Consumer electrical manufacturers and retailers haven’t had an awful lot to shout about in recent years, with the recession hitting their profits and the fact that there just hasn’t been anything really new and exciting to stir the imaginations of the average gadget hungry consumer.
2010 ushered in a new decade but also a new dawn of some truly awe-inspiring consumer accessible technology. I can only compare this new tech revolution to waiting for a bus; when you only need one, three arrive at once. What am I talking about? Only the jaw-dropping new holy trinity of: 3D entertainment, touch screen interfacing and controller-free gaming of course! For adCenter advertisers in the technology/electronics industry, the following research and insights have been culled from historical adCenter data (detail provided by Microsoft Advertising Intelligence) highlighting emerging trends and product opportunities.
1) 3D Entertainment: “OMG! Is that real?”
Back in the 1950s and 80s, cinema and terrestrial TV briefly flirted with 3D - (remember Jaws 3-D from 1983?), but it never broke through to the mainstream due to the films and technology being too expensive and complicated to produce an affordable mass consumer product.
Leap forward nearly 30 years and now the likes of LG, Philips, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony all want a share of the 3D TV pie. It was Samsung who was first-to-market in the UK when they launched the UN55C7000 a 3D-Ready TV which you view with special 3D glasses in February 2010.
Not only is 3D technology being incorporated into TVs but also into gaming products such as the Nintendo DS 3D (launch slated for early 2011) and the new range of FujiFilm FinePix Real 3D digital cameras.
What’s interesting from what we are seeing on Bing is that searches for the new 3D TVs have only started to gain interest from January 2010 and that the majority of people doing the searches are men (67%) in the 35-49 year old age group (39%).
2) Touch Screen: Touchy-Feely Tech
When the futuristic cop thriller Minority Report starring Tom Cruise hit the cinemas in 2002 everyone who saw the movie was impressed by the film’s forward-thinking take on future technology. What especially amazed audiences was the way in which Tom magically interacted with digital information in thin air through a system of touch screens and gesture recognition.
Fast forward 8 years and the technology concepts seen in Minority Report are now firmly based in reality with touch screen and gesture recognition being at the core of everything from mobile phones, laptops, computer monitors and game consoles.
The potential of mass appeal consumer touch screen technology was realised when Apple launched the Apple iPhone in January 2007. Since then, Apple have updated their range of MP3 players to incorporate touch at the core of its functionality, including this year’s launch of the Apple iPad, a touchscreen entertainment/work tablet device.
Microsoft Surface, demoed by Bill Gates at E5, caused a stir in May 2007 when he showed off the latest multi touch, gesture recognition technology embedded into a coffee table. Now in 2010 Surface technology is much more accessible, lightweight and compact and is incorporated into Windows 7 laptops and Windows Mobile phones.
On Bing, we have been watching searches for touch screen products gathering momentum since October 2008 and have noted that they’ve started to create more of a ground-swell in the last 12 months. The majority of people doing the searches are men (48%) in the 25-34 year old age group (28%).
3) Controller-Free Gaming: “Look, No hands!”
Nintendo were the pioneers behind the development of the ‘physical gaming’ movement when they launched the Wii in November 2006, a wireless games console which allowed greater freedom of movement and interaction with games. Since then Microsoft Xbox and Sony Playstation have been finding ways to innovate on this technology and turn the whole stereotype of gamers being geeky teenage boys on its head by making games accessible for all ages, genders and physicality.
At the E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2009, Microsoft Xbox unveiled ‘Project Natal’ later re-named KINECT; an eye-popping new way to play computer games without having to use an actual hard-wired games controller, commanding the game play by the gamer’s physical movement and voice. At E3 2010 Microsoft officially announced that Xbox 360 KINECT will be available in the US from November 2010.
Unsurprisingly searches for ‘Project Natal’ come from a majority of men (61%). What is a little more interesting however is that the largest age group looking to find more info on this technology fall into the 35-49 year old age group (37%), beating the nerdy teenage boys into second place (29%).
With so much new technology enchanting consumers for the first time in years, consumer electronics retailers and manufacturers alike can look forward to a prosperous holiday season. Although it may seem odd to talk about the upcoming holiday season in July, if you start optimizing your campaigns now and maintain high performance leading up to when the holiday shopping season begins to ramp up (typically holiday searches begin in September), you'll be in a fantastic position to take advantage of that seasonal traffic spike in the technology/electronics industry.
Thanks for reading!
Kate
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