Track Record 2020: How Accurately Did We Predict Key Trends for 2020

One thing for sure: 2020 won’t be easily forgotten.

It’s been a year that sadly redefined a new normal in how we live and work. We continue to track deaths resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and see ongoing violence against people of color that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

We won’t be doing a comprehensive recap of the year – including the lives lost or disrupted, although our hearts go out to all of them – because that’s outside the scope of our trend analysis.

As we’ve done each year for nearly 20 years, we will review the trends we identified the previous year and grade how we did for each prediction.

1.  Distrust of Big Tech and media fuels anxiety. We got this one right – noting that “This will fuel feelings of anxiety, anger, exhaustion, and isolation, regardless of political perspective” – though we underestimated the scale of the distrust or the anxiety. This is a significant problem because American generally live in one of two news bubbles, ones that communicate vastly different narratives so that we don’t operate with a single set of facts. This will continue to fuel distrust and anxiety in 2021.  Grade: A.

2.  The loss of local news coverage will continue, and will erode trust. According to Axios, “In the first 6 months of 2020, more than 11,000 newsroom jobs have been lost. That's nearly as many as were lost in all of 2009.” We’ve also seen many local papers reducing the number of days they publish, scaling back their print editions or going out of business. We were right about the continued loss of local news; we have not seen data yet about the impact of that loss. But we know that the trend impacts how local news gets reported and what kinds of local news gets published. This trend will continue in 2021. Grade: A.

3.  Streaming services will get a lot of media and consumer attention. We said that the so-called streaming wars is not a zero-sum game, that American consumers will choose to subscribe to several streaming services, not just one, and we got that right. Streaming services became even more important in 2020, with some like Disney+ premiering movies that would otherwise have been released first into movie theatres. We also believe we were correct when we noted that, “The growing number of ad-free streaming content services will make it harder for marketers to reach a mass audience. Even ad-supported services will be out of reach for local and regional organizations so they will need to look for other ways to reach local customers.” Grade: A.

4.  The Gig Economy isn’t just for millennials. We said to expect older Americans to enter the gig economy, and they may have but the pandemic hurt the gig economy. The gig economy did not get as much attention as it should amid huge losses of traditional jobs this year, nor did the impact on gig workers who don’t get benefits like unemployment checks when their jobs dried up. We believe that after the pandemic – whenever that is – the gig economy will recover, but gig workers will want a safety net to help them in case of future job losses. Grade: C.

5.  Consumer spending patterns are shifting. We said consumer spending would shift from owning to renting things like ZipCars, Citi Bikes and any number of sites that rent the latest fashion trends. On a short-term basis, spending did shift though that was due to the pandemic. Long-term we think that what we call the “non-ownership economy” or the “convenience economy” will continue. Grade: C.

6.  The sharing economy will become more expensive. We said to “expect (that companies will pay) more attention to gross margins (a measure of profitability), detailed financial models for startups looking to raise money, and a focus on discipline” as opposed to focusing only on growth. Instead, many companies focused on survival in 2020, which included pivoting to offer new products and enter new markets. That said, Netflix recently announced it will increase its monthly rates, and we think others will follow. Grade: B-.

7.  Streaming — but not owning — content increasingly means you might not be able to access the version you want. We said, “Consumers will become increasingly aware of the risks of streaming, which include ongoing monthly costs that will increase; content that disappears when a streaming service loses its rights even if you were in the middle of the program); and services that might disappear or abruptly shut down. Grade: A. 

8.  Going cashless will also affect consumer spending. Driven by the pandemic, contactless was huge in 2020 as almost everyone shifted to Venmo, PayPal, Zelle and other services. Many of us have hardly used cash all year. We can’t tell if contactless affected spending since retail was hurt by the pandemic. We do stand by the statement that “An increasingly cashless society will make it much more difficult for the poor, who may be unbanked (as the banking industry calls it) and can’t get a credit or debit cards.” Grade: A.  

9.  Robots won’t take over in 2020 but will be more commonplace. Robots will likely see a boost om a post-pandemic environment but we did not see as much coverage in 2020 as we expected. Grade: C+.

10. The age of plant-based “meats” has gone mainstream. This was a significant food trend though not the biggest of the year (that was cooking at home). Grade: A.

These were our initial sets of trends. We will post the next set on Monday, and will give us a final grade for the year. 

Birnbach Communications Issues Five Media Predictions for 2019

For the 17th year, here are our top media, social media and marketing predictions for 2019. It is a disruptive time for the media, bringing both chaos and opportunities.

Without further ado, here are five of the agency’s top 5 media trends for 2019:

1.      The growing number of streaming content services make consumers harder to reach. The number of people who stream content as well as the number of apps providing on-demand content is rapidly growing. Already 61 percent of Americans, age 18 to 29, regularly watch or listen to what they want, where and when they want it, according to Pew Research. Apps for CBS, TBS, NBC and ABC are ad supported – only by national brands – but more dominant services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, YouTube Red, and Spotify Premium are ad-free, putting their subscribers out of reach for marketers.

