Black Mirror’s rating system is here – and it’ll transform marketing
Realestate.com.au’s chief inventor, Nigel Dalton, tells retailers that the secret to surviving in 2018 is to build your business around time, transparency and trust
Perhaps the most talked-about episode of Black Mirror – Netflix’s dystopian drama that predicts how technology could change our world – is the premiere of its third season, entitled Nosedive. In this instalment, people mark each other out of five on their smartphones after every social interaction.
This affects Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard, Jurassic World), who needs to bump up her average rating to a 4.5 in order to move into a swanky new apartment she’s been eyeing up.
In Black Mirror episode Nosedive, citizens including Lacie rate each other out of five
“The home only takes a certain class of people,” explains Nigel Dalton, from real-world property company REA, which operates realestate.com.au. “But she currently lives with her loser brother who is a ‘2’. She has to figure out, ‘Do I lose him to get the place?’
“Thank god it’s science fiction. But then again, maybe it isn’t?”
In fact, he goes on, a real-life project is being slowly rolled out in China. It’s called the Social Credit System, and as well as trading ratings, the government uses mass surveillance systems to monitor citizens’ conduct. It’s thought three million are hooked up right now, with the plan for it to go nationwide by 2020. The top mark is 950, but drop below 400, and you’ll be barred from public transport – something they’ll know about because security cameras using facial recognition are tracking you.
And it’s about more than bad behaviour.
Play computer games at night and you could be penalised for being anti-social. Purchase nappies and you’ll get a lift because China favours family. Oh, and if you can clamber above 600, you’ll get credit to buy things online.
Think it’ll never happen in Australia?
“If you take Ubers then you’re already scoring a human being for his service. The question is: ‘Have you got used to it yet?’”
Nigel joined REA in November 2012 as CIO, but moved roles to chief inventor at the end of 2016. Here, he oversees REALABS, a department focussed solely on creating innovations, from virtual and augmented reality apps to voice-activated search or simply ideas for new websites.
And it’s easy to see why he was appointed to the position, which you suspect they created especially for him. Case in point: he’s presenting these predictions over dinner at Sydney’s Bentley Restaurant and Bar, to a room including some of Australia’s most senior retail marketers, but his sermon is presented with a passion that has diners leaving their Rottnest Island scallops sitting idle. His zeal is bottomless.
“The Black Mirror world is coming and it will drive consumer transparency in a way we never imagined,” he enthuses. “And it’s about so much more than just technology.”
The title of his talk today is the same as the words that adorn the wall of his workshop in inner-city Melbourne: time, transparency and trust. That is, that shoppers expect purchasing to be quick and easy, trust the brand to go a good job, and – star system included – must sense some honesty.
“These are the three currencies of the web,” he says. “Avoiding irrelevance is my job description.”
Nigel was speaking at a Mumbrella Bespoke event at Bentley Restaurant & Bar. It was attended by some of Sydney’s most senior retail marketers
Irrelevance is something he fought against in his last job at Lonely Planet, as general manager of information technology and then deputy director of digital. The world’s biggest travel book publisher missed their flight when the internet arrived, and today has been dwarfed by rivals such as TripAdvisor, Instagram and Yelp.
“People under 30 think Lonely Planet is a dating site,” he says. “Unless you want to get beaten by a device in your pocket, awkward conversations need to be had. Tinder is now the app for travellers.”
His enthusiasm for all this started with a degree from Waikato University in New Zealand, where he studied a diverse range of subjects including economics, geography, statistics, sociology and computer science. He describes himself as essentially being a behavioural economist by profession.
And so he’s taken his love of people and obsession with tech and merged them together to create REA’s famous Hack Days. Once a quarter, more than 100 people from all divisions in the company submit ideas to improve the business, and then they get the chance to actually turn them into working concepts. It’s an idea that was modified from Yahoo in the US, and the company’s commitment to it is such that it’s estimated to cost them $1m in salaries each year.
It’s money well spent, because the organization understands it needs to continue to innovate quickly to keep ahead of Amazon and Google, who lurk in the shadows of the property game. At one Hack Day, for instance, his team created 3D online models of houses not yet built, and the plan is for that to merge with Pokemon Go-style tech so that consumers can do virtual inspections, after snapping a code on a billboard. That’s very Australia-specific tech if someone is planning, say, to move states.
“Amazon’s dilemma is its inability to be passionate about one thing. They’re the new mass audio. They will never get down to that level of passion for property and creating the perfect home that we have.
REA’s chief inventor, Nigel Dalton
“This trust we’ve built has led us to having over a million Aussies jump on our site every day. That powers billions of data points that we can use to create even better experiences, but also offer our advertisers.”
Most of his time, though, is taken up by trying to understand how the consumer, and therefore their purchasing habits, have changed.
“People visit multiple sites before making a purchase,” he says. “That’s transparency.”
Not so long ago, he explains, he found himself transfixed watching a teenager try to buy headphones in a hi-fi store. He’d probably already done all the research online, he figured, and had narrowed the purchase down to two products, which he wanted to try on himself. He doubtlessly knew more about it than the manager.
“But what did the 25-year-old sales guy want to do?” says Nigel. “He wanted to follow the script about selling him the headphones the professional way. He did the training and got the certificate, after all! I wanted to help him, but for the sake of silence, I didn’t. Ten minutes later, the customer went home.”
This thought started when he visited a conference at Paradise Country theme park on the Gold Coast, which attempts to recreate a traditional Aussie farm experience. “There were loads of tourists and people cracking whips and riding horses, but I couldn’t work out why I felt so uncomfortable.
“Then we went to the shearing shed, and it dawned on me – it was my childhood. My upbringing is now a comedy theme park in Australia! If this happened to me, could it happen to my profession in real estate, too? Maybe soon you’ll go to a theme park and say, ‘This is how people used to buy things. They go into a store! Look, there’s a cash register! You will tell your children, and they will laugh at you because you didn’t just walk out of the store with what you wanted.”
Or in other words, people’s expectations have increased very quickly, and in ways many marketers just haven’t grasped. Time, transparency and trust are now essential in areas of buying and selling you’d never imagine. He cites the example of buying illegal drugs on the dark web. Today, 90% of drug dealers have a four or five-star customer rating. Many offer money-back guarantees.
Nigel finishes up his talk by citing a quote from Bill Gates.
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”
CONTENT SPONSORED BY REALESTATE.COM.AU
Nice one Nigel!
Time and transparency are key!
Also incidentally, this content from REA is far superior step up on the odious dribble that Steve C regularly shares as ‘insights’ on LinkedIn.
Well done for redeeming yourselves!
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