#41 - Real Identity: How to Engage a Dragon

Immersive experiences and the technology that will empower them are on a fast track to the future. Technology is a bridge to connect experiences, but how will that happen amidst avatars, NFTs, spatial awareness, quantum computing, algorithmic curation and so much more. And why do brands care? Jason Snyder joins the Real Identity podcast to give us a preview into the world where the volume and capacity to compute signals and tie them back to meaningful moments simply boggles the mind and opens a door to the future.

Featured Guest
Jason Alan Snyder
Global Chief Technology Officer|IPG SC&E |Momentum Worldwide

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonalansnyder/
Twitter handle: @evil_robot
Company website: https://www.momentumww.com/
Published LinkedIn Article: Quantum Computing Matters for Advertising, Brands and Marketers

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Transcript

Kyle Hollaway:

Hello and welcome to Real Talk about Real Identity from Acxiom. This podcast is devoted to important identity trends in the convergence of AdTech and MarTech. I'm Kyle Hollaway, your podcast host, and I'm joined by our co-host, Dustin Raney. The world is changing thanks to innovations and technology. We're moving to a new era where immersive marketing will be more powerful than ever. On today's podcast, we're going to explore some ways this will happen and why it's important for businesses to take advantage of these changes before their competitors do. As with any new technology, there will be some early adopters who are eager to try it out, but as immersive technology becomes more accessible, we'll see it used in many areas where it wasn't before, from helping people buy products to helping them learn about products, interact with those products, or feel more confident in their purchase decisions.

While there are still many questions surrounding how exactly this will play out, seeing as the Wall Street Journal reported Disney as laying off their entire metaverse next generation storytelling and consumer experiences division, and even Meta struggled with their reality labs division, reporting an operating loss of $13.7 billion last year. Along with the financial and organizational headwinds, there are also questions about what kind of data companies will want from users in these experiences.

However, one thing is certain. Immersive marketing has opened new doors for brands and advertisers that want to connect with consumers on an emotional level rather than just pushing product information at people. So this will be a really interesting conversation today. So what are you thinking about, Dustin?

Dustin Raney:

Totally agree, Kyle. Gen Z and Gen A have grown up in a world that's been shaped by technology. They've never known a world without the internet or smartphones, and they've grown up with social media as an integral part of everyday life. As Gen Z enters the workforce and begins to reach its full potential, brands will need to adopt new behavioral trends to engage them effectively. That's just the fact of the matter. For instance, did you know that nearly 90% of Gen Z and Gen A consider themselves gamers? And they don't see virtual or augmented reality as this futuristic thing that they're already experiencing and participating in spending massive amounts of time in these crazy, sophisticated, shared virtual environments, and when they hear the word metaverse, they're like, "So what?" My 11-year-old daughter is already selling her clothing designs to avatars and Roblox.

So similar to the way that millennials and Gen Xers ushered in e-commerce and social media, the stage is already set for the next generation of customers, and brands are already exploring new ways to engage with them in these digitally immersive environments to acquire, retain, and grow. This is forcing data-driven marketing technology to play catch up. For instance, how can brands leverage the data captured from virtual environments to measure performance? How will my tech stack handle the massive amounts of data created and captured in these fully immersive experiences? I think this is a great place to stop ranting and introduce today's guest, Jason Snyder, global CTO of Momentum. I've had the honor and privilege to get to work with him, to know him, working on some really cool forward-thinking use cases, and we've been plotting to get him on Real Talk for a while now, and he's one of the most innovative doers, not just thinkers, but doers that I know. So Jason, thanks for joining us today. Can you give our listeners a snapshot of your background?