2.      The age of the mass media is mostly over. It’s a niche world now. Partly that’s because marketers can now reach very specific audiences, along with nanoinfluencers, since online media can tailor content by gender, age, interest, political persuasion, etc. (Unfortunately, print media also is increasingly becoming niche, due to an ongoing reduction of the number of pages and size of their news staff combined with an increase in subscription rate.) In 2019, it’s complicated and expensive to reach a broad audience so marketers need to consider targeting key audiences through niche media.

3.      The broken business model for news will cause continued problems in 2019, including an increase in “news deserts.” It’s not only print media that will struggle in 2019, online media will struggle, too. The reason: online subscription fees are lower than print subscriptions and online ads generate less money that print ads (even though online ads provide much more useable data). We expect, unfortunately, more layoffs, smaller printer runs, smaller and less frequent issues – both online and in print. In 2019, we're going to see a growing number of "news deserts," defined by the UNC School of Media and Journalism's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, as "a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level." News deserts are a problem because it means communities aren’t getting critical information related to civic life, government services, etc.

4.      Social media will continue to undergo scrutiny and it won’t look good. And despite that, people still won’t quit Facebook, Twitter, etc. amid growing concerns about privacy and disinformation campaigns. We expect Congress and the EU, the UK and other governments to look to regulate social media. But we also expect that most won’t be able to regulate effectively because most politicians don’t have a firm grasp of how social media works. There will be more hearings but not many solutions because it’s a complex issue that algorithms alone can’t solve.

5.      More apps will try to combat fake news. Already there are at least a dozen initiatives – with names like The Trust Project, News Integrity Initiative NewsGuard, The Journalism Trust Initiative, Accountability Journalism Program, Trusting News, Trust & News Initiative and the oddly named Media Manipulation Initiative. Many are funded and staffed by journalists and also use algorithms to detect fake news. We hope they succeed but suspect they’ll be as successful as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter have been to fight hate speech -- which is to say: not very effective but better than nothing. (A.I. will get a lot of attention but trust in algorithm will decline.) In the meantime, Axios’s Jim VandHei offered some suggestions: Stop using the term – it doesn’t help. And people should “Quit sharing stories without vetting them.” (We don’t think that will happen, either.)

In addition to these media predictions, we will roll out additional trends focusing on technology, fintech, artificial intelligence, retailapoclypse, the labor shortage and gig economy, and other topics here on our blog at blog.birnbachcom.com.

Please let us know what you like or disagree with. We'd love to hear from you. As usual, next November, we will evaluate how we did with this year's predictions.

New York Times Validates Our Prediction About the 1st Amendment & Colleges

We try to stay away from politics but we also look at media issues, which includes the First Amendment and free speech and a free press.

With that in mind, in 2017, we predicted:

The first amendment becomes a battle-ground issue. Between campus culture wars(regarding who can speak on campus and who can disrupt those who try to speak on campus),varying definitions of hate speech and the more-open expression of bigotry, the fight to protect free speech will generate coverage in 2018. Part of the challenge is a polarize climate is finding the balance between allowing free expression and preventing bigoted express.

And in February 2018, we saw this New York Times' article, "Republicans Stuff Education Bill With Conservative Social Agenda," which includes pullout text that describes a "590-page higher education bill working its way through Congress" as "a wish list for those who say their First Amendment rights are being trampled."

And addressing those concerns will lead to others feeling that their First Amendment rights are being abridged. And the bill specifically addresses "universities where controversial, or sometimes merely conservative, speakers have sought to appear. Schools have denied speaking slots or put restrictions on them after some protests against the speakers have become unruly." The bill would force colleges to publicly declare their speech policies, so if they tried to change the rules ad hoc, depending on who was speaking, they would be vulnerable to free-speech lawsuits."

It's worth reading the article about how this is playing out. The article provides some details that suggest that the bill does not equalize things but, instead, tilts things in the other direction. In other words, it seems the bill will continue to use of the First Amendment as a battle-ground issue. And that, we think, is a mistake. 

First Big Retail Bankruptcy Validates Prediction About Retailpocalypse Due to Amazonification

We're interested in retail as a bellwether of our consumer-based economy. Or, more accurately these days, the canary in the coal mine. 

Last year we raised concerns about problems affecting the retail sector because there are a number of other parts of the economy that rely on retail, including real estate, newspaper and other local advertising, employment, and logistics. So when retail hit a downturn, there's a trickle-down affect.

We mentioned those issues and made it our top prediction for this year. We wrote about it further in a subsequent blog post: The Wall St. Journal Validates Our Prediction in a Column Entitled, "How Retailers Can Thrive in the Age of Amazon."

