Movember and digital marketing trends

As we approach the end of Octo­ber, a cou­ple of things come to mind such as: dark­er morn­ings, con­trol of the ther­mo­stat, and maybe even Christ­mas shop­ping. But the one thing on our mind in the Adobe offices is Movem­ber. For those of you who may be unfa­mil­iar with this year­ly tra­di­tion, Movem­ber is a world­wide cam­paign to raise aware­ness and funds for men’s health issues and to encour­age men to grow (and women to sup­port) the Mo (mous­tache) dur­ing the 30 days of November.

After a suc­cess­ful effort last year, with over 120 Adobe employ­ees help­ing to raise almost $25,000, the UK team (with over 30 Mo Bros) was the run­ner up in terms of funds raised for this impor­tant cause. Well, we’re back this year hop­ing to be even more successful!

Now, how does this relate to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing you may ask? Well, aside from being a move­ment heav­i­ly focused in dig­i­tal using the net­work effects of our social con­nec­tions to spread the mes­sage, I want to look back to our Adobe Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit of 2014 where Justin (JC) Cogh­lan, co-founder of Movem­ber, took cen­tre stage to dis­cuss how they keep the con­ver­sa­tion about men’s health alive in the dig­i­tal age. Before Sum­mit we spoke with JC and one of the ques­tions we asked was:What key dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing trend do you see mak­ing it big by the end of 2014?

Justin (JC) Coghlan’s response (May 2014):

“Wear­able tech­nol­o­gy is the obvi­ous new direc­tion com­ing out of 2014. We know that con­tin­ued improve­ment and devel­op­ment is launch­ing around sports bands, Google with Glass on the scene, to whole ranges of new wear­able tech launching.

2014 and beyond is real­ly all about tak­ing things to the next lev­el with wear­able tech.

Health and well­ness should play an excit­ing role here. Tech­nol­o­gy launch­ing that can mon­i­tor every­thing, through wear­able and mobile devices, will change the game; from con­tact lens­es that change colour when your blood sug­ar is low or some­thing like Wello, which mon­i­tors all your vitals.

Wear­able devices could ulti­mate­ly track all your data and upload to your doc­tor, so your body func­tion over a peri­od of time is tracked, not just a snap­shot of how you are on the day, which would play a key role in pre­ventable health.”

Read the rest of the blog post here: Justin (JC) Cogh­lan from Movem­ber Speak­ing At Adobe Summit

Inter­est­ing­ly, since we spoke with JC and saw his pre­sen­ta­tion as Sum­mit we’ve noticed more than a cou­ple of advances in wear­able tech:

As a dig­i­tal mar­keter it’s an excit­ing time when your future gaz­ing can be in terms of months rather than decades! For con­sumers, as these tech­nolo­gies progress it quick­ly becomes an expec­ta­tion to get added val­ue through all the data we share. Take the exam­ple of the dia­bet­ic who gets a vis­i­ble sign when their blood sug­ar is low: there’s a clear val­ue propo­si­tion in shar­ing that data, to a point where it clear­ly changes people’s lives.

As some­one who works in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, it’s easy for me to buy into the inter­con­nect­ed future that JC described ear­li­er this spring. Not because ‘I like gad­gets and I’m an tech ear­ly adopter’ (although many of us tend to be!), but because I see the val­ue in rich data and the val­ue of dri­ving con­text from com­bin­ing infor­ma­tion sources.

In two years I may look back at this blog post, while my watch ques­tions me ‘why I’ve ordered take­away piz­za twice’, ‘why I’ve not gone to the gym’, and that my plans to ‘meet some friends at the pub’ aren’t the health­i­est choice — and won­der why I want­ed this con­sol­i­dat­ed infor­ma­tion, or how it can be more use­ful in my dai­ly life. But the least I can say is we did our part for Movem­ber and hope you can too, so please sup­port the team: http://uk.movember.com/team/1595169.

Update: Justin (JC) Cogh­lan, co-founder of Movem­ber, took cen­tre stage at Adobe Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2014, watch the video here:

Expecting a datasource