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Jack Swayne

CEO, iProspect London

About this Author

Jack is the CEO of iProspect London, the no.1 global performance agency. His focus is on making iProspect the best performance agency to work with, and work for. In a digital economy, this requires a relentless focus on people. This deep understanding of people is critical to determining how media, content, data, and technology can build the best brand experiences.

Over the last 14 years, Jack has held a number of different but complementary roles within Dentsu Aegis Network, across Digital Performance, Communications Planning, Data, and Technology. Having started his career in digital ad operations, he has applied this level of digital granularity, combined with communications planning expertise, to help build some of the largest brands in the world, including Diageo, P&G, and Specsavers.

Voice Search Today and Tomorrow

Every time the industry gets excited by new technology, we tend to let that excitement cloud our judgement on the true impact on consumer behaviour and its corresponding relationship to drive better business performance through marketing. In the last 18 months, if you only listened to the buzz, any brand that didn’t invest millions of pounds in to Augmented Reality, Blockchain, and now Voice Search, would be dead in the water. But in the last 18 months, have these new technologies truly had a transformative effect on business performance? Have brands that have done nothing to address these new phenomena truly been left behind? We believe the answer to this question to be no, today… for now. No one sums it up better than Roy Amara and his increasingly popular law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This is true of almost every single new piece of technology that has been introduced in the last 10 years: We all overestimated the short term effect, and underestimated the long term effect, of digital We all overestimated the short term effect, and underestimated the long term effect, of social … and we all overestimated the short term effect, and still underestimate the long term effect of mobile So what does this mean for Voice Search? Does Amara’s law apply here? We believe the answer to this question to be yes, undeniably yes. On 28th June 2017, we surveyed 1,181 adults in the UK on their current search behaviours, and found that 15% use voice to interact with a device - be that a smartphone, games console, laptop, or digital assistant. 15% is a big number - that’s over 7.5m adults in the UK - but it’s not a transformational number yet, and those 15% are not using voice search exclusively. However, the trends we saw within the 7.5M adults are significant: Although the predominant voice behaviour is broad information seeking, 25% of voice search has purchase intent behind it (find a store location, purchase or order something, research something you want to buy) 35-54 year olds are as likely to use voice search as 18-24 year olds Over 10% of 65+ use voice to search in the UK Men are twice as likely as women to purchase using voice These suggest that Voice Search is no fad and it will become more and more important for people, and therefore brands, tomorrow. According to Comscore, 50% of search will be via voice by 2020*, and we believe this to be accurate. That doesn’t mean there aren’t immediate opportunities today in voice search for the 15% of the UK adult population. Every brand can capitalise from this trend from: Embracing the long tail conversation Personalising for the best voice experience Making your brand discoverable for voice We delved deeper into each of these three points, our research, and points of view during a Breakfast Briefing we held in September, designed to explore what brands need to be doing with voice search today and how they can prepare for the increasing behaviour of voice search tomorrow. Find out what some of our speakers thought were the key takeaways from the event in the video below: *Comscore 0 3 min read

Countdown to Christmas: A Festive Word from our MD

Here at iProspect, we are lucky to have the best performance specialists across the globe. Whether they’re using machine learning to process billions of rows of data or launching a new chatbot, our experts are dedicated to delivering transformative solutions for brands. This is how we maintain our reputation as the UK’s leading performance marketing agency. To win, it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve and Q4 is no exception. That’s why we have been thinking for the last eight months about Christmas. It’s never too early to start planning your digital campaigns, so to navigate you through the festive season I’m pleased to share eight months of work by kicking off our digital Christmas Countdown. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be gifting you with a sled-load of content to guide you through the season. Our experts in Paid Search, SEO, Content, Paid Social, Affiliates, CRO and CRM will be sharing their top tips via fortnightly podcasts and blogs, which will answer all your questions around the creation, implementation and promotion of a successful cross-channel Christmas campaign. Channel experts will look at what’s changed since 2017 – think GDPR, algorithm updates and new social media product features, to name a few – as well as how trends like A.I., Voice Search and UX will continue to affect how customers search, shop and convert. To begin, check out our Christmas roadmap to see when and how you should press play on each channel. For more details, click on the image to enlarge the infographic. Here’s the full schedule so you know when to check our Blog and Insights sections. September: Paid Search and SEO, and Paid Social October: Content and SEO, Paid Search and CRO, and Affiliates November: CRM and Black Friday/Cyber Monday December: Recap of key channel takeaways We hope you find the insight valuable and please do get in touch if you have any questions. Jack Swayne, Managing Director 0 2 min read

Jack Swayne

About this Author

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