Today, Fortune reported that "Bon-Ton Stores Becomes Latest Retailer to March Into Bankruptcy Protection."  Here's the key sentence:

The Milwaukee-based retailer, whose chains include namesake stores as well as Carson’s, Elder-Beerman, Herberger’s and Younkers, has been struggling for years with declining sales amid challenged traffic at the malls it occupies, an assortment redundant with what rivals sell, and difficulty adapting to the emergence of e-commerce.

Those factors are exacerbated by Amazonification. And they will continue to impact other mall-based retailers in 2018 and beyond.

Interestingly, much of the coverage to date has focused on bankruptcy filings or impact on shares without taking a bigger perspective such as the impact of store closings. Bon-Ton had already announced it was shutting 40 stores but the chain has 260 stores overall, and with it, significant real estate leases and obligations. In fact, filing for bankruptcy makes it easier to break leases.

So what's not getting reported is the trickle-down nature of the suddenly unemployed retail staff, both on the sales floor and logistics, maintenance, and other services -- people who will face a hard time finding new jobs since few retailers are expanding -- as well as the impact on the malls themselves (because boarded up stores don't attract customers so it can start a downward spiral impact on the health of that particular mall location), and newspaper ad revenue (since those stores no longer need to advertise to bring in local customers).

 The reason this isn't getting covered is that, even in good times for retail, the sector is dynamic with new stores opening and other ones closing. But our concern is that we don't think there will be enough new stores to replace the ones that have closed. And even if Bon-Ton restructures its debt and gets out of Chapter 11 -- for now -- it still hasn't developed a strategy to address Amazonification. 

New York Times' Farhad Manjoo Validates Our Prediction About Screen Addiction

In his Jan. 18, 2018 column in The New York Times, "It’s Time for Apple to Build a Less Addictive iPhone: Apple gave us the modern smartphone. Now, it can create a new take on the device by encouraging us to use it more deliberately — and a lot less" by blog-fav Farhad Manjoo validated our prediction about screen addiction issued in Dec. 14, 2017.

A month ago, we said:

The ‘60s may have been the Age of Aquarius but this decade seems to be the Age of Anxiety and Anger. One cause: screen addiction. Constantly clicking our smartphones for the latest news – and it seems that there’s continually breaking news – may help us feel we’re on top of the situation but it leaves most of us feeling more empty, worried and angry than before – despite political preferences. We anticipate more coverage on stress, anxiety, mental health and ways to de-stress, which includes taking a break from your device – aka a technology cleanse or digital detox – which is healthy and a good idea but may seem impossible to do.

In his article, Manjoo observed:

Tech “addiction” is a topic of rising national concern. I put the A-word in quotes because the precise pull that our phones exert over us isn’t the same as that of drugs or alcohol. The issue isn’t really new, either; researchers who study how we use digital technology have for years been warning of its potential negative effects on our cognition, psyche and well-being. 

What is new is who has joined the ranks of the worried. Recently, a parade of tech luminaries, including several former Facebook employees, have argued that we’re no match for the sophisticated machinery of engagement and persuasion being built into smartphone apps. Their fears are manifold: They’re worried about distraction, productivity, how social networks alter our emotional lives and relationships, and what they’re doing to children.

 By the way, when we write that our predictions have been validated, it's only partly for self-congratulations. Mostly, we see this an opportunity to continue the discussion on a topic that already interested us, and to move the story forward.

In this case, Manjoo takes a deeper look at the issue, pointing out the problem is: 

Like air pollution or intrusive online advertising, tech addiction is a collective-action problem caused by misaligned incentives. Companies that make money from your attention — that is, ad-supported apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube — now employ armies of people who work with supercomputers to hook you ever more deeply into their services. Sure, we should call on them to act more ethically — and Facebook, for its part, has said it’s willing to lose money to improve its users’ well-being — but I’m skeptical they’ll be able to suppress their economic interests.

That's an important point: a solution may reside within the companies that are not only causing the problem, they also make money because we are hooked on their products. So solving our addiction will cost them money.

Which means: fixing this will be hard to sell to a board of directors and shareholders.

I do like two of Manjoo's suggested fixes:

1. Imagine if, once a week, your phone gave you a report on how you spent your time, similar to how your activity tracker tells you how sedentary you were last week. It could also needle you: “Farhad, you spent half your week scrolling through Twitter. Do you really feel proud of that?” It could offer to help: “If I notice you spending too much time on Snapchat next week, would you like me to remind you?”
2. Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications. Today, when you let an app send you mobile alerts, it’s usually an all-or-nothing proposition — you say yes to letting it buzz you, and suddenly it’s buzzing you all the time.

The notifications (as we observed in our predictions) are a real part of the problem. Your phone lights up, and your turn to see what it was. Combined with the increasingly fast news cycle (another one of our predictions for 2018), we expect screen addition to get worse this year.

