Digital Shift is Econsultancy’s new trends service designed to give you the need-to-know insights into the key shifts in the digital marketing and ecommerce space. This quarter’s update features attention tokens, voice computing, AR Quests and virtual wearables.

The critical shifts as detailed in this quarter’s report are summarised below:

  • Blockchain and advertising: With the emergence of new platforms and agencies based on blockchain, and even advertisers aiming to use the technology to solve the transparency issues around the digital media supply chain, how likely is it that blockchain will provide the answer?
  • Voice interaction and AI: With these two trends colliding we look at the latest attempts to provide brand solutions through voice search, how Google are using AI in a range of sectors and we consider the ‘AI flywheel’ which has enabled Amazon to super-charge their AI programmes.
  • Trends in mobile apps and commerce: Despite global sales of smartphones declining for the first time ever, mobile apps, commerce and video is booming. We take a look at what is driving these shifts, investigate the shifts in video viewing across devices and explore how Netflix use hyper-personalisation to improve the user experience.
  • AR campaigns and the future of mobile devices: We draw upon some great examples of AR-driven campaigns this quarter, and we consider how AR could be an important part of the future of the mobile device.
  • Data competencies: The Modern Marketing Model adeptly captured the way in which marketing is changed forever and incorporated data as one of these shifts, so what are the key data competencies of the modern marketer?
  • Internal APIs: We are all familiar with externally facing APIs, but how can internal APIs and a service-oriented architecture help support greater organisational agility?
  • Zero-based budgeting: Finally, we look at what is surely one of the most under-discussed yet significant trends in marketing teams today. Is zero-based budgeting a good thing? Or the end of marketing budgeting as we know it?
  • The report was written by Neil Perkin, renowned blogger, writer and the founder of Only Dead Fish, a digital consultancy that specialises in applying strategic understanding of digital and emerging media technologies to help businesses optimise their effectiveness within the new, networked communications environment.