One image summarises the future that awaits marketing professionals: the fluffy pink, bulletproof hug vest. It’s a fictitious product that could answer the need for reassurance and safety for adult Gen Alpha consumers in 2045. All the experts assembled by OMD for this year’s Sense conference painted a future made more complex to navigate for people and business leaders by technological advancements. However, they also offered some valuable advice to overcome mounting difficulties or even turn them into opportunities.
Using a series of stark tableaux, EMIR’s Head of Advisory and former futurist-in-chief for Dubai, Dr Noah Raford, depicted the future that is to be expected for the three key consumer generations, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. He advised the marketing community to look for the upside in every situation. “During the next 20 years, we will have to face an extraordinary and unprecedented confluence of economic, political, social, climate and technological transformations. Our job will be to regulate our own emotions and anxieties before helping others, people we know and care about, as well as people we don’t,” Dr Raford warned. “Some will bury themselves in distraction like video gaming, others, technically Gen Alphas, will see AI and other technologies for what they are: an opportunity to create something new and unique.”
This echoed Blake Cuthbert’s opening talk, during which the CEO of OMD EMEA described six forces that disconnected marketing from growth and offered six counter-approaches to turn them into positives. These include abundance planning, cultural activations, integrated creator planning, commerce intelligence, agentic buying, and the agent ecosystem. “It’s not a case of humans or machines but humans and machines, even in terms of to whom or what we will address marketing messages to,” Cuthbert said. “Individuals and organisations will have to maintain their prompt libraries, which will usher in a new paradigm of effectiveness. What we’re seeing is the end of Big Advertising and a future with lots of littles, characterised by hyper-personalised messages in branded ecosystems.”
With a keynote address she delivered with a heavy sprinkling of humor, the renowned digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush captivated the audience with her deep insights into the intricate relationship between technology and human behaviour. Drawing on her extensive research in digital culture across the MENA region, she shed light on the unseen forces at play in our interactions with technology, uncovering the subtle yet profound ways it shapes our thoughts, decisions, and habits. Harfoush offered actionable strategies to extract the benefits of technological advancements while safeguarding ourselves against unintended consequences. “After automating manufacturing, we’re now automating knowledge work,” she observed, adding a warning. “If we rely too heavily on AI without remaining thoughtful and engaged, we risk losing mastery of our thinking and expertise when we need it to validate the work of machines,” she cautioned. Harfoush urged the audience to cultivate “intentional expertise” to ensure that human creativity, judgment, and depth of knowledge remain irreplaceable pillars of progress.
If storytelling is a fundamental and immutable aspect of humankind and how we learn and communicate, Qi Pan, Snap’s Director of Computer Vision Engineering, revealed the next iteration of the media experience: story-living. Pushing the limits of Augmented Reality, media experiences will involve people in large, shared environments. “The technology and devices are developing to make this vision a reality. The ability to add digital content on top of the physical world is hugely exciting for users and brands, as they now can add entertainment and information at scale,” Pan said. “With rapid tech advancements, like Snap’s fifth-generation spectacles, AR is becoming more natural, letting users add content to the real world without losing touch with it.”
The event, which took place at the Museum of the Future, drew a large crowd of senior business and marketing professionals from brands, agencies, and media circles. OMD has been staging annual thoughtleadership events in the region since 2007. Over the years, OMD has consistently delivered thought leadership and innovation, solidifying its position as a pioneer in the industry.
“When everything around you is changing and the very notions on which an economy or market is based are shaking, you can either resist or ride the wave. We’ve clearly chosen the latter, and by adopting our new positioning statement, ‘We Create What’s Next,’ we’ve taken the first of many steps to reconnect marketing with growth where this link had become weak. As always, the devil is in the detail, and it is by looking at our world through an empathetic lens that we can pick up the trends and insights that will make a difference to our clients,” commented Saleh Ghazal, CEO of OMD MENA. “Decoding Generation (H)uman has been designed as a rallying cry to operate the deep transformation the next decades call for. Yes, it can be uncomfortable and even scary but being innovative in this context means being courageous and inquisitive, finding the upside by flipping challenges on their head. It also means understanding what makes people unique and connecting with them relevantly and authentically at scale.”
This edition of OMD Sense was produced in partnership with Snapchat, a trailblazer in augmented reality, creativity, and media technology, and Talon, a global OOH specialist media agency reimagining and reinventing the possibilities of the medium.