Like us, Manjoo feels that government regulation is unlikely to solve the problem (another of our predictions). He urges Apple, which has a different business model from Facebook and the other advertising-supported social media platforms, to take design steps to reduce our addiction -- since doing so won't hurt Apple's business model.

We agree with Manjoo and hope that Apple will build those common-sense suggestions to reduce our collective addiction to our devices.

Of course, while we think everyone would benefit by being less addicted to their devices, that doesn't mean we want you to stop visiting our blog. Let us know if you disagree with the screen addiction concept or if you have suggestions that could reduce our own screen addiction until Apple and others unveil a less-sticky design.

Wall St. Journal & New York Times Validate Our Prediction About Screen Addiction

In one of our predictions for 2018, published Dec. 14, 2017, we made what we thought to be a longshot prediction: That this year, people would recognize screen addiction as a real issue. Here's what we said:

The ‘60s may have been the Age of Aquarius but this decade seems to be the Age of Anxiety and Anger. One cause: screen addiction. Constantly clicking our smartphones for the latest news – and it seems that there’s continually breaking news – may help us feel we’re on top of the situation but it leaves most of us feeling more empty, worried and angry than before – despite political preferences. We anticipate more coverage on stress, anxiety, mental health and ways to de-stress, which includes taking a break from your device – aka a technology cleanse or digital detox – which is healthy and a good idea but may seem impossible to do.

The reason we thought it was a longshot is that over the past couple of years, there has been the occasional article about digital overload but it hadn't coalesced into something more than a blip. But last year, we felt that could easily change in 2018.

And it has.

Check out:

1. The Wall St. Journal's "Debate over iPhone use by young people reflects the misgivings some in the industry feel toward smartphones' ubiquity: Silicon Valley Reconsiders the iPhone Era It Created"; and
2. The New York Times': "Tech Backlash Grows as Investors Press Apple to Act on Children’s Use: Apple should give parents more tools to curb technology use by children and study the health effects of excessive screen time, two big funds said"; and
3. The New York Times: "It’s Time for Apple to Build a Less Addictive iPhone: Apple gave us the modern smartphone. Now, it can create a new take on the device by encouraging us to use it more deliberately — and a lot less" by Farhad Manjoo.
   

According to the Journal, "a letter to Apple on Saturday from Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or Calstrs, which control about $2 billion of Apple shares....urged the tech giant to develop new software tools that would help parents control and limit phone use more easily, and to study the impact of overuse on mental health." And also, the Journal reported, "On Monday, Tony Fadell, a former senior Apple hardware executive involved in the iPhone’s creation, also called on Apple to do more, saying on Twitter that adults are struggling just as much as children with smartphone overuse."

Last year, Fadell apparently began voicing concern, but the media didn't start paying real attention to it until this year.

In it's article, the Times quoted the same letter, describing "a backlash against big tech has been growing for months." Which is another trend we predicted in which we said, "There will be a debate about whether or not and how to regulate Facebook, Google, and Twitter." We did not use the term "backlash," though we should have, and we did not mention Apple specifically but later in that paragraph, we do say that one of the underlying questions would be "Has big tech gotten too powerful." And we think that increasingly, the answer is: "Yes" (and that's part of the backlash).

In fact, check out this front-page (remember that the front-page used to be an indicator of importance) article from the WSJ: "The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon: Facebook, Google and Amazon dominate their worlds just as Standard Oil and AT&T once did. Critics say they should get the same treatment. The answer to the antitrust question depends on a narrow test: Are consumers worse off?"

For us, screen addiction and big tech backlash and big tech's power are important societal issues. We doubt much will happen to address either the screen addiction or big tech's power (and we think the anxiety and addition they cause does amount to consumer harm) but it is significant that these issues are being raised.

NY Times' Farhad Manjoo Validates Several of Our Predictions

We're big fans of New York Times' tech columnist Farhad Manjoo. So we're thrilled to see his latest column, "Expect 2018 to Be More Sane? Sorry, It’s Not Going to Happen" (print headline: "In 2018, Expect Chaos To Be the New Normal") because his predictions are in line with ones we made Dec. 14, 2017.

For example, in his Jan. 4th column, Manjoo said, "You're fooling yourself if you think 2018 is going to be any different, sanity- or anxiety-wise, from the roller coaster of the year just concluded." We agree -- especially the part about anxiety-wise because in we said, "People will be more anxious and angry" in 2018. 

Going further, we said:

The ‘60s may have been the Age of Aquarius but this decade seems to be the Age of Anxiety and Anger. One cause: screen addiction. Constantly clicking our smartphones for the latest news – and it seems that there’s continually breaking news – may help us feel we’re on top of the situation but it leaves most of us feeling more empty, worried and angry than before – despite political preferences. We anticipate more coverage on stress, anxiety, mental health and ways to de-stress, which includes taking a break from your device – aka a technology cleanse or digital detox – which is healthy and a good idea but may seem impossible to do.

