got a chance to experience adidas’s future by running ‘The Track’, a 15m Astroturf track providing a real time data visualisation experience to test your game. This involved partaking in 3 running challenges to measure speed, work rate and skill. The data came to life as I ran the track and provided insight on which adidas boot would best suit my style of play – the Predator (the technical wizard), f50 (the speed demon) or Nitrocharge (the engine).

So what does all of this mean for the future of sport? The training, coaching and viewing of sports are all in for some dramatic changes. Mobile Living leaves no rock unturned, and it is now making its way onto the football pitch. Players and coaches will have new, personalised, quantified ways of tracking their performance and progress. The adidas innovations will be game-changing. Literally.

Creating brand experiences for and with consumers requires technology. Obvious right? Then why do marketers and their IT departments still remain segregated in so many businesses today?

Internet week in New York (the East Coast’s response to Silicon Valley – some have even dubbed it Silicon Alley – a gathering of all the digi-heads and tech fanatics on this half of the country) has just finished (now in its 5^th year).

One of the seminars I attended looked at digital disruption, and not just in how digital has disrupted consumers, or given headaches to marketers as they attempt to find new and innovative avenues in which to speak to these new hyper-consumers (ahem, please see our nVitro The Hyper Individual).  It also addressed the change among the C-Suite – no longer can the suits at the top carry on with life in the business world as usual.  Their window office will not protect them from the digital age and those who ignore the call of digital integration will feel it  -  most acutely on their bottom lines…

Thus, the CM-I-O is born (chief marketing and information officer).

While in the analog world, information technology specialists and marketers remained decidedly and determinedly separate within the company walls, this brave new world, with its rising and unending importance of digital technology, requires these Chiefs Of to become increasingly integrated. Meaning that IT must now jump in bed with their ad and marketing teams – merging marketing practice with the technology that supports it in order to create a consumer-friendly, fast paced and effective brand interface for engagement.

Both sides of the corporate brain -  the creatives and the techies  – now form the internal power couple put  on the quest to engage the consumer in ways meaningful to their life today and tomorrow.  And the reason for this internal merger is simple: excellence in marketing ideas (driven by the CMO) requires excellence in the delivery of ideas (driven by the CTO/CIO).  And as data increasingly becomes more of an business asset, silos of information within a company can cause chronic illness that will only lead to early brand death.

And it makes sense, an obvious and natural transition. Transparency is increasing faster and cost is decreasing faster now than at any other time. So why keep the IT team in the basement when good IT can facilitate new systems of customer engagement? IT enables things such as Concierge Living to be brought to life, allowing for brand transparency and excellence in our demanding 24 hour consumer society. This shift in corporate leadership and co-operation is strategic and we expect increasing numbers of brands to join in – and rapidly so.  As Matthew Jauchius, CMO of Nationwide Insurance, put it – “What can you do without technology?”.  The number of activities is shrinking almost daily.  More, responding in real time across social media is marketing GOLD – technologists can empower marketers to respond, effectively and timely, through these social mediums.

The lesson? Technology should not be viewed any longer as simply an expense, but used strategically as a business asset and enabled to drive competitive advantage from within. Marketers do the dreaming and then work with IT to find a way to make those dreams come true.

Some big brands have already seen the light, blending these roles or forming unique partnerships – internal Bro-mances and Sisterhoods, if you like – in an attempt to bring the 21^st century customer into focus and streamline their processes. Motorola, Nationwide, International Hotel Group… are just a few of the big names speaking at Internet Week who are pioneering the world of the CM(I)O  -  and according to them, with great success.

Innovation needs the consumer and the consumer today is integrating digital into all aspects of their life.  Marketers must now do the same.

Are IT and marketing meshing in your organisation?  If so, what differences has your brand seen?  If not, do you think this should become a critical part of the agenda moving forward?  We’d love to hear your thoughts.