Disruption & transformation

Philips is beta testing a new platform that allows consumers to 3D print a replacement accessory for one of their electric shavers. Right now, it’s just one accessory and it’s only available in the Czech Republic – but the test is getting a lot of attention from product teams in a variety of sectors. The idea that companies could make accessories or offer small, hard-to-stock pieces directly for consumers to print at home or locally could be a game changer on many different levels. The initiative could extend the useful shelf life of products, allowing us to gain more use from them. It could offer a new revenue model for local shops that could install high quality 3D printers for people to walk in and use to print their designs. Manufacturers could create new revenue streams from selling 3D designs for consumers to use instead of needing to order parts. One day we could see an entire market and industry come up around these so-called 3D Fixables, and this could be just the start.

The advertising industry is anxiously awaiting potential news that newly appointed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who started his term by single-handedly bringing the deadly measles disease backfrom near extinction, may turn his attention toward the pharma industry by banning all drug advertising on television. Unlike his widely criticized stance on vaccines, this is a move that most Americans support. It’s also one causing significant discussion among those in the advertising and media industry who currently rely on an industry that spent a reported $7.9 billion on advertising between January and October of 2024 alone (a 10% increase over the previous year). It is part of a larger discussion about the future of television advertising itself. Due to costs of production and media spending required, it has long been a space that is mostly closed to smaller brands without the large budgets required for major TV. There are signs this may be changing with more programmatic options for the smaller players to buy space and promote themselves in more targeted ways on specific shows or on specific networks. The result of this potential ban, along with platforms that open this market to more potential advertising could be a huge disruption. It could also lead to the same challenge facing other industries such as books and media where the glut of low-quality, poorly executed creative products is creating noise and frustration among those who need to suffer through them. Navigating Amazon to find a book requires you to also wade through AI-generated garbage, infuriating knockoff “summary style” books and plenty of things that should never have been published. If TV advertising becomes the same, the ads will be more than annoying—they will be unwatchable and yet impossible to avoid because they are the unskippable payment for us to watch what we want.

A little over six months ago, De Beers Group announced the DiamondProof “diamond verification instrument” at a jewelry trade show in Las Vegas. The idea was that this device could sit inside a retail jewelry location and immediately distinguish between a natural diamond versus a lab-grown diamond. The official announcement for the device included this telling line: “with research showing that almost half of consumers are unaware that every LGD can be readily detected, the device … help[s] underpin the integrity of natural diamonds.” In a world where the difference between natural and lab-grown diamonds cannot be seen with the naked eye, this device will offer visual evidence immediately to a consumer of the differences … presumably to help the jeweler make the case for selling a natural diamond instead of the significantly lower priced and visually identical lab-grown alternative. On one hand, this is a masterful upselling tool that likely will work to help jewelers close the deal with customers for the more expensive piece made with natural diamonds. On the other hand, it could provide a valuable service to improve consumer trust and prevent fraud by showing that what you’re buying is actually what you get. What do you think—is DiamondProof an enviably clever upselling tool or a valuable real-time device to prevent fraud?

In case you needed more life imitating fiction, a startup known as The Los Angeles Project is using gene editing to experiment with doing some “crazy” things to animals—including making glow-in-the-dark rabbits, cats that are hypo-allergenic and maybe, one day, actual unicorns. As founder and biohacker Josie Zayner says, “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of our moral prerogative to level up animals.” The actual motto of the company from their website and social media is “We Build Life.” Clearly there are Jurassic Park inspired concerns here about the unintended side effects of this experimentation. Particularly because the animals are engineered “without the ability to reproduce” which is quite literally the thing that didn’t work in Jurassic Park. On the plus side, their work will inspire new questions and debates about what the limits and regulations around this sort of genetic research and experimentation should be. When asked about this, Zayner did have the most John Hammond-esque response: “The crazy thing is, this technology is so advanced, and nobody’s doing shit with it. That’s kind of our motto: Let’s do stuff with it.” Hopefully that “stuff” doesn’t involve frog DNA which can switch genders so we end up with a world overrun with fluorescent bunnies and experimental unicorns. Then again, maybe the unicorns wouldn’t be so bad.

Facebook announced they are going to get more aggressive with allowing AI-generated users and profiles on Facebook. In a move literally no one was asking for, they announced the shift and one of their senior AI execs at Facebook described their vision this way: “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going.” People were justifiably “disgusted” as several media reports noted, and also worried that a platform which is already frequently used by both the elderly and conspiracy theorists, among many others, will now make it even harder for the most vulnerable people to separate fabrication from reality. On a business level, marketers are worried that now AI-generated “impressions” which are obviously worthless will now be counted when measuring the impact of messages and generating invoices for advertising – leading to inflated numbers and fraudulent billing. You would expect there will be some measures in place to prevent this, but the broader dangers of unleashing so many fake accounts and training them to presumably get closer and closer to mimicking the behaviors and quirks of real people is almost certainly a terrible idea on many levels. Which unfortunately offers no insulation against them going ahead and doing it anyway.