How does Manjoo describe things?

Chaos is the new normal; the apprehension you feel every time you get a notification on your phone -- the fear that you don't know what fresh horror it could bring -- isn't an overreaction but an adaptation. Thanks to phones and Facebook, anything really could happen tomorrow.

We really like that -- as a phrase, not the reality of it: Chaos is the new normal. And "the fear you don't know what fresh horror it could bring" -- very compellingly written, but his capturing the same thing we did...just we got there a couple of weeks earlier.

This also touches upon another of the trends we identified on Dec. 18th: The news cycle, powered by social media, will continue to speed up.

There were days in which there was major news several times a day. We expect that to continue in 2018 – and that when there’s a slow news day – let’s say only one big news story – consumers of news anxiously click on refresh, thinking they must be missing some additional news. Regardless of political views, people, including late-night comedians are finding this exhausting.

According to Manjoo, the implications of all this is that "Nowadays, because we're hyperconnected, we see butterfly effects everywhere...but it's not just that one-off stories cause huge cascades; it's that in a connected world, there are now so many one-off stories capable of setting off cascades, and no one knows which ones will hit."

The problem with that, Manjoo said, "Technology isn't stopping. The pace of technological change is in many cases too fast for anyone of us to comprehend or get used to; as a result, just as the world seems to get its head around one new force unleashed by tech, another comes along to discombobulate our efforts to respond to it." 

That is one reason many of us are so anxious these days.

Again, we don't like where this is going but we're glad we're seeing the world the same way as Manjoo.

Wall St. Journal Valudates More of Our Trends

In an article about the pressures facing CEOs, and the boards that hire and fire them, "Hackers and a Shrinking Talent Pool Top CEO Concerns for 2018" (print headline: "CEOs Gird for a Year of Disruption"), the Wall St. Journal identified several key trends, including:

• Data breaches and cybersecurity. In our list of Ongoing Trends in 2018, we said, "There's never enough cybersecurity/privacy." According to the Journal, CEOs are recognizing that protecting their companies (and their customers and partners) from data breaches and cyberattacks is a critical risk. One CEO quoted in the article said, "These bad actors keep getting smarter and more aggressive. It's an ongoing war." We think it's an important issue, and that companies all need to bake cybersecurity and anti-data breach measures into their cultures even if they are not even close to being a security company. By that we mean, practically every company needs to have a solution in place, and needs to re-evaluate on a regular basis if they're doing enough.
• Talent battles. Among those we included in our list of key trends for 2018, we identified the labor shortage an important issue. We see the labor shortage already affect the A.I. and biotech sectors, and the Journal says there is a shortage of engineers at financial services companies, noting, "In their quest to build highly sophisticated technology platforms, some financial-services giants now have more software engineers than bankers and traders on their payrolls."

To be fair, we did not cite data breaches specifically in our trends but we think cybersecurity and privacy does cover it. And we didn't go into as much detail about the talent battle in our blog as we have in a subsequent article that we expect to appear shortly. (We focused more on the impact on the nature of work, which is still a story we think will be addressed in 2018.)

Let us know what you think we got right or what we missed.

Wall St. Journal Validates Predictions on Bitcoin & Amazon

Though it's freezing out, we were warmed to come back from New Year's to see that the Wall St. Journal has validated two of our trends.

We predicted that bitcoin would be the subject of daily news coverage, and that seems to be very much to be the case, just check out the latest in a stream of articles about bitcoins: "For Bitcoin, A Year Like No Other In 2017, bitcoin became one of the market’s greatest speculative crazes; it remains to be seen whether it can live up to the hype." We expect this to continue throughout 2018. What's more, we expect to see dedicated columnists and online media outlets devoted to bitcoin. (That said, we're not sure bitcoin is not some kind of trend, and we are not endorsing bitcoin or cryptocurrency -- just saying we expect it to be a subject that gets covered by the news media.)

The other trend is about the market force and impact that Amazon wields. Check out Christopher Mims wrote, "Even Amazon, a Colossus, Has Its Limits," which does say that Amazonification is not inevitable. According to Mims, part of where Amazon is most successful is in driving down prices of commodity items, not in developing premium devices like an iPhone (its success with Alexa notwithstanding). He said, increasingly, Amazon serves as a retail platform for other retailers, taking 15% of their sales via amazon.com -- and that's why Amazon has its limits: because Amazon still needs other retailers to succeed on its platform. 

We think that's true but that Amazon continues to be the major retailing factor in 2018 and beyond. We expect Amazonification to be debated and examined throughout the year.

WSJ Validates Our Prediction About IoT Isn't Cybersecure

In our list, Ongoing Trends for 2018, published Dec. 18th,  we predicted that "IoT will continue to be victim to cyberattacks."

