Cannes Round-Up: Eric Oldrin: Social Creatures > Social Media

M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y-E-S-I-S-T.

It's Machine Learning from Assist. It's a podcast where we think and dream about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. This chapter is an excerpt from episode 4, a wrap-up of our interviews at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It's where over 10,000 folks from 90 countries meet to hand out awards and chop up the future of brand communication. We used the opportunity to do almost all of our interviews on a boat. But it wasn't just any boat. It was the floating home of LivePerson, one of the true leaders in transforming customer care from voice calls to mobile messaging at scale. They're a huge deal in the conversational commerce world. LivePerson took great care of us and are a true friend of the pod. Right now, Facebook's Eric Oldren. Eric's working at the front edge of AR and VR, augmented and virtual reality, and the storytelling implications of that technology. He's always asking us to remember where this work can still be fun and serve our deepest desires to connect. Eric is super thought-provoking and lovely, so let's get to it. Enjoy!

What brings you to Cannes this year? What are you doing? What brings you out here?

Well, Facebook has for a few years now had a presence at Cannes, and we just come here to connect with the creative industry, you know, brands and advertisers and people creating. It's a festival of creativity, so our team in particular is really focused on Cannes as an important tentpole moment for us.

And when you say your team, can you tell us what do you do?

Well, I'm part of the Creative Shop team in Facebook, and we work with brands and advertisers really focused on exploring all of our different creative spaces and helping to show the industry what's possible. And people both on the brand and advertising side, but also publishers and creators and developers like yourself, to just explore that space and try to, try to push the envelope. Create some lighthouse examples of what's possible and to really just inspire people and drive— on my end, to drive product adoption and exploration of the space.

And the space today for you is the AI space or the conversational space. Is that most of the area you're spending your time in?

I really look at emerging platforms and products, and so part of that is messaging, which includes conversational AI and but also things that are more sort of utilitarian, built within the platform that are focused on single tasks. And they do one thing really well and they're a lot of fun. There's one, for example, that focuses on events.

Interesting. So is a key insight to keep it fun?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's important to create a sense of a connection between people and fun is a big part of that, some kind of delight, emotional connection. There's an opportunity there. It doesn't always have to be that way, I guess, but we found that brands have really defined this space by exploring that natural one-to-one personal connection that can be established. It's sort of like if you were a simple shopkeeper and someone walked into your store and you had a conversation with them. Let's say you were, you know, selling bicycles, and that's a tough decision for you to make. You're not really sure how to choose all the different parts of that. You know, whether it's the type of bike, if you want a road bike or mountain bike, or what kind of seat, or what kind of spend limit you should have. So the shopkeeper helps you get through that very complex decision. And we found within Messenger that some of the best experiences are ones that guide people through a really complex decision that they're trying to make. So LEGO made a really interesting experience back during the holidays, and they've continued to evolve this Ralph the Robot experience that they've created in Messenger that allows parents really to understand what kind of products are available. There's thousands and thousands of different LEGO kits. And so by asking parents questions about their kids, you know, what age are they, do they like things that move, or do they like little worlds to walk into. You know, LEGO helped to make some, some choices, and then you can make a purchase right there. Or if you look at things, for example, from Alcoholics Anonymous or the Belong To bot, where we're dealing with issues within our community that are really important, and oftentimes people struggle to navigate through those choices. And in that case, Messenger again allows people through conversation to unpack a lot of the tough things to consider in a very personal and very thoughtful way.

You said creating emotion. How do you think about designing emotional connection?

Well, I think that really comes down, you know, to all the expressions that are available within the thread, within the conversation. Certainly language and syntax and words are important and the way that a bot communicates, but also all the other expressive elements that are available, whether it be GIFs or emojis or video or, you know, even audio, I think is a really interesting avenue for people to explore within messaging. There's certain countries that—

What specifically?

Well, I mean, are you aware down in, like, I think it's within Latin America, like Brazil, and I've seen this a little bit in Mexico, where If you're texting someone, like through SMS, someone would record their voice and then they'd send that as a message to someone through texting or messaging. And it's a simple way without having to use your thumb, you know? And then so they pass audio clips basically. So I think there's interesting things to do there.