Jason Synder:

Hey, thanks so much for having me. Thank you for that unbelievably kind introduction. It is true. I am the Global Chief Technology Officer at Momentum Worldwide, part of the Interpublic Group. I'm a technologist, a futurologist, and an inventor. I have had this role or roles like this for more than a quarter of a century now. So I have been deeply immersed in the transformation that's occurred inside the marketing technology stack. That's been my focus and the things that as a kid back in the '70s that I used to look up the sky and dream about happening are finally coming to fruition. And it's happening in a really, really interesting way, and it's really exciting to be a part of this and to witness it. It's really challenging for me, as Kyle was saying at the top of this, throwing the metaverse sucker punch right right away.

What does this stuff mean? Everybody's getting laid off or everybody's getting fired. And the truth of the matter is that I'm not sure that we should believe how this information is being disseminated in terms of the financial decision these organizations are making. I think there's a lot to unpack about the hiring decisions that were made during the pandemic. I think there's a lot to unpack about how people are framing the opportunities with artificial intelligence and machine learning and how we're repackaging those things under new labels. But yeah, Dustin, I agree with what you were saying around how generations today are consuming this technology, how it works, and how it's going to have a massive influence in every aspect of our lives moving forward. Because with the exponential growth of technology comes the exponential adoption of technology, and it's very difficult to see that adoption when you're living inside the exponent.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, I mentioned Gen A and Z, but honestly, it's every generation that's going to have to need to be prepared for this because after the early adopters make it real, then everyone else is kind of stuck with it and needs to understand it as well. So thanks for introducing yourself, Jason. The world is moving towards immersive experiences as we talked about a whole new way brands and consumers interact. You're quoted in a recent article responding to the statement, the negative mantra seems to be there's no metaverse, only gamers and games. Why and how is the Metaverse more than gaming?

Jason Synder:

Technology acts as a bridge between people and the world, and it allows experience to connect with others in new and different ways. And that's never been more true than it is today. Metaverse, this concept of a synthetic or artificial reality that's interconnected with a level of commerce, a level of creative expression and profound interconnecting, that doesn't exist today. Will that exist someday in the future? Yeah. Are Web3 technologies like blockchain and a ledger that allow us to take our digital assets with us anywhere and use them in different places going to be part of that? Yeah, it's going to be critical to that capability. But today what we have is what I describe as a multiverse. So we have many different universes that aren't connected together in a meaningful or profound way.

Commerce is possible inside of them, the ability to build and share is possible inside of them. But as you pointed out with your daughter and Roblox, you can't take that Roblox stuff into Call of Duty yet. So we inch closer to that every day. And more importantly, what we see from a client's perspective is meta linking. So this idea that we can take a physical good or product, whether it's consumer packaged good or a luxury brand and create some sort of connection into Web3 or the metaverse, depending on if we want to use that dirty word or not, and creating those relationships between physical assets and digital assets and the notion of ownership. And I think critical to all this, and as you know, that's where we've been focused for about a year now, is what does that mean for identity in the context of all of this? And what does that mean when you have all of these multiple kinds of personalities, not just talking about your work life and your gaming life or your home life, but you can actually have an entirely different representation.

You could be a dragon or a flying spaghetti monster, and if there's commerce inside of these places, what does that mean for brands? Because my expectation is that I'm going to have some sort of engagement with a brand if they're present in these other worlds and these other places, and I'm violating everyone's expectations around who I am, but I still have a single identity tied to all of these personalities, and now I want to engage with the brand. So how does that brand engage with me if I'm a dragon, or if I'm a flying spaghetti monster? What does that mean and what is that interaction?

Trying to figure those things out, I think, is what's really important right now, that tension, because that right now is what experience is on all of these different levels. And it doesn't have to be just with goggles on, or on a console. Because augmented reality, these layers that we can put on top of physical reality, mixed reality, the kind of work that I'm doing now with The Famous Group on live broadcast TV for sports and other types of entertainment, that's all part of this, and all of those things, all of these technologies and all of these expressions are part of my consideration set and an extension of my personality in these different places.

