OurCrowd and the Future
The OurCrowd Summit was an impressive display of technology, research and development. Forward-thinking start-ups demonstrated how they are changing the world in the fields of healthcare, cyber security, driving and more. As I watched these presentations, I realized that these companies will also disrupt something even more basic - the professions that exist in the world.
For instance, the small machine which can perform blood tests in every clinic will do away with the job of the lab technician who has been trained to handle the complex machines currently used for testing blood. Self-driving cars will eventually do away with cab drivers and apps that tell you when to water your fields will make advanced agriculture degrees a thing of the past.
Luckily, I am not in any of those professions, and it’s hard to imagine that marketing will disappear anytime soon. But what is for sure is that the marketing field will change, and probably more rapidly than any of the fields mentioned above. The way we do marketing has transitioned so drastically in the past 20 years, that it’s almost guaranteed that we won’t recognize the field in another 20.
Digital marketing has taken the world by storm, but print marketing has by no means said its last word. At the same time, digital itself has changed so much, with new apps popping up and ever-evolving trends and best practices.
When I was in 4th grade, our teacher asked us to imagine the world in the year 2000 (that seemed really far away at the time…). Looking back, I see that all our predictions were wrong. We were sure we would be commuting to work in flying cars but we didn’t dream of smartphones and Google.
So I would be foolish to guess what the future has in store for us marketers, and I won’t even attempt it. Instead, I would encourage all of you who are involved in marketing to remember to roll with the punches. We can’t stand still, because soon we will find ourselves sliding down the mountain. Change happens rapidly in this business, and our job is to stay up-to-date and be a part of those thrilling developments.
I hope I get to attend OurCrowd next year and hear about more jobs which will soon be obsolete. And if blogs are still a thing in 2021, I will tell you all about it right here...