According to WPP president Rose Herceg and WPP chief strategy officer Katie Rigg-Smith, microchipped newborns and intergenerational living are on the cards for Australia’s future. The pair painted a picture of a vastly different nation that left listeners suspended with palpable wonder at this year’s SXSW Sydney.
The panel “Australia 2035 – Are You Ready For What’s Coming?” was hosted by ABC journalist and political lead David Speers, where he unpacked Rigg-Smith and Herceg’s new report focusing on the changing face of Australian consumers.
The report, “Australia 2035 and Beyond: Understanding the changing face of Australian consumers”, looked into how brands can connect with a nation demanding radical change. Some of its findings were startling.
Health
In the future, health could look radically different.
“There is technology now that can be planted into somebody which detects and can destroy pre-cancerous cells before they become cancer. The latest biological and technological research from labs around the world is looking at these microchips as a potential for disease prevention. Now the question is, do we want to put a chip inside our newborn to find the things that might be malfunctioning? This is a massive ethical minefield,” Rigg-Smith said.
The thought of microchipping newborns might sound eerily dystopian, but Rigg-Smith pointed out that people were likely equally as suspicious of vaccines when they were first introduced.
Intergenerational Living
As Australians struggle with the cost of living crisis, the WPP pair argue that we might not have been thinking imaginatively enough to solve this issue.
“The debates that we’re having in politics are all legitimate ones, for instance around negative gearing or helping people get into the housing market with various incentives and zoning laws at the state level and all that. But we’re not having this debate around how many people are living in each dwelling. We kind of get scared to go there and talk about it, because, you know, this is a personal decision for people,” said Rigg-Smith.
“Ironically enough, the younger generation felt intergenerational living would make them happier than the older generation.
“I don’t think we’ve even begun to imagine what intergenerational living could look like. We’ve just got it in our heads right now that there’s a granny flat in the backyard or a big eight-room house. But what if we could completely reimagine what those spaces looked like and give space to each family? What would that look like for utilities? What would that look like for bank accounts, for insurance, for car sharing, for electricity grids? How could you reimagine the entire ecosystem of an intergenerational home?”
Preparing For Change
If the world is going to look radically different, people need to be prepared and fitted with the right skills, Rigg-Smith and Herceg argued. The current trajectory was not good.
“The report found that 74 per cent of Australians do not believe that we know how to debate key topics anymore with respect for the other point of view,” said Rigg-Smith. The statement received a resounding “yep!” from an audience member.
“And compounding that, 53 per cent of Australians are afraid to speak their mind publicly or on social platforms for fear of retribution, and what was mildly terrifying to me was it was the younger generation that was more likely to strongly agree with that than the older generation,” she added.
The pair offered an antidote to the sentiments: imagination unencumbered by fear.
“We’re a very comfortable country. My worry sometimes is that we don’t push ourselves enough to be imaginative and brave, and that means embracing the prospect of failure,” said Herceg.
“I think that we don’t even fail anymore. We just don’t do anything, our productivity is at a record low in this country. Whether you’re a company where you work for a business, for the government, the private sector, or the public sector, you’ve got to remember that failure is a part of imagination.”
These issues go far beyond the advertising, media, and marketing industries. Rigg-Smith and Herceg said that issues faced by these industries are issues faced by humanity more widely. If brands want to engage consumers, they argued, we must nurture individuals with critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills to prepare for the rapidly approaching future.
Social Media
Social media has had a huge effect on consumer engagement. As the Government gears up to introduce an age limit on social media use, brands should be alert as to how it will change consumer behaviour.
“We have to remember that social media has a positive origin, but that it has taken on a life of its own. I think an age ban is a good idea, we need kids to develop deductive reasoning skills so they are equipped to properly assess the content they see on social media,” said Herceg.
Education
Rigg-Smith and Herceg argue that today’s youth aren’t fundamentally lacking because they’re ‘lazier’ than previous generations, but that the world they are entering is unprecedented, and the past’s ‘basic skills’ look radically different today. This will shape the future of workforces, which require imaginative and critical thinking to produce exciting work, especially in our industry.
“We found that 77 per cent of Australian citizens don’t feel that we are teaching our children the skills that they need, like deductive reasoning, judgment and critical thinking. This is nothing against our amazing teachers. We have phenomenal teachers that work their guts out for our children day in, day out. But the world around the education system has changed so much,” said Rigg-Smith.
“It used to be that you can’t trust everything you hear. You can’t trust everything you read, except by amazing journalists, but you can only trust what you saw. That’s the expression, ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’ It was the ultimate validation that something had happened, and now what I’m seeing with my own eyes can also be called into question with AI-generated content.
“If we can’t trust any of our senses, then how we instil in our education system the ability for that deductive reasoning and critical thinking and judgment is going to become more important for the future”.
“Basic skills are missing. Kids don’t know how to change a tyre anymore,” added Herceg.
Rigg-Smith and Herceg’s research found that Australia faces radical change in the future, yet we’re not adequately equipped to face it. Brands need to be ready for what’s coming, and be part of the conversations happening.