Kyle Hollaway:

So Jason, you touched on a few things there, but I know of our listeners, if there're anything like me, a lot of this starts to blow the mind a little bit of like, "Okay, it sounds really interesting, but make it practical," so I know you're involved with specific use cases with some brands and really something a little more tangible. Can you give us a sense of what are some of those immersive tech engagements that you're building out that someone could wrap their mind around?

Jason Synder:

Sure. And we've been, from an experiential marketing standpoint, this is work that we have been doing for a very long time. So I've been building these things out for clients at Momentum for a decade or more now. And we see this again in expressions in VR and in AR, say for example, the activations that we do within a big sporting event or a Coachella or a Super Bowl or a US Open where you can go in and interact with the players in these simulated or virtual environments, where you can get takeaways, digital takeaways from your engagement inside of those spaces. We're also building out extensions in places like Roblox, for example with Walmart, where we are providing these music experiences in for Walmart inside a Roblox where we're producing concerts in those spaces for people to go and see the artists. So I think that in terms of traditional sponsorship and experiential marketing, you're seeing this blended or hybrid reality for at least the last decade now, where people are engaging in these different spaces.

Kyle Hollaway:

So take an interesting one there with Walmart going to Roblox. What kind of uptake are you seeing in that? What kind of interaction are you seeing with consumers?

Jason Synder:

We're seeing, I think, what we would expect. We're seeing the audiences that are engaged in that space, that are of that fan base. When we look at, for lack of a better term, the precision segmentation of the audiences that the brand is trying to reach against the fan base of those artists showing up. And we see them showing up at the scale that we would expect. Are we finding and creating new fans and new audiences both on the platform as a result of these sponsorships and as a result of bringing these artists together with these brands? We are, but I think that it would be just as you'd imagine putting on any kind of concert in any kind of genre, in any kind of location, you're seeing parody experiences, and these are engaged audiences in ways that are appropriate and contextually appropriate to that form of reality and that venue.

Kyle Hollaway:

So you mentioned identity within these ecosystems. So I'm assuming that it's still pretty nascent right now on the abilities to really understand those audiences in their real world persona when they're engaging in a Roblox concert?

Jason Synder:

Yeah, that's right. And that's one of the real challenges and quite frankly, that Dustin and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about that and how do we provide signals intelligence inside of this multiverse experience set and tie that back to who you are in physical reality. And what is appropriate in terms of tying that back and what does that mean for a brand or a marketer? What do they need to understand in the context of your identity versus your personality? Because today the signals are not very strong, and it's really kind of a mass model, the same that we have had for decades in broadcast media. And it is that approach that's being taken inside of these environments and that type of precision addressable capability that many brands and marketers have come to enjoy through using DMP and using automated technologies for the ability to generate advertising on the fly.

Although some of those capabilities exist, they don't really fully pull together this entire identity solution that are you're talking about, where we understand the differences and the context through which people are engaging in these different realities and then juxtaposing that against their identity in the physical world. We don't have a lot of signals inside of these virtual worlds right now to match against identity in the physical world, and we certainly don't understand context between those two things, and we don't really understand how far we should go in making those connections, what's appropriate as well.

Dustin Raney:

So Jason, really cool use cases that need to be solved for. They're already starting to leverage these technologies, but there's obviously the need to measure, and I think this is where I was mentioning earlier about how really data driven marketing companies are having to play catch up. How are you seeing, and I know you and I have had, as you mentioned, the ability to work with each other a little bit on some of these new use cases, but do you want to explain a little bit about some of the things that we're doing to maybe solve some of this signal and touchpoint connection between the three planes of reality, from virtual to augmented terrestrial?

Jason Synder:

Sure. I think that what we really need is to have some kind of technology layer that provides orchestration between all of this. And so key to that is going to be the identity resolution capability. And then on top of the identity resolution capability, understanding and processing the signals intelligence that come back from these different sorts of realities. And then redirecting appropriate content, offers, experiences, commerce, whatever that would be to those personalities, contextual to the realities that they reside in. And then as I was saying at the top of the program, being able to use technologies like a ledger or a blockchain to handle and manage transaction across those things.

