“Advertising now uses technology that is more sophisticated than what we used to put a man into space in the 60s”

Teachers from the School of Communications participated in the main program of the Telling Stories international festival, which took place at the Higher School of Economics last Sunday. This year it was held for the sixth time. As always, the festival was organized by the HSE Faculty of Creative Industries.

A series of speeches by speakers from the School of Communications as part of the main program of the Telling Stories festival was opened by Alexander Kulikov, teacher of the master's program "Data Driven Communications", director of development of the Segmento programmatic platform, whose projects won two Cannes Lions, Effie and Silver Mercury awards for effective automated advertising purchases and work with big data.

Alexander gave a lecture on "Digital Advertising Revolution" in the "Creative Industries Trends" section and talked about what advertising will be like in 2025.

The lecture began with an excursion into the history of advertising, the audience traced the development of advertising from ancient Egypt to the present day: from the first ads on the street to banners on the Internet, from mass mailings to narrow audience segmentation, from pure creativity to communications based on big data, from the media to social networks.

According to Alexander Kulikov, “advertising now uses technologies that are more complex than those with which we launched a man into space in the 60s.” The development of advertising, Alexander believes, will be determined by new technologies in the near future. From the trends for the future, the speaker singled out the increasingly active use of artificial intelligence and neural networks, the hyper-personalization of content in communications, the activation of metaverses and blockchain technologies in social networks.

All this will allow collecting and analyzing more personal data and more accurately adjusting communication messages to the target audience, developing new formats of interaction with it and building loyalty systems.

Will all this require a rethinking of marketing? Yes. We are surrounded by a huge amount of data. Trends reinforce each other. New competencies will be needed, for working with neural networks, for example. The marketing model will change, we will not talk about a funnel, but about gears. A revolution in the industry is coming.

Ludmila Zaporozhtseva, professor at the School of Communications, PhD in semiotics and cultural studies, musicologist, expert in marketing semiotics and audio branding with 12 years of experience, presented the School of Communications in the section "History of Creative Industries". Lyudmila gave a lecture "Sound spaces of brands: why brands are not silent?".

At the lecture, Lyudmila talked about how brands work with sound: how they integrate sounds into communication through an application, how a melody created from sounds made by this device in different situations can become a soundtrack for the presentation of technology, like sounds made when opening a food product package, can become a sound logo. The audience also learned how melodic techniques from classical music can be used to create musical logos.

Together with Lyudmila, the guests of the festival listened to several melodies, sound logos and anthems of companies from different fields and tried to understand what meanings the companies put into these combinations of sounds and what techniques they used for this.

It is impossible to ignore the acoustic channel of perception, because it is connected with the emergency response system, which was formed in the course of evolution. A person even in a dream listens to what is happening around. Sound recognition is faster than visual image recognition.

Alla Bryzgalova and Anastasia Urnova completed a series of presentations from the School of Communications, who took part in a series of metal lectures on the history of creative industries.

Alla Bryzgalova, a graduate of the School of Communications, head of the product marketing department at VKontakte, spoke about how the labor market will change with the advent of artificial intelligence.

According to Alla, for the first time in the history of mankind, technologies replace not manual labor, but intellectual labor. Artificial intelligence today is changing the process of creating a product. Reduced production costs, reduced the number of people involved in the creation of the product. The speed of content creation and the speed of its consumption is growing.

At the same time, there are still no artificial intelligence models that would completely replace humans. There is not enough power for this. “AI abilities are a tiny fraction of what our brain can do,” says Alla. Therefore, while artificial intelligence cannot replace those who do not just perform one action, but are engaged in something more.

Artificial intelligence is not a threat, but rather a partner that helps to achieve more in a short time. Today, co-creation is possible when a person works together with artificial intelligence. The first to be fired due to advances in technology are those who perform one specific, simple task. They are followed by those who have not learned how to work with artificial intelligence. Be friends with technology and look to the future: is it possible for your profession to co-create with AI?

Anastasia Urnova, who spoke after Alla Bryzgalova, spoke about how today, in changing conditions, to create a personal brand in the labor market. Anastasia Urnova is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Creative Industries at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, author and host of the "After the Deadline" podcast show.

With the development of artificial intelligence, it makes sense to pay attention to professions whose representatives work directly with people and sell humanity. Society does not want AI to take over this function. In this context, the function of the teacher is changing. If earlier it was a person who simply shifted knowledge from his head to someone else's, now the task of the teacher is to inspire, infect with the desire to further understand the topic. Also visionaries, missionaries will be in demand - those who can light a fire in the heart of the audience and lead it along. At the same time, the demand will be directly related to the personal brand.

According to Anastasia, in order to build a personal brand, it is important to understand what the target audience is waiting for - an ideal employer or client. Based on the expectations of the audience, it is possible to formulate the attributes that a person who builds a personal brand should have. When a list of attributes is made, a person should try to understand which attributes he already has and which he needs to acquire in order to become successful with his target audience.

An important component of a personal brand today is leadership qualities, Anastasia believes. “If earlier a leader was considered a person who can speak from a position from above, from a position of strength, today there is a request for a new sincerity from the leader,” she says. - The second requirement for a leader today is aesthetic intelligence. You should not just be a great professional, you should be a pleasure to work with, you should give aesthetic pleasure. And the third requirement is charisma. If we're talking about charisma, you can't work for yourself, you have to burn for others."

The School of Communications was also featured in the exposition, which was set up in the atrium of the HSE main building on Pokrovka as part of the Telling Stories festival. Together with the works of the Poster Laboratory and other exhibits presented by the HSE School of Design, guests could get acquainted with the projects that applicants and students of the School of Communications created specifically for the Advertising Constructor competition. This is an international competition organized by the School of Communications. The exhibition was curated by Yana Vladislavovna Erofeeva, teacher of the School of Communications and Deputy Head of the School of Communications for Youth.