Katrine Rau on personalisation, speed and chatbots

So my name is Katrine Rau, I'm the Group Director in Copenhagen for Fjord. And what that means is I run the team there, we started back in June, where I joined to start up the whole thing. So I was the first person joining and we're up to about eight people now. First of all, it was, it's my first time here at South By, so it's great to be here. And I think what really is exciting and what I also see trend-wise is that all of the different audiences start mixing. And that's really great to see, so both with the interactive festival going on, but also certainly also with the music and film going on. So trend-wise, it's fascinating to see how things go across. So there's of course your things that are happening right now with chatbots, where you start to have this machine learning and also the human side of it. There's lots of discussions around how do you make sure that it's both a machine audience and voice, but also certainly the human voice is kept in there. So I think that's one thing, and then also a lot of interesting technologies are emerging. I was seeing this truck yesterday that was just lighting up with different little LEDs that you can actually customize. So I think there's a lot about technology and customization right now. I think diversity is just super interesting and super important. I was hearing a talk this morning about storytelling as well, and what really resonates with me is, we're, as designers, we're used to storytelling, but it's really also around story doing, and how do we make sure that the content that's being created doesn't get outdated tomorrow. So as media, as design agencies, we really want to make sure that our clients can start learning from the content they're putting out and also getting their audiences to really fit with it and feel it. But at the same time, we have our Snapchats that just have super quick content that's happening. So it's this mix between the long-lasting content and the super quick and dirty. I think it's interesting, and I think that is what I'm also gonna be bringing back to make sure that you have the short term and the long term always. One thing is coming from a corporate organization, but also what's happening on social media, what's happening in your day-to-day, and really starting to find where is that sweet spot for content management, for organizational change elements, because you do have a lot of millennials in your organizations, and how does that actually fit in from an organizational standpoint? Because we're used to, also especially in Denmark, we're used to these little bit older organizations that are really trying to embrace the new, but what is the new within our world? It's really fast and moving, both from a technology side and a content side. So what's next? It's always the big question, right? I think what comes next is we need to really be ready for all these fast moving elements. It's not about laying low and stepping back and just kind of watching what's going on. I think everyone needs to be on their tiptoes and really ready to embrace, and I think we need to have a lot of organizations actually embrace design thinking, both on a management level, to start being able to move fast, but certainly also our CIOs from a technology side need to be ready to move faster than they are right now, and into just how do we actually get things to move super fast? I think that is where we need to really embrace the future and not stop and think too much. One of the scenarios that I think about when I think a few years ahead is that right now our content management and our way of thinking is being very skewed because we start to look at filters through, for example, Facebook. You're only following the people that you have around you. You're only seeing their direction of content, and that really means that we start to actually drift apart even more. So if we start to embrace some of these challenges with that, I think we also need to look at different medias and mediums. So for example, I might look into National Geographic for seeing trends within that kind of round and how content is being talked about there to actually apply that to design and organizations and strategy. And I think I was hearing one of the futurists here, and I think it's really interesting when you start to look at how different elements of different cultures and different societies and different silos are actually being isolated, but how can we bring them together by actually looking across? And that's one of the things that South By really brings into it.