Right now we have this concept that I've been writing about a lot and lecturing about a lot, and it's this notion that comes from psychology and philosophy of intersubjectivity, so this notion that we all agree to what reality is. When we're having a conversation, the three of us are, we're all agreeing that we're on this podcast right now. This is what's happening. And right now if you have a ChatGPT, it's really cool, but it doesn't possess that. And in some ways that's part of agency and as an entity. And when we talk about managing a single identity across all these personalities, across realities, it's really important that we get a handle on intersubjectivity for the orchestration layer quickly. And so a lot of the time and effort that myself and my engineering teams and creative technology teams have been putting in is to wrap our arms around that and to build out some tools and technologies that help us understand that. So using things like large language models as a reference point, that's helpful for us, and retraining those large language models on these different realities.

But also, we're starting to do some work on spatial awareness. So understanding in a synthetic world what's around you. And you can imagine how with a large language model, if you train it to first understand, okay, predict what the next word's going to be in a sentence, then you start to train it, okay, well I want you to learn this specific information about my customer and my audience base, and then I want you to start generating what the next paragraph would be.

Now imagine you could do something similar to that with spatial awareness in an environment, in a synthetic environment, and what the impact of doing if you combine those technology, if the impact of something like that would be for brands and for brand marketers. And if you were to create some kind of assistant or some kind of ambassador and then tie that back to activities for shopping or attending a concert or going to some kind of experience, a sporting experience that's hybrid, that's both physical and virtual. It starts to get really, really interesting when we have an ability to understand the context of what's happening across these realities through an orchestration layer that understands probably what somebody's going to need to anticipate those needs and to provide resolution across those realities.

Dustin Raney:

That's a massive amount of data points that you're going to have to crunch through to understand spatial proximity and stuff like that. And we've talked about this a lot, existing database technology and SQL and the types of things we've used for decades now, is that going to be applicable here? Is it going to be able to manage that?

Jason Synder:

It is not high volume computing. High capacity computing is not suitable for that level of activity. And again, you go back to ChatGPT, anybody who's using the GPT-4 model that's paid their $20 a month or whatever it is, spends a lot of time waiting for it to be able to respond to you because it's simply overwhelmed. And when we think of that and when we think of everything that I've just described, what's happening in physical reality, what's happening across multiple realities, you start to look at a computational problem that is similar to a material science problem. When I say that, what I mean is we think of a material science problem. Let's say we're making electric cars and we have a battery and we want to create a new lithium ion battery. Well, we would go to the periodic table of elements and start to figure out how we're going to combine those things.

And traditionally, empirically when we could do that and we could sit in a lab and try to look at all these atoms and put them together and well, that's going to take forever and we may or may not get a result. Said okay, well, we can do this theoretically and we can do a whiteboard exercise and we can look at combining these things and that's cool, but we're also going to be mostly wrong with doing that. And then the third way to do that is through simulation. And if we try to simulate that, well, we very quickly run out of computational power. All the computational power in the world is going to allow us to do that literally.

So that's why we have to use quantum computing because with a quantum computer you have a qubit, which is stateless computing, which I won't unpack all that on today's podcast, but we are starting to do quantum pilots at IPG to look at that, to try and solve some of these problems, these massive computational problems using quantum. It's starting to reduce some of these signals intelligence problems across geospatial multiple realities to mathematical formulas so that we can start to feed them into the quantum systems.

Dustin Raney:

Man, there's so many strings to pull on this conversation trying to determine which ones to pull on here. But when we think about it practically in terms of marketing and advertising and the application of these, I think economics comes into question for me. Where are we on that economic viability spectrum of ... What is that conversation with a brand to say, "Hey, brand, we've got an idea that could help you capture more customers and it's going to require quantum computing." What's that economic picture look like and what's the appetite that you see in the market to do those things at this moment?

