VOICE Round-Up: The RAIN Agency's Will Hall on why systems rule

It's Machine Yearning 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 our interview with Will Hall at the 2018 VOICE Summit, the largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Will is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research, and design. Will is the Chief Creative Officer at The Reign Agency. In this excerpt, he lays out how brands need to evolve and work in smart new ways to own their brand voice so they can move beyond recommendation and into anticipation. This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning. Will Hall.

So people have been saying ever since brand as a concept and as a practice, you know, started to really come online in the '80s and people got serious about it. Brand voice became the term. And now we're really finding out that you gotta go up so many more levels than what you ever thought possible.

Yeah. You've heard a lot of scare tactics, if you will, around voice, like it's the death of brands. We actually don't think so. In many ways, it's the liberation of brands because if you lead, we advise brands to really start with voice and have that inform your larger ecosystem. Okay, so why? Because voice is conversational. Nobody's looking for your brand in 2018 Everybody's looking for what your brand does. It's out here at the content level. But voice is different from a podcast, even. I love podcasts, but a podcast is a one-way thing. Voice, you can have a conversation. When you start to think about your brand, not just having a monologue projection, one-way voice, but what are my ears? How do I listen? How to respond in kind? What's my relationship like? I think those are new muscles to build for a lot of brands.

What's the rationale people are using if they're trying to make that assertion? Death of brand?

Frankly, I think a lot of that has to do with the transactional nature. I think the death of brands part is a lot of brand equity is based on a visual. There's visual equity there. You look down, you see candy. Oh, candy. Well, what happens when that's invisible? Take a brand like Campbell's, 160-some-odd-year-old soup brand. What happens if that visual equity is gone? So that's part of it is that, what's that, again, participatory layer that you can start to make your brand relevant when things go invisible. And as well, when you think about the disruption that's happening in retail. I mean, this is— I'm not the first to say this, this disintermediation that's happening where it's a passive thing. Purchasing is becoming more and more passive and voice is sort of the interface for a lot of that. That has a lot of disruption. So when you hear these projections like, you know, over the next 4 years there's going to be $40 billion or whatever transacted through voice. The problem with that is, is that it builds implicit bias. In the case of Amazon, it tends to default to the last thing you purchased. So that's good if you're the first one. It's really bad if you're the second one and they probably didn't ask for you by brand. So that's why they talk about brand. I didn't ask for Duracell, I asked for batteries. It gave me one and now it built in an implicit bias. Right. Yeah.

Hence the rise of, of the Amazon Basics.

Exactly. Yes.

Circling back to where we were earlier, though, in some ways voice becomes another execution point, just as social and print and display and like all these other were execution points. But it is still like really figuring out who are you? What do you stand for? What is your true purpose?

Yeah, and I totally agree. And I would also say at an even higher altitude of which voice is a part, there's a fracturing that's happened. You know, we joke that, you know, in the same way you don't have 3 TV networks anymore, obviously, you've got thousands and, you know, add to the internet and social and all this sort of fracturing that's happening and everything's vying for your attention. That requires brands to have more discipline in the continuity between those touchpoints. You're not having a 1-hour-long conversation. You're having 60 1-minute conversations and more likely whatever that is in seconds. And it's how do you string all those different touchpoints together Something we talk about is how do you have one conversation with 1,000 little chats?

Yeah.

How do you be the same person when you walk in every room? Display, social, voice.

That's right. And I think one of the things brands will have to figure out, how do you not just give your— so, okay, great, you're on Amazon, great, you're on Google or whatever. How do you not make them now the voice for your brand? You know, why is Alexa your voice now? Is that good? Maybe, right? But how do you sort of make sure you're the owner of your data, that you have a single source of truth that's doled out? Across those touchpoints.

Yeah, so now here's one. So the gunk that has built up that separates brands and consumers. So natural language comes in and somebody can now go into retail and say, "Show me a 60-inch TV with the best sound and the truest black and whites," 'cause they're a TCM fanatic.

Yeah.

And they want the best experience for the Maltese Falcon. And so they can stand in front of 30 monitors and the 3 that are the best light up for them, and then they get to choose which one. I was talking to somebody about that, and they said, "Wow, that's a very, very educated consumer." Like, no, that's somebody that says, "This is just me truly saying what I want." Yes.