In its special cybersecurity supplement on Dec. 19th, the Wall St. Journal published an article entitled, "Smart Devices, Increased Risks: John Carlin on how security isn't ready for the Internet of Things." The article featured John Carlin, a former assistant attorney general in the national security division of the DOJ, who validated our main point: "Across the board, we didn't properly calculate the price of risk in making the decision to move all of this information and connect it through this insecure medium."

Carlin also said:

With the Internet of Things, we are on the cusp of a massive exponential increase in new devices that can cause immediate loss of life or serious injury that are going be connected through this same insecure protocol. What we can’t do or shouldn’t do is make the same mistake again of discounting risk before we make this societal transformation.

The move from a car with a driver to a driverless car, for example, is going to bring significant changes to our society and the way we move goods and services. In government, we didn’t think of trucking as something that could fundamentally disrupt society. But if all of those trucks are connected, you can disrupt it on scale.

The Journal also published another article, "Connected Device Manufacturers Not Addressing Cyber Risks: Manufacturers of connected devices aren’t adequately addressing cybersecurity threats associated with them."

We love the idea of IoT but are concerned and skeptical about security issues around the convenience that IoT offers its users -- and potential hackers.

Meanwhile, since our prediction on IoT and cybersecurity came a day before these articles hit, you can say that we scooped the Journal.

New Popular Naming Strategy: Drop Part of Your Corporate Name

The latest popular corporate naming strategy is pretty basic. Recently, Walmart Stores, Dunkin' Donuts and Business Insider have all dropped part of the name to become Walmart, Dunkin' and Insider, respectively.

For Walmart, the move is to position the company as an e-commerce player.

For Dunkin's, it's to move beyond just donuts.

And For Insider, it's because they now cover more than just business.

That strategy may be a problem for companies with only one name. 

Of course, Fox seems like it will drop its name, if the acquisition with Disney goes through.

Usually, we recommend against changing a company's name, especially if there's a lot of brand equity in the current name. And we have some skepticism that a name change makes much of a difference. (A new logo, on the other hand, can make a difference.) But with Walmart, that's what everyone calls it, anyway, so we doubt it will make much of a difference.

The same with Dunkin's.

That may not be true of Business Insider, a good online news site. Insider sounds like a TV celebrity gossip show more than a reputable news source. But, as we mentioned in our trends, 2018 will be a tough year for online news sites. So we expect more changes. And we wish Insider the best of luck.

Ongoing Trends for 2018

Not all significant trends next year will be new ones.  We always look at ongoing trends that will continue to impact the media, marketing and tech worlds.

The first 14 of the 18 trends listed below include an explanatory sentence. The final four are, we feel, self-explanatory.

1.  The news cycle will continue to speed up. There were days in which there was major news several times a day. We expect that to continue in 2018 – and that when there’s a slow news day – let’s say only one big news story – consumers of news anxiously click on refresh, thinking they must be missing some additional news. Regardless of political views, people, including late-night comedians are finding this exhausting.

2.   2018 will be tough for traditional and online media. We hate writing this but the layoffs and shutdowns affecting traditional print (Boston Herald) and cool online outlets (BuzzFeed) that occurred the last two months of 2017 will continue in 2018. Despite living in a time when staying on top of the news (throughout the day) has never been more important, with more people than ever following hourly developments, fewer people seem to want to pay for the news. This is true also for hyperlocal media (like DNAInfo and Gothamist, both shutdown), which for a time was considered to be an exception since people seemed to favor local news about their communities that weren’t getting covered by regional or national media. Great reporting takes lots of effort and resources (as does debunking fake news, as the Washington Post showed us when it reported on a failed attempt to offer a false narrative by the Veracity Project). The problem for traditional and online news sources is, increasingly, Americans turn to social media for news. So traditional and even online media need to develop a new advertising and subscription business model. So far, great journalism is helping the New York Times and Washington Post attract and retain subscribers. But it must be frustrating for them to see hat purveyors of true “fake news” (those that are not based on facts and don’t correct mistakes once they learn of them) can generate tens of thousands of page views when real, serious news doesn’t get clicked.  Another aspect that will affect traditional and online media will be if either or both of the AT&T-Time Warner and Sinclair Broadcasting-Tribune Media deals go through.

3.  Fake news won’t fade in 2018. It’s still easier and more lucrative to generate totally fake news than it is to produce real, fact-based news. Some players are doing this for financial gain and others for a different, more sinister reason, and we expect both to continue in 2018. If Facebook, Google and Twitter all have trouble dealing with the fake news scourge, how will regulations and Congress be able to solve what the social media giants can’t? (For more on this, check out "Why the Fact-Checking at FB Needs to Be Checked: Some measures may not work all that well.") 

4.  Cord cutting will continue but still won't save money: Streaming will continue to be popular but consumers will at some point realize they are not saving money. There will be more streaming services, making it complicated to watch what you want on your TV (remember those?) and you’ll still have to open different apps to find the movie or TV show you want to watch.