Jason Synder:

So I have two jobs, managing to risk and managing to opportunity. And in terms of quantum, that's certainly managing to opportunity. I know enough to know that all of the data in the world that we have today was generated in the last 18 months, more or less, the majority of it. And we're in a weird place today, because do we want to continue to generate more information from these AI platforms that may be hallucinating or generating bad information? It's long-winded way of answering your question saying, well, are our clients thinking about that? I don't think most of our clients are thinking about that.

They're worried about thinking about whatever it is they need to do for their business. The challenge that we have is that all of us as consumers, whether we own a business or we're individuals, and whether we're looking at CPGs or luxury brands or cars or computers or whatever it is, this new reality that we live in where we occupy our time, whether you spend time in a virtual world or you spend time in a physical world navigating it with maps or whatever it is, we're all part of contributing to this level of data engagement.

And I think that we have a responsibility to help prepare our clients for that. We have a responsibility to help to start to build tools that are going to be capable of managing and navigating that. And I think that the conversation in terms of the practical business realities right now is whatever we are deploying and building in terms of the platforms that I create for our clients is extensible. And I think that we are predicting that this is going to be a requirement with a high degree of certitude moving forward. So we are ensuring that what we are deploying today is capable of managing that.

Would I call up any of my clients today and say, "Hey, you know what? We need a quantum computer." I don't think I'd do that, but I have to be sure that the work that we're doing is going to be extensible and capable of operating in that environment because otherwise it's an existential threat for ourselves and for our clients because the volume and capacity that's going to be required to operate in terms of processing power, data storage, all of those things in this new world, are non-trivial. It's an order of magnitude more than what we have today. And that's what we're seeing reflected in, again, at the top of this podcast, all these changes, these dynamic changes that are happening in the big tech players reflect that they're just holding a mirror up to our reality.

Dustin Raney:

The analogy I like to use, and I'm not sure if you guys would agree, it's what would happen if Ford or Chevy or any of the makers stopped building concept cars? Why do they do that? They're stretching into the future. They're showing that they have an eye on the future. So in a way, some of these new things, while they're not necessarily meant to generate revenue in the short term, they might be in some ways a loss leader. It's protecting the brand and the future of what the brand's doing in the future state because we're not testing into those things. But it starts to become a risk on that side of the fence.

Jason Synder:

And I think that we're going to see the speed of adoption of all this stuff like happen dramatically quickly, and an expectation for a consumer grade experience that will include a lot of this utility. It's not about a first mover benefit, it's about being able to sustain your business in this new reality.

Dustin Raney:

Yep. Okay. I'm going to make a pivot from Quantum a bit to advertising model. So Jason, I've been fascinated with your thoughts, especially around sponsorship versus traditional advertising. So some of the more immersive experiences that you're helping enable these days, whether it's in a stadium, a basketball event with the NBA or whatever. I know you've mentioned this need to shift thinking. Brands need to start shifting their thinking to towards more sponsorship. Can you give your thoughts on that compared to what they're doing today?

Jason Synder:

Yeah, I think that in my opinion, that sponsorship is probably the most important and valuable thing that any brand can be doing today. When we look at where digital advertising is today with a focus on personal data and target specific demographics and user behaviors and the notion of this loss of privacy and control for consumers, this conversation that we've been having for about 20 years now and this notion of where we are with attention and ad blockers and ethical concerns, the idea that brands need to build trust and transparency. Well, sponsorship is a key way of doing that because inherent in sponsorship is authenticity, because these are activities that people are already engaged in or want to be engaged in. And by being a sponsor, a brand can really reconsider the way that it enters the conversation to help build trust in an era where consumers are increasingly skeptical of these advertising tactics.

What I've been working on and what the team's been working on is to understand and have sponsorship function in a more sophisticated and immediate real-time way, given the advent of all the types of technologies that we were describing earlier, so that we can look towards some sort of algorithmic curation of sponsorship and we can help people become more connected to the things they care about and to get brands to be part of that conversation in the context of sponsorship, rather than in the context of interruption or advertisement.