I love that idea. I also love Maltese Falcon. But I would also say that I think that's a promising future, but where I even see that vectoring to, and I could be wrong, I'm just talking here, but is, you know, we're sort of inundated with recommendations. Amazon is based on their recommendation engine. 70% of YouTube traffic, as I understand, is based on their recommendation. So I saw some stat that— this is the spirit of truth— that we get 40,000 say, hey, do you want this or that moments over time. And it's creating this cognitive overload. And when I see voice and more specifically the AI that's underneath that getting more and more mature, I hope that it vectors to a place that's not just about recommendation, but rather anticipation. That it can actually already know I'm into Maltese Falcon. This is totally your movie because you like black and white. This has deeper crushed blacks. No, thank you. And so I think that is where a lot of the technology we've invited into our lives has created isolation, an overwhelming amount. We thought computers were going to make our lives easier. I don't necessarily think so. But I believe as things get more mature, hopefully they can start to repent for— make good for some of the sins you could argue have been made early on by actually being an assistant for me and not just an assistant to broker data or sell me soap, but actually make my life better.

Anticipation seems to really be the— horizon that so many folks are pointing to.

I really think it is. And I would also like to add a bit of a nuance on that. You know, I'm obsessed with self-driving cars for a thousand reasons, but something that struck me is that early on, of course, there's a number of ethics and people are asking this, that, or the other. But one of the things that's come up is like, how can I imbue my driving sensibility on a disintermediated interface like you driving for me? And so you can actually start to say, I want this car to drive altruistically. Humanistically, protective, random, et cetera. And so my will is imposed on this AI that's acting on my behalf. And when you start to think about now, you know, yes, I want things to anticipate, but actually what I really want is my partner, this AI partner, not a replacement for humanity, but an augmentation to humanity. It's acting on my behalf and negotiating those things the way that I would want to negotiate with it. Right now, most of this AI is about selling you stuff, but the idea that it could— what if, What if you could have AI that says, I want to be healthier, I want to make better financial decisions, I want to make this, that, or the other happen, and it could start to act on my behalf to make those things happen? I love that idea that, yes, anticipation, but anticipation with my will sort of baked into it.

If the blue sky client came in, what do you have in your back pocket that you want to pull out?

Yeah, I would say designers are obsessed. I'm speaking from architecture. I think design in some ways synonymous with control and control lends you to systems. There's a reason why Frank Lloyd Wright made the chairs in his house. And made the curtains and made everything. It's a whole thing. There's this idea of Wagner in the idea of musicals and things like this, how it's the scent, it's the sound, it's the music, it's the lighting, it's everything all together. And as a designer, I've always been drawn to large, complex, interdependent systems. So for us, the keys is systems. I actually don't get but so excited about small one-offs, especially in voice, because it undercuts their potential of a ubiquitous voice assistant. So for me, the, the, oh my gosh, I would love that. Give us a system. It is also interesting when— this isn't a new idea, but as you start to democratize these tools and you have students who actually don't know what they don't know and they start to hack something in a way that they get unexpected things sort of emerge from that. And I'm actually been keeping an eye on academia in that way. And, you know, it's just interesting some of the stuff that they've been— they're approaching it from a totally different perspective. And, you know, a lot of the students I've had at NYU, they talk about this— they're not saying this explicitly, but they're starting to look at technology as being anthropomorphic. You know, yeah, it's listening to me and I can talk to it. What if it can see me? What if I can touch it? How might that respond? What if, what if, what if? And there's been some wacky experiments coming out of Cranbrook as well as NYU and ITP and things like that. I'm interested. It's easy to discount some of that stuff, say, oh, that'll never happen. But the seeds of this idea of us merging technology and being— technology being interfaced with our sensibilities like voice, like touch, like sight, that makes a lot of sense. And I love that people are exploring that in a more hacker spirit as well as just trying to drive bottom line initiatives.

Thanks for listening, and we hope you take a second to share this episode with other members of your team. And make sure you check out the other chapters from this week's episode, or what the heck, just grab the whole thing. It's worth it. We promise. Next week, Kathy Pearl from Google, Bree Glaser from the Mars Agency, and two folks who are doing fascinating voice technology for kids. Patricia Scanlan, and Adva Levin, all from The Voice Summit 2018. 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 Chufo and Michael Elsesser for Limina House. Have a great day.