Floor 9

Closing out this remarkable year of innovations, the entire Lab team came together for our annual recap of the biggest trends that defined the tech and media landscape in 2024, and look ahead to see what 2025 may bring. Together, the team discussed:

• The maturing deployment of AI and the long-term prospect of the AI hype
• The future of search and the impact that AI-driven challengers could have on Google’s dominance 
• The shifting landscape of social media—more media, less “social”—and how creators navigate evolving platforms and parasocial dynamics. 
• The major developments in mixed reality, esp. in hardware, and how its user cases might evolve 
• The streaming landscape in the post-streaming wars era, doubling down on live sports and battling subscription fatigue

Join us for this year-end roundup as we celebrate our team, our guests, and you—our listeners—and head into 2025 with fresh insights and excitement.

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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‘Tis the season again, and the Lab is here to discuss the latest shopping trends that we think brands should keep an eye out for this year. From a renewed emphasis on experiential in-store shopping to interesting loyalty plays, not to mention the new entrants like Amazon Haul and metaverse shopping, there’s no shortage of interesting things for Adam and Chelsea to talk about. Listen now to learn more about the latest trends in retail and shopper behaviors.

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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Welcome back to Floor 9! This month, we welcome long-time host and director of partnerships, Ryan, back from his paternity leave to chat with Adam, the managing director of the Lab, to round up all the recent news around mixed reality headsets. 

From the Orion AR glasses prototype that Mark Zuckerberg showcased earlier this month, or Meta’s Ai-infused Ray-Ban smart glasses, to the developer-oriented Snap Spectacles, as well as the headset that kicked off this wave of spatial computing hardware, Apple’s Vision Pro, we covered them all! In addition, Adam and Ryan also analyzed the current competitive landscape among the tech companies trying to crack the MR hardware market and prognosticated how things might shake out over the next five to ten years. Listen now to hear our take on this potentially revolutionary emerging category. 

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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Welcome back to another episode of Floor 9. This week, Tom Trudeau from our partnerships team chats with our managing director Adam Simon about everything that marketers should know coming out of the Apple event on Monday. Together, they discussed various new Apple products, the upcoming Apple Intelligence features, as well as these AI-driven features will change consumer expectations and reshape brand interactions. Topics covered include:

• The new iPhones’ surprising hold on pricing, and what it means for the smartphone market (0:58)
• Analysis of the upcoming suite of Apple Intelligence features (2:23)
• The new “visual intelligence” features coming to iPhones, and what it means for marketers (5:30)
• The ability to capture immersive spatial video and images, and what it means for Vision Pro (7:13)
• Updates to AirPods and additional support for contextual audio (8:32)
• New hearing health features coming to AirPods Pro (11:47)
• New health & fitness features to Apple Watch and Apple’s sustainability goals (14:41)
• What brands should do to prepare for the new era of AI search (17:42)
• How Apple is positioning Apple Intelligence and where the company stands in the AI competitive landscape (19:51)
• Why spatial computing remains a key focus in Apple’s strategic roadmap (21:28)
• The long-term prospect for Apple Intelligence and large language models in general (22:05)
• Closing thoughts on Apple’s latest products and what they mean for a new deployment phrase of consumer-facing AI (25:30)

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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In this special bonus episode of the month, the Lab’s strategy team assembles to discuss the highlights from the results of our latest Futurecaster survey! Futurecaster is the Lab’s proprietary innovation tool that identifies how your audience is engaging with the tactical areas of innovation across emerging technologies and media channels.

In partnership with Dynata, we survey 2,500 smartphone owners aged 16-74, asking them about their awareness, past and planned usage, and perception of emerging technologies and media channels. That survey data is fused with our Acxiom data stack, allowing us to identify which tactical areas of innovation your audiences engage with.

With each new edition of the survey, we gain interesting new insights into how consumers are adopting and interacting with new technologies. This year, the results showed noteworthy developments across a wide range of innovation territories, including generative AI, augmented reality and mixed reality, retail and lifecycle loyalty, smart city and mobility solutions, the experience economy, and the creator economy. For example, awareness of generative AI tools continues to grow, with 55% of respondents saying they have heard of them, up from 36% who said so last year. 

Listen now to learn more about Futurecaster and the key insights we learned from this year’s survey!

