citizenbay

Jeremy Jauncey on the Quantified Self and the rise of mobile health sector

 

You don't have to be weird to be wired

So sings Mark E Smith of the most British of bands, The Fall, in their 1982 song Totally Wired.

Maybe so, but for some, the idea of having your pulse, BMI and sleep patterns measured by wearable devices is very weird. They see it only for the techno-narcissists.

However, the rise of the wearable health device seems unstoppable. There are already a wide range of activity monitors and sleep monitors such as BodyMedia, Fitbit, Jawbone, Pebble, Sleepio and WakeMate.

According to this report,there will be more than 170m wearable health and fitness devices being used, which means more and more known brands will be moving into the sector.

Nike, Adidas, Motorola and others are already playing in this space. More will come.

According to a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute (I know, pompous name, but the report is good), they estimate a 10-20% reduction by 2025 in chronic disease treatment through remote health monitoring.

So whilst at the Festival of Media, I cornered Jeremy Jauncey of TicTrac and interviewed him. His business helps aggregate all this health and fitness data into one place so to manage things better.

I asked him about the true value of all this self monitoring and why he thinks it is more than self-indulgence. Jeremy shares some practical benefits but also aims to put my mind at rest regarding the ownership of all this data.

After all, the stuff that we give to Facebook is one thing. But my BMI, pulse, heart rate? Well that is my digital DNA, and I am not too keen on others making money out of my DNA.

As concerns of personal privacy is heightened by the recent Prism revelations, control of our own digital DNA will surely be a major counterpoint to the rise of the self-monitoring movement.

So you might not be "weird to be wired", but you might be opening yourself up further to others leveraging your data for their benefit.

 

cbtv: Karen Nelson-Field & Phil Townsend - Most branded content needs viagra

 

 

"70% of marketing activity has low arousal"

So says Karen Nelson-Field of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Phil Townsend of Unruly Media, just after their presentation at the Festival of Media Global 2013. They had spoken at the event on what makes great branded video content. So I thought I would grab them and ask them a few more questions.

Putting aside Phil's big plug of Unruly Media's tools for analysing branded content (though why not!), I was fascinated by the results of their research on what are the triggers for the sharing of great branded content. Which is where the 'arousal' factor came in. Their research found that getting lots of people to view the content does not necessarily foster higher incidence of sharing of that content. Boring ads don't get shared, which is not surprising. But neither do mildly amusing bits of content. A small smile on the face of the viewer won't be enough to encourage them to share.

Karen and Phil suggested that high arousal in people will get the sharing button pushed. Before you start defining what 'high arousal' could mean, let me help. According to their research, there are 4 levels of emotion (Positive High, Positive Low, Negative High, Negative Low) across 4 emotional descriptors (Humour, Motivation, Temperament, Awe). In the Positive High Arousal state, we find Hilarity, Inspiration, Astonishment and Exhilaration.  So if your branded content is not hitting any of those states, then you will struggle to have the content shared.

Here is their research if you want to go beyond my interview with them.

Of course, this is only part of the story. Brand created content will always sit side by side with, and often out-shone by, user-generated content. And as comscore showcased in a great piece of research last year, business benefits can be secured by finding ways to combine the benefits of both sources of content.

In my interview with Karen and Phil, I also asked about the social motivation behind the sharing of content. Specifically, I wondered whether people share because they want to share (external good) or because they they want to be seen to be sharing (recognition). It seems a little more digging into their data will be required.  Looking forward to seeing what they come up with. And am off to have a dig around myself...