5.  Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality still won’t be everywhere. Both VR and AR are making progress but neither is there yet.

6.  IoT will continue to be victim to cyberattacks. We think there will be more IoT cyberattacks, as IoT and Smart Homes go mainstream. Perhaps the only advantage of having to get up and walk over to a light switch is that hackers can’t hack your home.

7.  The future is still looking cloudy. This may be the one tech trend that has yet to experience a backlash.

8.  Driverless cars attract significant coverage. There’s lots of interest in driverless cars because driving is such a part of the American persona. While there’s been great momentum forward, we’re also seeing new challenges that need to be addressed: insurance-related, business model, infrastructure, and tech issues. Do you need Uber and Lyft if you can own or rent a driverless car? If you can rent, why do you need to buy a car? If Uber and Lyft deploy driverless cars, what happens to their former drivers? Meanwhile, we’re also seeing a push for electric cars; China announced plans to eliminate all new combustion cars and trucks by 2030 so we expect to see the rest of the world to follow, which one challenge being ensuring there are enough charging stations.

9.  There's never enough cybersecurity/privacy. There’s still not enough of either. The European Union has proposed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to strengthen and unify data protection for individuals within the EU but it also will affect companies outside the EU. So expect that U.S. companies will need to look at and evaluate how to meet GDPR.

10. NFL ratings will continue to decline. We don’t know whether it’s because of too much football (we’ve never liked Thursday night games) or because of severe injuries or because of the protests but we expect this to continue.

11. Corporate boycotts & consumer boycotts will continue. These are boycotts by companies in order to demonstrate distance from controversial programs and personalities. We also expect boycotts of companies that are boycotting those controversial people and programs.

12. Drug pricing will continue to get a lot of attention. But there won’t be an easy solution so don’t expect much except outrage.

13. Wearable tech will still not be as mainstream as people in the industry were hoping. But wearable will make quiet inroads so that before you know it (probably not in 2018, though), lots of things will have built-in technology.

14. STEM will continue to be important. With a looming labor shortage (in some fields), businesses are looking for employees with a firm grasp of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). We think funding for STEM will continue to keep U.S. businesses competitive.

15.   3-D content, 3-D TV and 3-D printers will still not be as popular as they are cool.

16.   Artisanal will still be a hot concept.

17.  e-Wallets still will gain traction in 2018 but mostly for Millennials as opposed to their parents.

18.  Content management remains king.  

The Wall St. Journal Validates Our Prediction in a Column Entitled, "How Retailers Can Thrive in the Age of Amazon"

It almost seems like there's a law that an article about the status of the retail sector must mention Amazon.

In our predictions for 2018, we discussed the possibility of a "retailpocalypse" due to "Amazonification."

The Wall St. Journal interviewed a shopping mall owner in Bellevue, WA, and wrote about it in a In a column published after our predictions hit entitled, "How Retailers Can Thrive in the Age of Amazon The secret, says Bellevue Square’s owner, is to provide customers with ‘emotional fulfillment.’" So even in an article that looks at how retail can survive, please note:

1. The presence of Amazon in the headline.
2. The mall owner, Kemper Freeman, acknowledges that there are two problems facing most retailers, and one is that America has 50% more retail space per person than Canada and that Canada has about 50% more retail space per person than Germany -- and that Germany has it about right.

Which means even a mall developer who is doing well, and has found ways to drive people to his locations -- the article makes it clear that Freeman is actively engaged in boosting traffic -- feels the U.S. retail sector is facing problems, observing, "If he's right, a severe real-estate contraction is coming, and weak stores and malls will get eaten alive."

And that's from a booster of the industry.

Freeman also makes the point that online sales represents a low-double-digit percentage of overall retail sales, and that some of his malls' hottest retailers are those, like Amazon and Tesla, have an online and bricks-and-mortar presence at his mall.

In other words, for many, shopping is still entertainment, getting out of the house, socializing, and about a level of experience that point-and-click does not equal. According to Freeman, that's why bricks-and-mortar retail will survive but they have to know how. His bet? Macy's will not survive because it is run by accountants not by entrepreneurs, who truly value customers, not just costs (as accountants do).

We don't want retail to fail. We're just interested in how the media covers the sector, when we think it is vital to the U.S. economy.

We'll find out in mid-January how retail did this Christmas season when the National Retail Federation (NRF) releases the numbers at its annual conference. 

Key Predictions for Trends in 2018, Part II

When we evaluated trends for 2018, we came up with more than five -- while avoiding politics. 

Here's what we're calling our Bonus Set of Predictions:

1.  The media landscape will change in 2018. Beyond newsroom layoffs and publication shut downs, which is upsetting, the media landscape will change in other ways in 2018, thanks to three deals: a DOJ-opposed AT&T -Time Warner combination, a more likely Sinclair Broadcasting purchase of Tribune Media, and a Disney acquisition of Fox’s TV and movie studios (but not Fox News, Fox Sports and Fox TV channel). If two of those three deals go through, expect others as defensive moves.  In an Internet of media choices, consolidation at this level may not be in the consumers’ interest.

