Humans are irrational, chaotic and sometimes hung over.
Robots are ordered, rule following.

Most of us are spending more time on screens than we do sleeping.
Real human interaction between each other, let alone with brands, is reducing. But while our habits have changed our hearts haven’t. We still want and NEED human relationships to love (brands).

What does all this mean for brand communication?

A ‘robot’ might (for example) serve my boss underwear ads while I was working with him at his desk. While that would be highly embarrassing for all concerned, I don’t remember the brand, and as far as I know he is yet to buy the pants.

But I might be more inclined to remember something a little less expected and a little more disruptive that is full of human insight and humour. Like this from the Aussie pants brand Bonds. You’ll have to see for yourself.

It’s the difference between programmatically targeting a consumer and really understanding and communicating with an audience. At Red Bee we are passionate about audiences, which are made up of humans, but we do love technology and what it enables us to do too. The point is that when we embrace any technology we can’t forget who we are and what makes us feel. When connecting with humans through a screen (in this multiscreen world) we consider three important things: human insight, human interaction, and human stories.

1. Human Insight
We need to understand the people we’re talking with and what makes them tick, or laugh, remember and share: like Bonds did.

We have recently been working with Nissan to raise awareness of their sponsorship of Team GB and ParalympicsGB. Our first challenge was to understand what connected the Nissan audience with the Olympics and Team GB/ ParalympicsGB. Early research revealed something interesting about the Nissan audience. They don’t just enjoy watching sport like most of the British population: they actually want to take part in it… they want to feel like part of the British team.

Rather than rocking up and badging t-shirts and content at the finish line in August, we wanted to support the team for the whole journey, which played well to our audience’s supportive sensibilities. This meant connecting with them at a time when the majority of people were not yet paying any attention to the Olympics – from January to May.

There’s plenty of support for the athletes around the time of the Games, but there is a lot less on those dark, lonely winter morning training runs. It is during those hard yards when the medals are actually won. So we asked the audience to get involved to support the athletes when they needed it the most, on a miserable winter morning at 7am. The world record holding (and charming) Paralympian, Richard Whitehead, invited people to join a live training session, through a launch video on Facebook, designed to stand out in people’s newsfeeds.

2. Human interaction
Our second tip for being human in this multiscreen world is human interaction.

First a quick pop quiz.

Q. Do you know who ‘won’ the sports sponsorship rankings last year?
A. …………

Was it Google with a snarky, all knowing McEnroe chat bot tennis guru?
Was it Carlsberg with probably the world’s first 3D Serena Williams hologram?

Actually neither, especially as I made them up.

No, it was homely Robinsons with some good old human community management, responding personally to almost every single tweet during Wimbledon. The antithesis to thoughtlessly spammy or racist chat bots.

Yes a lot of the interaction brands have to play with today happens through a screen, but it can still be very human. It can be delivered editorially, or more literally as we did for Nissan, where our live training sessions facilitated very intimate, while also mass, human interaction.

At 7am on that dark and cold February morning we hosted three live-streamed training sessions on Facebook with the gymnast Max Whitlock, Richard Whitehead the Paralympic runner and the rower Kat Copeland. People could work out with their sporting heroes live for an hour. And they joined in in their thousands: from running pensioners in Cumbria to young Olympic gymnastic hopefuls at their club in Glasgow or in their bedroom at home.

Participants were invited to join in, tweet and share videos of themselves and their friends taking part, and the athletes responded to them personally, which sent some of the young fans loopy.

This was using technology to connect people, not to be people.

3. Human stories
It doesn’t need me to say we have loved human stories since the dawn of time. Human triumph over adversity is always a favourite. It’s that storyline that saw journalists give the 9-dan ‘Go’ grandmaster (human) Lee Sedol a standing ovation when he came back to briefly defeat the AlphaGo robot in the fourth round of their intense man vs machine contest a couple of months ago.

For Nissan, our live training event enabled the fans to get closer to the athletes as our insight told us they wanted to, and to interact with them for sure. But it also allowed us to tell some powerful human stories about the participants and their human relationships with the Olympic and Paralympic athletes – through a screen, hundreds of miles away.

So there you have it. Our three-point plan to being human in our hyper connected multiscreen world:

Human insight. Because we respond best to content that truly understands us.
Human interaction. Because bots can’t match our chaotic, disruptive and irrational, but totally loveable, way of doing things.
Human stories. Because these are what have shaped our society since the dawn of time, and what will help us survive whatever is to come too.

And one last note to ourselves. By all means order your pizza by tweeting an emoji and replenish your wardrobe using the H&M fashion AI from the comfort of your armchair. But don’t be too lazy. The bots will be learning and training even while you’re sleeping. By the next Olympics we might not so much be watching rowing, Paralympic running, or gymnastics, but esports. And the playing field will have shifted once again. Could we see a bot on the podium in Tokyo 2020? Escorted there by a driverless car?

When it comes to communication though, fleshy and lazy as we are, I do feel we can still have the last laugh. Robots obey commands while we can think and feel and have ideas for ourselves. Robots don’t have emotions while we can love and hate and everything in between. Robots need oil and the odd battery charge to survive. We need food and water, but as social creatures we also need to communicate with other humans for our survival. Empathy, creativity and communication are still what make us human even in the multiscreen world, and what will continue to set us apart.

Kath Hipwell, Head of Content Strategy, Red Bee Creative