Recap of Our Predictions for 2017

We feel it’s not enough to issue predictions for the upcoming year. We also think it’s important to look at how we did with predictions for 2017.

A brief recap – though we predicted a shorter news cycle in 2017, we did not expect it to be this fast/short. Whether or not you’re a news junkie (and if you’re reading this, we assume you are), 2017 has been an unusually exhausting year. Even generally apolitical Jimmy Fallon envisioned Halloween nightmare that entailed being unable to escape the news cycle. There were a lot of stories this year that we (nor anyone else) predicted – a list of so many, mostly political (which we avoid), we are not going to list them here. We will say that we did not expect the solar eclipse to generate so much coverage.

One of the big themes late in the year was the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in Hollywood, politics, the media, and pretty much every field; we hope awareness of and concern regarding sexual harassment continues to be a public conversation that will make it difficult for those perpetrating the harassment to get away with it. We also hope that it will be easier for victims to be believed and supported.

Here are our assessment of our predictions for this year.

1. Fake news won’t fade in 2017. 

Unfortunately, we were right about this one. “Fake news” is too broad a term says Claire Wardle, Strategy and Research Director of First Draft News, a nonprofit research group housed at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. Wardle told CNN’s Brian Stelter on his “Reliable Sources” podcast that there are “three different types of problems:

• Mis-information: “the kind of false information disseminated online by people who don't have a harmful intent.”
• Dis-information: “false information created and shared by people with harmful intent. False news reports around presidential candidates ahead of the 2016 election fall into this category, and so does their social media amplification from malicious accounts.”
• Mal-information: “the sharing of ‘genuine’ information with the intent to cause harm. That includes some types of leaks, harassment and hate speech online.”

Keep in mind: the general definition of “fake news” tends to be news the speaker doesn’t agree with – it’s actual truth, notwithstanding.

We think Wardle’s definitions are useful to understand there are flavors of fake. But we don’t think the distinctions will become mainstream because currently there isn’t much consensus on facts (or “facts”), with one person’s dis-information (harmful intent) being someone else’s mis-information (false information passed along with non-harmful intent).

Meanwhile, we said it will be difficult for social media sites to combat the spread of fake news, especially because they profit from fake news.

Grade: A+.

2. Big Social will evolve in 2017, but not necessarily in a good way. 

Unfortunately, we were right about this, too. We said, Twitter’s future “is very much in doubt,” and that continues to be true. We said that Facebook is facing problems about fake news, and that was proven true in November’s Congressional hearings. But we left out Google – oops. We said, “all of this turmoil will benefit Snapchat, which is already is favored by the millennials,” and Instagram, and we think that’s right – butt we overstated things when we predicted that SnapChat will be the dominant social media platform by 2018. We also predicted “LinkedIn will thrive as long as it remains (as we think it will) apolitical,” and that’s been true.

Grade: B+

3. The media cycle will speed up. 

This certainly was true in 2017. While President Trump’s use of Twitter to announce official government policy certainly is a major reason, it’s just one factor. Another: a recent Pew Research Center report found that, “About a quarter of all U.S. adults (26%) get news from two or more social media sites, up from 15% in 2013 and 18% in 2016.” So expect this trend to continue into 2018 and beyond. (This is not necessarily a good thing but was predicted in the early 1980s by futurist Alvin Toffler.)

Grade: A+

4. The gig economy and the sharing economy will continue to go mainstream.

Independent contractors or contingent employees – as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) used to refer to them – now comprise an estimated 30% of the U.S. workforce. The BLS and U.S. Census Bureau plan to do a better job of tracking the gig economy. In the meantime, we were right when we said, “We need to more accurately define the gig and the sharing economies… to gain an accurate portrait of overall U.S. economy as well as develop appropriate policies regarding taxes, healthcare and social services.” Both the New York Times and Wall St. Journal validated our predictions.

Grade: A

5. IoT will continue to open the door to cyberattacks.

This was not as big an issue in 2017 as we expected. That does not mean the threat is over. As the Internet of Things (IoT) does go mainstream, cyberattacks remain a significant threat – though likely more targeted to companies than to the average home. But overall, we overstated this.

Grade: C

We will post more of our annual recap in the next few days.

TrendReport 2017: Our Annual Look at Media and PR Predictions

As we have done for the past 15 years, here are this year's annual list of predictions of media trends. We use this annual process to identify issues to help our clients brainstorm how they fit into what the media will cover in the upcoming year. We have a lot of fun developing these, and will be rolling out additional trends next week.

1. Fake news won’t fade in 2017. When you cut out all the costs involved in actually reporting news, as fake news does, financial sustainability isn’t an issue. Fake news will continue as long as it remains profitable or ideologically effective. It will take more than big brands pull their advertising on fake news sites (or try to get their ads off those sites) to stop fake news. Facebook, along with Twitter and Reddit (not really among the “Big Social”), are taking steps to reduce the spread of fake news. Some critics call “enforcing user guidelines” a form of censorship, and we expect that the Big Social will be accused of doing too much by some and not doing enough by others. Both Facebook, whose advertising tools have made it easy for fake news sites to promote their content, and Google, whose AdSense has enabled fake news sites to monetize their content, indirectly profit from fake news. While both have said they will work to rid it from their platforms, fake news is like spam: the only way to truly kill it, is to have people to stop clicking on those links – but there always seems to be enough people who fall for it to make it worthwhile for the content providers. 
2. Big Social will evolve in 2017, but not necessarily in a good way. We expect more trolling and twitstorms on social media. The future of Donald J. Trump’s go-to social media platform, Twitter, is very much in doubt. It lost $500 million in 2015, and $1.6 billion since going public. If Twitter is not financially viable as a standalone platform, its survival becomes a real question. Although profitable, Facebook is facing the problems of ad counting and fake news. All of this turmoil will benefit Snapchat, which is already is favored by the millennials, and Gab, described by the New York Times as the social media platform for the alt-right, a “throwback to the freewheeling norms of the old internet, before Twitter started cracking down on harassment and Reddit cleaned out its darkest corners.” From a demographic perspective, we think Snapchat will be the dominant social media platform by 2018, along with Instagram. We also think LinkedIn will thrive as long as it remains (as we think it will) apolitical.
3. The media cycle will speed up. There used to be a lag between the time an event took place and the time it could be reported. In the era of social media dominance, it seems to take a nanosecond between an event and the social response to it to hit Twitter, followed by an ensuing twitstorm.  This is further fueled by the participation of anyone with the app, as evidenced by the many who felt compelled to stay on top of the developments during the campaign and afterwards, regardless of whether they cheered or jeered. We expect twitstorm, and coverage of those twitstorms followed by outcry to the initial response to be a mainstay of broadcast coverage in 2017.
4. The gig economy and the sharing economy will continue to go mainstream. There are people who work in the gig economy who don’t necessarily realize it – including, for example, teachers who tutor after school. We need to more accurately define the gig and the sharing economies (i.e., Uber, which touches on both; as well as Airbnb) and to identify and track meaningful metrics, both to gain an accurate portrait of overall U.S. economy as well as develop appropriate policies regarding taxes, healthcare and social services.
5. IoT will continue to open the door to cyberattacks. We saw one major cyberattack via the Internet of Things (IoT) in 2016, and we expect more to occur in 2017. The challenge for IoT companies is to be able to deploy security protocols that are flexible enough so IoT devices in your house (or office or car) can talk to each other, yet also prevent hackers from getting access. We expect there will be much media coverage in 2017 on cyberattacks, in general, whether perpetrated by foreign countries or other parties.

Please let us know if you agree or disagree with these trends. If we missed something, let us know.