Dustin Raney:

Just for our listeners, just to provide a little bit more maybe context. Say you're sitting in a game and you get some random advertisement from a retail brand that's just kind of injecting themselves in the middle of your experience, less likely to trust or be engaged with that brand over the brand that's actually sponsoring the event itself. Right, Jason? The brand that there's a bit of trust now that you've established by sponsoring the actual event rather than just interrupting the experience randomly as traditional advertising is done today.

Jason Synder:

That's 100% correct. And with the advent of some of these new technologies, I think that we're going to see more and more experiences that we have on a hyper personalized and a local level. The local college, the local high school football game, the local middle school field hockey game, the lacrosse game, the soccer game, all your kids' soccer games, all of these things I think are going to be able to be streamed, captured, viewed, and all of those then now create sponsorship opportunities because how in the world are we going to pay for all that? And imagine we had the ability to connect brands into those activities to provide sponsorship opportunities for those things on a broad universal scale, things like the Super Bowl and the World Series, the US Open, but also then for the local field hockey game or pick up Frisbee golf game if you wanted to do that.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, it's really interesting. We just finished the season of basketball and our post-season, all of it was streamed. Every individual court was streamed through BallerTV. And so see how that could evolve, because there's a lot of costs right now is being passed on to the consumer, but that's certainly starting to bring in that sponsorship view to that, then there's a real value to the consumer. And that's what helps build that trust, is when there's that perceived value of, "Oh, this brand is helping provide this to me, therefore I'm going to be more likely to engage with that brand in commerce or whatever."

Jason Synder:

That's right. And if you saw some of the latest NBA tech that they were just displaying at the All Star game where you know can bring yourself as an avatar into the game in real time during broadcast, and you start to think well, that becomes pretty interesting. And that goes back to, again, it seems like science fiction when we talk about it or esoteric, we say like, "Oh, there's these different realities and we can connect them all and orchestrate them," but the thing is, it's happening. It's leagues and brands and these major technology companies that are doing this, so this is not far off in the future. This is happening now. These ideas are being reduced to practice now.

Dustin Raney:

And it's an exciting time for sure, to think through what all that looks like. Well, unfortunately, we're getting to the end of our time for today. And like I said, there's so many strings we could have pulled and we could probably make this just a podcast in and of itself ongoing this conversation because there's so much evolving and so much change as you mentioned earlier. But when you're looking forward and knowing that there's this massive amount of change going on, but for someone like you who's deeply immersed in this, you're kind of doing your life work here, what excites you about the next 12 months?

Jason Synder:

Oh man. Yeah, I'm excited about a lot of this stuff. I'm not going to lie. As I said earlier, I knew that we were going to get here. I didn't know when we'd get here, and I can't believe how fast things are moving now that we're here. And there's so much that that's exciting to me. I've got to say, and it's not going to be exciting to the majority of people listening to this, but if ChatGPT's ability to generate code when you ask it questions. And just yesterday, Microsoft added this capability, this co-pilot capability inside of their coding tools, and we are starting to see this happen at scale and adoption. I think we're going to see massive improvements in terms of all of the tools that utilities that we use on a daily basis as these things become more intermingled.

But where in the next 12 months I expect to see more innovations regarding spatial awareness in AI, and when we look at the robots that are being made physical robots, not just software robots, but when we start to merge these technologies together, the physical robots and the virtual robots and add in things like spatial awareness, I think, all right, we're going to see some dramatic changes in our world that are going to be pretty exciting.

Dustin Raney:

Very cool, man. Thanks so much for joining us, Jason. It's certainly a fascinating subject area and I look forward to seeing what momentum brings to market with us in the coming years. For our listeners, you can find all our Real Identity podcast episodes at Acxiom.com/realtalk or find us on your favorite podcast platform. So until next time, we'll see you then.