What you need to know:

• Massive data wave incoming requires brands to re-architecture.
• Data ethics a rising challenge.
• Marketers need to get on front foot now to avoid "god-awful" headlines resulting from algorithmic decision-making.

Bringing up the bodies

Cross-industry convergence driven by ‘industry 5.0’ is rapidly surfacing a tangle of ethical, regulatory and data nettles that brands must quickly grasp to avoid “god-awful headlines” and the kind of lawsuits emerging in the US as a result of AI and algorithmic decision-making. The internet of things is becoming “the internet of bodies”, according to Dr. Catherine Ball, Associate Professor at the Australian National University's School of Engineering. That presents a “game changing opportunity” for marketers as well as potential minefields.

“We will have in Australia a legislation that pushes us to open our algorithms”, warned Ball, with the government last month issuing an AI and automated decision-making issues paper in which transparency is a key line item. Brands likely to be at the pointier end of such regulation are already preparing, with Tabcorp’s new Chief Customer Officer, former Telstra exec Jenni Barnett, handling data ethics as a key part of her remit.

At the front-end, Ball thinks consumer education could be a critical factor between success and failure for brands navigating an AI-driven world. For the back-end, she urged brands to start planning major investment in sustainable data storage infrastructure to handle the incoming tidal wave – and set up that infrastructure with an idea of how data will be analysed, or risk “drowning” in meaningless information.

“We are now getting involved in data tsunamis. We're looking at multi platform, multimodal, four dimensional temporal variants, individualised data production and consumption. We are running out of server space,” Ball told ADMA’s Global Forum. “For those of you that work [for] a large brand, do you have your own server farm? If you don't have access to your own sovereign data capability, we might be slowing ourselves down.”

Twin peaks: The rise and pitfalls of digital twinning

The rise of digital twinning will be a key contributor to the data surge, Ball suggested, stating she is already working with DFAT on disaster planning using digital twinning techniques. The hope is for Australia in future to respond to disasters such as mega cyclones or volcanic eruptions hitting Pacific neighbours, or flooding in New South Wales, within hours rather than days or weeks.

“A digital twin is exactly that, a digital copy of who you are,” said Ball. Those twins can help with everyday tasks such as avoiding wardrobe malfunctions to predicting health needs – e.g. get a massage today because the data says you will have a sore back tomorrow.

“Even now we can do gait analysis – which would have picked up I have a broken foot and am walking in a completely different way,” Ball told ADMA delegates. “What if I said to you we can actually pick up autism in kids using gait analysis? We can actually pick up dementia and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's in people before they even know they're sick.”

There are two ways that can go, said Ball.

“We can say, ‘Great! Early intervention, new medications, personalised medicine, we're going to target people with maybe home care, Aids or health insurance advertising’.”

That could present a “massive opportunity for public health.” But on the flip side: “What if my bank or my health insurance company knows that about me before I know that about me?” asked Ball. “If we're going to have technology that's picking up imagery about us and creating digital twins about us, it's not necessarily going to be picking up our strengths. It's going to potentially be looking for our weaknesses. And you can see how that would make a God-awful headline,” said Ball.

Where it lands, Ball suggested, is down to public education and acceptance.

“Australia’s response to the Tongan crisis took five days before we would enter the country because we didn’t even know if we could land on a runway.

“We’ve got live flood mapping technology that is just so accurate. Yet we didn’t have it for use [up in Lismore and half of NSW]. Why? Money? Social license? Social acceptability… This is where marketers have a real opportunity to provide education,” said Ball.

“By providing education about new and emerging technologies and by telling your clients and customers about digital twins, by explaining to them some of the ways in which data is going to be collected, how it's stored and how it's used. That's how you empower and engender trust. That's how you avoid semantics and linguistics.”

Green data storage or busted brands

“90 per cent of world’s current data was produced in last two years,” said Ball, with the next step change now underway – which means brands need to rethink data architecture.

“Your data load and the need to store, archive, manage that data, the digital twins you're going to be creating – you are looking at an exponential hockey stick graph of how your data burden is going to increase over the next five years, and a lot of people won’t sustain that,” she suggested, warning that the upsurge in data also increases data management risks for brands.

“We get 200 cybersecurity attacks per second in Australia. Is the data that you're using stored on an Australian sovereign data platform? Is the data that you're storing legal in the country that you're storing it in, have you started buying into server farms?” asked Ball.

Then comes the sustainability question: “Are you looking at the carbon footprint of your data? One of the studies coming out of the Pawsey [Supercomputing] Center in WA showed that in ten years time, it's estimated that 25 per cent of the global carbon footprint will be from data storage alone,” said Ball.

“That's before we start the whole metaverse thing, before we start talking NFTs, before we start talking anything in terms of the Ethereum blockchain and how that's going to grow and change in the next few years,” she added.

“I stand here as a data scientist, I love data. But I am highly concerned about how we're going to manage it in the face of the climate emergency and whether or not the data industry is going to have a black mark against it the way the shipping and the aviation industries currently do.”

“So when you think about cybersecurity and you think about [data] infrastructure, what platforms, what service, where are you storing it? If there is a sovereign capability protection measure, is there a way in which you can actually sell your data? How do you sell your data legally? How do you store it legally? How do you actually interrogate the data that you've got stored? Unless you build your systems knowing how you're going to analyse it, you are going to drown in data and starve for information.”

New marketing Ps required

The challenges thrown up by the incoming data wave, the internet of bodies and industry 5.0 are manifold, warned Ball, as are the opportunities. Both can be navigated by adherence to simple principles – an alternative set of marketing Ps.

“Think about what’s possible, what is probable and what is preferable,” she said, urging marketers to focus wholly on the preferable. “Think about why we do what we do as human beings, and then the technology will present itself.”