Are there any expressions or ways to express ourselves that you would be excited about or that you think are coming that we don't even know we'll express ourselves like? Is there anything, 'cause I mean, I don't think we thought GIFs and animojis and all these memojis or all these things were coming. Is there anything that isn't here yet that you think is exciting?

Well, I'm excited to see the shift towards visual communication. So you mentioned emojis and GIFs and you can have an entire conversation with someone just by sending GIFs back and forth. I'll often do that at work. It's not only very effective, but it's also really amusing.

GIFs are like the first intent keyboards because basically it's a group of words with meaning and we type all these letters to make words, words to make sentences, sentences to make meaning. And a GIF is just the meaning.

Yeah, it's pure raw meaning and emotion.

But it's fun.

It's super fun, especially the contrast between the words and the photo. The photo has this extra layer which is sort of unspoken but understood.

Yeah.

So I'm excited about that direction. And within Messenger, for example, we recently integrated AR more into bot experiences into the platform itself.

Yeah, it's amazing actually. That was a great, great— I mean, it changes browsing. I mean, I think the biggest critique I think of messaging as an interface or language is that browsing a lot of items is hard. But all of a sudden, if you put a watch on your wrist or a Sephora makeup on your face or a Casper bed in your room, or all of a sudden browsing when it's really that personal is a much different experience of shopping. And it's much better than the web.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it gets you closer to that one-to-one connection. It's almost as if, again, going into a store and having a conversation with a shopkeeper. You can talk about the complexity of a decision. So take again that LEGO example. You could, you know, navigate through all the different products that you might want to— in other cases, you'd be browsing, but in that case, there's a little bit of help with that decision and that exploration. But then the next step, yeah, is to take it and try it and then buy it. So you actually look at the different LEGO opportunities, spin them around, get a real good sense of how you might play with them, how your kids might play with them. And so we've seen this done in a number of different instances, like Sephora built this really— they were getting really good at AR for track-to-face and makeup and things like that. It's crazy good.

And it shows up in your cart. You try it on, you send it to a friend, and then everything you tried on sitting in your cart.

Yeah, absolutely. And can turn into that. And I think there's also really interesting storytelling opportunities as well. You know, it's not all about experiences with brands and commerce, although there's an incredible amount of value there, but there's really fun things just to explore. We've seen a lot of really cool storytelling partners, you know, whether it's Disney or again Nat Geo and whatnot, just playing in that space. So I think, I think to me that's really exciting is the intersection between conversation, connections, sort of a personal, very real, very sort of real-time connection, and then bringing in visual experiences around that. I get pretty excited about that.

So 2 years ago then, were you thinking that AR would become part of the conversation, like when you mentioned Sephora, or was that something that happened pretty quickly when it was just applied in that situation?

Yeah, I think we saw some really interesting mainstream-style sort of, you know, aha moments happening in AR even 2 years ago. I mean, Pokémon GO was that moment where we started to see this potential of AR. I think we saw a lot of experiments before that as well.

That was crazy times. I like, people were just like a whole world and everyone was just walking around catching Pokémon.

It was so fun. I mean, to your point earlier, it really is about sort of connecting with people in an emotional way, allowing a little joy in their life.

There's this whole narrative around people are gonna just talk to their robots and stuff, but I think that kind of showed that people still wanted to get out and get offline and be around the other people in community. And, you know, maybe the AR and AI actually gets us off these devices to get into back into real life.

Yeah, I agree. I think we're really at an interesting place. And technology will do this where it rushes forward, it feels all-encompassing, people get a little worried about it, and then it finds an equilibrium that balances between the analog and the digital. And at the end of the day, technology is meant to be invisible. It's meant to be part of the sort of seamless fabric, fabric of our lives and additive and joyful and connect us. That's the goal of technology, is to bring us closer together, not to divide us. And the times where we feel like it's dividing us, I think we're just— that's just a little bit of growing pain. And in fact, it's actually moving towards this place where we will naturally move towards connections. We as humans want to naturally be social. Yeah.

Do you think that, you know, you guys succeeded so well at getting everyone connected and what you say about we're at that interesting moment in time where the thing that disconnects us now is we're all just staring at our phones when we are in person. You know, you look around and it's really everyone. And do you— how does this shift back? How does this shift back to in-person connection that's not distracted?

