Contextual Integration – which looks at how brands are using location, time and personal preference data to move from planning in media silos to creating contextually relevant communications – will be one of their key themes at Now / Next / Why. For more information on this annual Contagious trends conference, and for tickets, click here for London and here for New York.
Hands up if you hate your bank.
The chances are, if you’re under the age of 30, you’ll have one arm in the air right now. A recent survey from Scratch, an in-house unit of broadcaster Viacom, found that Millennials really don’t like banks. A whopping 73% of the 10,000 people interviewed in the Millennial Disruption Index said that they’d be more excited about a new financial offering from a tech company than from their existing bank. More worryingly – for banks, at least – is that nearly half of all respondents are counting on companies like Google, Amazon and Square to overhaul the way that banks work, with 33% believing they won’t need a bank at all in the near future.
People want an alternative to the stuffy, archaic way that many financial institutions operate. And they’re starting to get what they want. At Contagious, @contagious we’ve long been tracking companies from other sectors looking to play havoc with traditional banking business models. It’s been well documented that tech companies like Square, PayPal and Google (and even Walmart with Bluebird) have been barging in on the payments scene for quite a few years now. But, just in the past month, we’ve seen telcos, retailers and messaging services getting in on the action.
A few quick examples: Starbucks recently announced that almost one-third of all its transactions are processed through its loyalty cards. This caused Wired to speculate that the coffee chain could advance the transactional capabilities of the scheme in the near future, perhaps one day even eradicating the need for bank cards in-store.