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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This week on Floor 9, the Lab’s managing director Adam Simon welcomes two senior UM executives, Dan Chapman, Global Chief Strategy Officer, and Andy Littlewood, Global Chief Product Officer, to Floor 9 for an insightful discussion on the impact of the over-reliance on AI within the media landscape, how agencies can work with clients to avoid becoming “bland brands” and lead the Renaissance of Media. Specifically, they took a deep dive into the following topics:

• The shifting landscape of the media industry and the end of digital ad triopoly
• The impact of generative AI on the ad & media industry, and the best strategies to deal with it
• The role AI in brand-building, and how to increase brand differentiation in an era of homogenizing digital platforms and ad tools
• The “brand vs. agency” dynamic and what agencies can do to help clients navigate AI’s impact
• How to avoid becoming a “bland brand” and being commoditized by AI by rediscovering nuanced brand patterns
• How marketers can lead a renaissance of creativity in this new era

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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This month on Floor 9, the Lab team assembles for a panel discussion on the future of the entertainment industry. Faced with rising streaming fatigue, high-churn “nomadic subscribers,”  and the looming threat of AI-generated “slop content,” Hollywood needs to be smart about navigating the post-streaming-wars industry landscape, and that begins with re-aligning their business model with the market reality. In this episode, host Ryan Miller is joined by Chelsea Freitas, Tom Trudeau, and Richard Yao to break down the various issues facing the entertainment industry today and point to the best practices going forward.

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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As usual, Apple’s latest WWDC event brought forth many software updates, but the star of the show was Apple’s major AI update — Apple Intelligence, which will enable LLM-powered new features across Apple’s entire ecosystem. In this episode, Adam and Ryan took a deep dive into Apple Intelligence, the ChatGPT integration, its impact on the AI competitive landscape, and more. Listen now to hear our analysis on the WWDC announcements, including: 

• Apple Intelligence overview - 2:20
• Siri’s big upgrade - 5:58
• Fun AI features: Genmoji and Image Playground - 10:26
• Apple’s AI privacy promise & how it works - 14:04
• Apple’s OpenAI partnership & ChatGPT integration - 21:07
• How Apple’s AI strategy differs from competitors - 26:20
• Safari Highlights & new Photos app updates - 30:01
• New immersive Vision Pro content - 33:20
• Implications for brand marketers - 37:58

f you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on Twitter @ipglab and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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May marks the beginning of the tech conference season, and this year, we had three key players in the AI race — OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft — all hosting their respective developer conferences within a two-week period in May. If you missed the announcements, fret not! The Lab team is here to help you keep up with the fast-evolving AI developments and competitive landscape.

In this episode, Chelsea Freitas from our strategy team, along with Ryan Miller and Tom Trudeau from our partnerships team, took the Floor 9 mic and discussed all the highlights from the recent developer conferences, including:

• Microsoft’s hardware-centric Surface event - 0:52
• Is AI-powered Surface laptops a legitimate competitor to Apple? - 3:27
• AI-powered Recall feature for the Copliot+ PCs - 5:01
• Key announcements from Microsoft's Build event - 9:03
• Will people call them “AI” as more AI-powered features become productized - 15:25
• The advertising implications of Copilot and Microsoft’s AI features - 16:45
• Key announcements from Google’s I/O developer event - 19:55
• The impact of Google rolling out AI search - 21:23
• Google integrating Gemini AI into its suite of popular products - 24:31
• Google’s new multimodal AI-powered creative tools - 29:03
• Last thoughts on the AI race and wrap up - 32:52

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on Twitter @ipglab and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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Kids these days! In this episode of Floor 9, the Lab’s strategy team (Adam Simon and Cheslea Freitas) and partnerships team (Ryan Miller and Tom Trudeau) join forces to analyze the youngest generation on the scene and their Millennial parents. Together, the team tackles topics that include:

• Gen Alpha’s key media behaviors
• How Gen Alpha socialize digitally  
• Gen Alpha as “AI natives”
• Millennials’ collaborative and overprotective parenting style
• The major concerns of Millennial parents 
• The recent “no phone childhood” movement
• Key takeaways for brands looking to reach kids and parents

If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on Twitter @ipglab and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!

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