(First published in 2016)
Since the advent of steam engine in 1781, every year, the futurists have tried predicting the Digital Trends for the next year. Though, it was later, in the year 2000, when VC funds started funding agencies and digital companies that are named after founder’s cats and dogs, this trend of predicting trends, well, really became a trend.
This is the time of the year when new jargons enter the marketing narrative, some slow-burners suddenly peak and a few others vanish altogether.
Yes, ‘jargons.’ We love them.
Archeological studies with carbon-dating techniques have revealed that writing about trends or ‘predicting’ them is the ‘lowest hanging fruit’ in the journey to establish ‘thought leadership.’ Earlier, the stories were available only on rock faces. Now, it is all up in the ‘cloud’ and are ‘device agnostic.’ As white papers, brown papers, blogs, and more. A search on Google for ‘Digital Marketing Trends for 2013’ resulted in 119 million listings. And another 137 million listings for 2014.
In 2013, the big buzzword was Big Data. By the time most people could read about it, fill a few slides in a PPT (with animation and big fonts), and attend a course at IIPM on Big Data, a ‘Laddu phoota’ in some futurists’ mind. It seems Big Data is not enough. The world has moved away from Big Data to Smart Data and Big Insights! Oh boy! The PPT now needs an ‘iteration.’
Then there are some trends that are capable of trending every year. For 6 years, some trends remained the same with minor changes in English. From ‘Next year is the year of mobile’ to ‘Next year really is the real year of real mobile’ and everything in between. Mobile indeed is portable.
Thanks to one biscuit/cookie, ‘real-time marketing’ was well established last year. The fallout is that we all are scrambling for ‘newsroom strategies for brands’—whatever that means. In the meanwhile, another ‘cookie’ is apparently crumbling. Expert investigators are trying to do some ‘Fingerprinting’ techniques to find who killed the ‘cookie.’
Just when we all thought that we understood ‘multichannel’ marketing, this tweet from an opinion leader threatened everything—“Oh you are not ready for an ‘omni-channel’ consumer strategy that integrates multiple touch points enabling seamless storytelling and delivering delightful experiences.” Wish my ancestors had left me some land for farming.
In a growing industry, trends also need to grow. A modest growth though. Every year should have one extra trend than the preceding year. So 2010 had Ten Trends, 2011 had Eleven Trends, 2013 had Thirteen and so on. It is expected that in 2024, there will be 24 trends to watch out for (2 per month).
As predictors get trends (and jargons) churned out, let us read up as much as possible and be ready to navigate the conference circuits and panel discussions.
So, does your brand have a ‘Snapchat’ Strategy?