Well, it's probably not a one answer.

Yeah, I think it's a global— it's a— it's a now a global problem, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the day, the way it shifts back is that we find meaning in the world around us and that the device brings our heads up because it's connecting to something important. And the good experiences that we find within a mobile device do just that. They bring you to a beautiful place. They give you great recommendations. Recommendations about a restaurant where you then have a wonderful evening with your friends. You know, they help you find products and interesting things that you're going to have, you know, with your family and a great Christmas that you're going to share together. And, or AR brings your head up and you're actually discovering things in the world around you, or you're, you're meeting people that you knew 20 years ago in high school and all of a sudden you're reconnected and you end up getting married to them. I mean, these are real stories that happen every day. I think it's real easy for us to over-index on the dark side of stuff, but at the end of the day, there's far more beautiful stories in the world than there are dark ones.

100%. You know, and I'm curious when you say that, that's an interesting design or philosophy for people to think about building in this space is that get people to move their head up like That's actually a design thing I never thought about, which is look up, get people to look up from their phone, not down at their phone.

Yeah. I mean, it can be something that you have as a design tenet, huh? Or it can be something that is innately within everything you're building anyway. I truly, I have, I have faith in the beauty of humanity and the fact that we naturally are building things that are bringing us together and causing us to look up. Like it doesn't even need to be written down on a list of your 10 design tenets. Like, that will naturally come out of what people build because that's, that's what they're trying to do is bring us together.

And can you take me a little deeper into VR? I'm not— I don't know that much about it. And I think a lot of people, you know, you have the people on one side that say you're just going to be in your headset all day, but there's obviously some beauty and amazing things happening inside of VR. What are some things that either most people wouldn't know about or some examples that you think are really good use cases of VR to show beauty and connection and feeling?

I think the power of AR is about empathy. It creates a sense of presence and agency within a space. So presence is a feeling like I'm really there. It's like a lucid dream or it's like a dream. And then agency is the lucid part, like the sense that you can actually take an action so you can interact and you can have an effect on that space. And when you're in, you're transported to these new these new experiences, the potential for empathy that comes from that is, it's astounding. Some of the most interesting experiences I've seen are ones that really bring someone into the perspective of another person or another place that they may never have experienced or they really need to.

Yeah.

Chris Milk did this amazing film that brought people into the eyes of a refugee, and this is a 12-year-old girl, and they followed her journey. And I mean, it is unnerving. It's absolutely just— if you're not changed by the end of that, something's wrong with you. You know, it was a really powerful experience. And that's the excitement I see in VR, is this incredibly powerful potential to connect and to create empathy. And now imagine applying that to stories. I think we've just scraped the surface when it comes to narrative and amazing storytelling within VR. So I'm really excited to explore that. That's sort of something that really gets me pretty excited.

And because empathy is really just understanding what it's like to not be you and then not judging it, essentially, right? Like, what is— what specifically to you— you use the word very, you know, very directly— what does it mean to you?

I think you described it well. I think it's to understand what it's not like to be you, to have a moment where you forget yourself and you walk a mile in someone else's shoes kind of feeling.

Wow. Do you think the next real frontier of mindset is it's the era of the self or the individual?

I think the baby boomers put us solidly in that place about 20, 30 years ago. I think we're on our way out of that, hopefully, and we're sort of continuing to open the aperture around community and connections with other people. And I actually think we're moving to a place that's far less about self and trying to find a balance between individuality and community. And it's tough. I mean, that's our age-old tension.

I guess it would be more— it's the era of changing self to be empathetic and care more about others. And be more open to others. But because we weren't that, because we were so focused on self.

Yeah, yeah, I like that.

Interesting.

Let's toast some rosé to that idea.

Done. Let's go have rosé. We'll have a little quick glass.

And, uh, all right, thanks for listening, and thanks once again to the folks at Live Burst for their support in making the Machine Yearning CAN episodes possible. Get in touch on Twitter @Assist, DMs are open. We're super interested to hear who you think should appear on the podcast. Machine Yearning is made by Paul Ciuffo and Michael Elsesser for Limina House. Have a great day.