Birnbach Communications' Top Predictions for 2014, Part VII: Ongoing News Stories

Each year we provide a list of stories the media will continue to cover, which include:

1. Obamacare and midterm elections will be the never-ending stories in 2014.  Healthcare.gov seems to have turned a corner from its rough start but given midterm elections, the state of Obamacare will clearly be a never-ending story. Implications: Not so much a story that clients will want to touch, but it will generate attention from reporters and bloggers. 
2. Deficits, spending cuts, taxes, etc.: As with healthcare, expect that editorial and op-ed pages as well as political radio and TV shows will be littered with opposing perspectives of the steps the country should take. Debate may be worthwhile but don't expect Congress to be any less dysfunctional. 
3. Cybercrime and cyberwarfare: We’ve picked this as one of the most important trends of the decade so expect a lot of reporting about this throughout 2014. 
4. Privacy and security will continue to be issues that only experts care about. Experts will talk about the death of online privacy but actual users don't really care. They will continue to post information about themselves because we live in a culture of documentation, in which MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes that our experiences don't seem to matter if we don't actually share them via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. That said, we expect continued coverage of privacy issues, especially connected to the NSA or advertisers even though strangers can access information about where they live, where and when they travel, what they buy, etc. We also expect that cyberattacks and cyber warfare will continue to generate coverage in 2014 and beyond. Implications: From a privacy perspective, we think there could be a backlash if the big data about consumers' habits that are being shared with advertisers enables too much contact that makes advertisers appear "creepy." 
5. Bitcoin and cashless payments will continue to generate interest. We’ve seen a rise in interest in bitcoins, and it appears bitcoins may be on the edge of going mainstream. We don’t think that will happen in 2014 but we do think the topic will get discussed. Meanwhile we continue to expect digital wallets or e-wallets to go mainstream in 2016. As we get closer, we expect there to be articles comparing bitcoin vs. Google Wallet vs. Isis (from AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile), focusing on security and privacy issues around each standard. 
6. Star Wars: Currently scheduled for a 2015 release, the next Star Wars movie will be cool but, even with director JJ Abrams at the helm, it may not live up to fanboys’ overactive imaginations. Meanwhile, expect Comic-Cons 2014 and 2015 to get major coverage.

Thanks for staying with us. That's the end of our list of predictions for 2014 -- though we may add more. After all, it's still early in the year!

Let us know if you agree or disagree. Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V or Part VI.

Track Record for Predictions for 2013, Part V

Here's our report card for the ongoing stories we said we'd see covered in the media in 2013. 

o    The implementation and implications of Obamacare: This is one of 2013’s biggest stories (other than twerking, which we didn’t predict). This will be a big story in 2014 as both political parties try to make their cases ahead of the midterm elections. Grade: A+.

o    Gun control laws: As an issue, guns generated a lot of media coverage. Grade: A.

o    Deficits, spending cuts, taxes, etc.: This got a boost when the House of Representatives pushed the government to shut down for two weeks. This will continue to be a story in 2014. Grade: A.

o    Made in the USA: Continued to generate coverage, including in the July/August issue of Fast Company featured a compelling story, "The Road To Resilience: How Unscientific Innovation Saved Marlin Steel;A little maker of metal baskets shows how U.S. manufacturers can thrive against all comers. Grade: B+.

o    Cybercrime and cyberwarfare: Lots of coverage on this, especially in the first half of 2013 before leaks and NSA took over. Grade: B+.

o    Salaries paid women vs. men. There was some coverage about salaries but even more coverage about the roles of women in business, thanks to Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, has generated tons of coverage as the result of her book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In 2013, Lean In became the big gender-related story. Grade: B.

o    Cashless payments. We expect cashless wallets to go mainstream by 2016, and are holding to that, even as alternate credit card payment systems like Square proliferate.  The Boston Globe validated our prediction with an article: "Not paying by smartphone? You soon will, many bet. Grade: A.

o    Crowdsourcing/daily deals: We were right that crowdsourcing continued to be a big story and right that daily deal sites would decline in coverage. Grade: A+.

o    Star Wars: We were not surprised Wired made the new Star Wars film (not due to 2015) a cover story, but we were pleased. Another good prediction. There will be more speculation on characters and story lines in 2014. Grade: A.

o    Fees: We said we “don’t actually expect there to be a lot of coverage of how companies use fees to cover costs and raise revenues. However, we expect companies to continue to rely on fees on services they used to provide for free to boost their bottom lines.” Grade: B.

 

We'll post the final set on Monday. In the meantime, please check out our predictions for 2014, available here.

Boston Globe Validates Predictions about Cashless Payments and Gender Roles

In our annual predictions, we said that as part of "ongoing stories" that we expect to get a lot of coverage in 2013, we identified these two:

• Salaries paid women vs. men

         and

•  Cashless payments

Yesterday, the Boston Globe validated both of those predictions.  The "salaries paid women vs. men" stories has actually shifted already to address on women's roles in the office. Part of the reason for that shift is the result of interest in Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer, who recently gave birth and returned from a brief maternity leave. More significantly, Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, has generated tons of coverage as the result of her book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. (Incidentally, "Lean In" was one of the phrases we identified last year as a candidate for most overused phrase.) The whole focus on women and the office will continue to generate buzz this year, even after buzz for Sandberg's book dissipates.

Meanwhile, check out these two front-page Globe articles, which validate our prediction about women and salaries, and were published under the banner: "Crunch hits single mothers hard": 

• Gloria Steinem’s message about gender, then and now  
• Single-mother families struggling in Mass.

(Meanwhile, taking an opposite angle, the New York Times yesterday reported, "Study of Men’s Falling Income Cites Single Parents." The point: it seems that some gender issues are taking on more significance in the media.)

As for the cashless payments predictions, the Globe also reported: "Not paying by smartphone? You soon will, many bet." While this all seems relatively new to U.S. companies, two of our international clients prefer to pay electronically; in fact, the CFO of one international client told me earlier this week that he can't remember the last time he saw a check! We said we expect cashless payments to become mainstream by 2016 but it may happen sooner (based on comments like that CFOs, since it seems Europe has already embraced cashless payments). Perhaps that time will come by 2015.

What do you think?

2012 Trends Report Card, Part V

Here's Part V of our report card of how we did with our 2012 predictions. 

General Business Trends

1.     Companies will use fees to offset declining revenue in 2012. This didn’t generate the kind of coverage we expected but it still was an issue this year. Check out this Wall St. Journal article: "Big Bank Weighs Fee Revamp; Bank of America Considers a Revamp That Would Affect Millions of Customers."  BofA got embroiled in at least social media controversy over its fees.  Grade: B.

2.     Mobile payments will increase. We saw a number of articles validating this one, including the Wall St. Journal ("Retailers Join Payment Chase; Two Words: Digital Wallet—Wal-Mart and Target Join Project Aiming to Make Plastic"), New York Times ("Many Competing Paths on the Road to the Phone Wallet"), Fortune cover story: "The Death of Cash: Tech giants - and startups like Square - want you to use your phone to pay for everything from gum to train rides. Here's how they plan to achieve cash-free nirvana." We predicted that e-wallets would be mainstream in five years but we may move that up to four years, based on the kind of media coverage we've been seeing.  Grade: A.

3.     Videoconferencing will continue to hit its stride. We still believe we’re right but we expect videoconferencing to make further inroads.  Grade: B based on a lack of strong media coverage.

We'll issue more grades in Monday's post.

In the meantime, let us know if you have any questions or comments.