This year Red Brick Research attended Marketing Week Live 2014, and it was great to catch up with so many of our clients, suppliers and partners over the 2 days at Olympia. The annual marketing event was as stimulating as ever and confirmed our thinking on the latest marketing trends and developments.
The Guardian presentation provided an interesting insight into the future of newspapers and was quite thought provoking in its discussion of the Snowden affair. Paul Barnes of Questback provided a shrewd assessment of the importance of business insight for growth and his discussion on the increasing demand for brand research and strategic advice provided real food for thought and reflects the growth we’ve experienced ourselves in this area.
The Oculus Roller Coaster
The personal highlight of the conference was a chance to play with Oculus Rift and Google Glass courtesy of our friends at ASP.Com. Oculus was setup with a Roller Coaster demo which was pretty unnerving, especially with headphones on for a completely immersive experience. The headset was surprisingly heavy and for that reason it did feel like a piece of early generation technology with plenty of evolution yet to come; the best comparison would be very heavy skiing goggles. However there is so much potential for the technology inside and outside the gaming world that we’re sure it’ll be a huge success.
By comparison with Oculus, Google Glass is a much more natural and light-weight experience as you’d expect. However there’s still plenty of fragile technology packed into Google’s most in-demand wearable. All the tech in the world isn’t going to stop you sitting on them like any other pair of glasses and at £1,000 a pop, you wouldn’t want to do that too often.
All in all we had a great show that’s left us with plenty to think about, and we’re already working on ideas for how we might use the technology we’ve seen to enhance online focus groups, UX testing, ethnographic studies and other research methodologies.