Summit Session: Emerging Technology is Shaping the Future

Boo Wong, the Group Director of Emerging Technology at The Mill, gave an hour-long presentation on how Emerging Technology is Shaping the Future as a Marketing Innovation Session at Adobe Summit this past week (you can watch too here).

She began and ended her presentation with “Never before in our industry has the process of ideation and direction been so intimately connected to the tools of making and experiencing the final product.” The Mill is constantly pushing that connection forward.

If you’re not familiar with The Mill, they’re self-described as “artists, technologists and makers for all media, working at the frontiers of visual narrative.” And if you’re not familiar with their work, you should check out some of the incredible things they’ve created and been a part of creating (here).

One of those incredible things was an art piece for the 2017 Day For Night festival called UPROAR. As they describe it, “This piece, which pays homage to the resilience of the people of Houston, simultaneously visualizes storm data from Hurricane Harvey and Twitter mentions of #HOUSTONSTRONG.” If you have two minutes, I’d give it a look here. It makes a statement with data visualization in a beautiful way.

Another incredible piece they created was a collaboration with world-famous beatboxer, Reeps One. They trained a neural net to understand his music and differentiate the sounds of beatboxing. They trained another AI to reply like a call-and-reply beatbox. They took it to the next level by bringing in some audio data visualization with an AR app (called Dazer, still in development I believe) so you can see sound.

Wong put a big emphasis on how far they’ve come in reducing the need for post, or at least blurring the lines between production and post. By using a game engine with technology they designed called Cyclops and Blackbird, The Mill has been able to create photoreal CGI-objects rendered in real time, including cars. You can watch an incredible example of the Blackbird being used here.

Optional tangent below.

After watching her session, I went down a deep hole of videos The Mill has produced, Superbowl commercials, and art and technology marketing installations.  

With most of the content we consume now being on-demand and ad-free, being forced to watch an advertisement feels more inconvenient than ever. But still, people will make time to actively search out and watch advertisements as if they’re watching a short film. For example, this Top 10 2018 Superbowl Commercials video on Youtube has over 2.5 million views. With the enormous amount of time, effort, and money going into these ads and the quality that comes out, they’re admirable and enjoyable pieces of work, but the way they’re delivered to consumers doesn’t reflect that.

Is Youtube the ideal platform for this content?

Is there any potential that video ads will be promoted like short films and TV shows?

Could they be marketed and offered on platforms dedicated to on-demand video such as Netflix and Hulu?

Will the culture around these videos move towards recognizing them for the incredibly produced pieces they can be?

Or will they remain as inconvenient interruptions on Youtube and portfolio pieces for ad-creation companies?