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What’s Next? Kevin Kenrick

We asked some stalwarts a simple question. Here’s what Kevin Kenrick, chief executive at TVNZ, had to say.

Increasingly New Zealanders are including access to a fibre connection on the checklist for new house buying or renting decisions. I wonder if the flip side is people searching out camping holiday locations free from any connectivity.

It seems that every parent of teenagers is bemoaning the screen obsession of their offspring. Arianna Huffington in her book Thrive, recommends we practice ‘digital disconnect’ to bring more well-being into our lives. Derek Handley was encouraging attendees at a recent Snakk Media panel discussion to try ‘technology free days’.

For years we looked forward to the promised technology paradise – ubiquitous coverage, high speed connectivity, always on, mobile devices.

And now it’s here, it’s not actually what consumers want.

We don’t want to be ‘always on’ – we want control, to be connected when and where we choose.

In response to the overwhelming volume of media content now flooding the globe every minute of the day, consumers are choosing to disconnect from technology as a way of asserting control over their daily life.

Technology has enabled all that’s currently possible and consumers are frantically filtering through this avalanche of content to identify what’s humanly practical.

Surveys tell us people experience extreme anxiety when they don’t have ready access to their smartphones, and my sense is there’s a small but growing voice telling us there’s something wrong with that.

Perhaps this holiday season, traditionally a time for families and friends to engage in old fashioned face-to-face conversations, is an opportunity to reassess what we really want from technology. For those of us in media and marketing it might be time to think a whole lot more about consumer pull than marketing push, and the value to consumers of choice and control.

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