2.  Artificial Intelligence and robotics, now interconnected, will continue to be “hot.” A.I. and robotics will be combined in articles (instead of considered separately as in prior years), and we expect to continue to see scare stories about a “robocalypse” in which A.I.-enabled robots replace human workers as well as more-reasoned articles that debunk the scare stories. We’re not as worried because there we think it will open other types of jobs, and that implementing A.I. seems inevitable because the potential benefits could be so significant. 

3.  Innovation often will come via business models. You might not be able to get a reservation at that great local restaurant you’ve been ordering from but that’s because of their delivery-only business model relies solely on mobile-ordering apps. By eschewing things like waitstaff, expensive leases, and needing to focus on turnover rates for tables, these restaurants are able to flourish in a notoriously tough sector. We expect coverage of that sort of innovation – not so much of technology but in the use of technology – to continue in 2018.

4.  Bitcoin and blockchain is hitting it big time. Lots of coverage. Still not mainstream but finally reaches a point where people who haven’t paid attention at least have heard of the two cryptocurrency terms.

5.  Is the internet dying? Long before the (possible) end of net neutrality, some have predicted that the internet is dying. The internet (which was once so important it was always capitalized) has been subsumed by apps and by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which control much of the online ecosystem, from app stores to cloud storage to online ads. Ending net neutrality favors those five companies, while making it harder for small disruptive startups.

6.  The first amendment becomes a battle-ground issue. Between campus culture wars (regarding who can speak on campus and who can disrupt those who try to speak on campus), varying definitions of hate speech and the more-open expression of bigotry, the fight to protect free speech will generate coverage in 2018. Part of the challenge is a polarize climate is finding the balance between allowing free expression and preventing bigoted express.

7.  Millennials’ impact will change how companies market products and services. Currently America’s largest generation (sorry, boomers), millennials have had a significant impact on the workplace. In 2018, marketers will increasingly realize they need to change how they reach the 4.8 million 26-year-olds, and the millions of others currently 25, 27 and 24 as they encounter life-defining moments that include: choosing a career or to enter the gig economy; buying or renting a place to live, along with renovating or making repairs; taking on different responsibilities such as paying taxes and keeping track of their finances, including retirement; getting married, deciding whether or not to have kids and/or get a pet, and cooking. Millennials’ preferences and needs have already spawned new apps and services to deal with these responsibilities and choices. For example, we’re seeing a rise in food-delivery apps from restaurants that offer only takeout (not sit-down) service because they have a kitchen but no need for a dining room. We also expect a trend that began in 2017 to continue: companies will continue to develop educational programs such as classes, online tutorials and how-to videos on what the Wall St. Journal called “such basic skills as to mow the lawn, use a tape measure, mop a floor, hammer a nail and pick a paint color.” We also expect millennial preferences to become the default choice; for example, doorbells may become vestigial as millennials text, not ring, when they arrive at a friend’s house.

8.  Smart-Home automation will gain acceptance but still a niche offering. Smart homes are preferred in some markets by some buyers but not everyone wants them or values them yet. That said, smart home technology and appliances are getting easier to find, install and deploy. One possible driver of smart home tech could be counter-intuitive: with a growing population of seniors aging in their homes, their adult children may insist on installing tech that can help them monitor their parents. As long as the internet doesn’t crash, adult children will be able to check in on their parents, adjust heating and air conditioning (already possible with Nest and other devices), turn on lights and get help via apps that their parents may not have figured out. As tech-friendly boomers age in their own homes, expect them to embrace smart-home technology. We think Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to be a widely used phrase but that “smart home” is a more user-friendly term that may be easier to market. By the way, the biggest smart home tech segment will continue to be intelligent personal assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home speakers.

9.  The ranks of unicorn startups will grow but expect a backlash because unicorns are difficult to sustain. There’s a lot of money being thrown around, which is why we expect some of the enthusiasm for unicorns to diminish. It’s been very difficult to maintain a $1 billion-plus valuation in a meaningful exit. Also, we think New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo is right when he said, a continued threat for startups is that just “fewer than 1 percent … end up as $1 billion companies” and that the Frightful Five (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft) can out-pay key employees (an issue in the A.I. space), out maneuver or just invest in startups and co-opt them.

10. Religious nonprofits will be able to publicly make political endorsements, but doing so will change how they are perceived. As this is written, the GOP is discussing whether to eliminate the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofits from endorsing political candidates. We think Congress will repeal Johnson because it’s a campaign promise President Trump made. However, we think – and some, who otherwise hold opposing views, agree that it will affect how American’s perception when religious organizations are turned into political action committees. 

In our next post, we will post a set of ongoing trends that we think are important to keep in mind.