Track Record: How We Scored on Ongoing Trends

We identified 18 ongoing trends for 2018, and we think we did well with regard to most of them. 

1. The news cycle will continue to speed up. People are experiencing news fatigue because so much is happening daily. (By contrast, there were only a few stories — like the rescue of the Thai soccer team — that had the staying power to dominate the news cycle over a period of days. Otherwise, most stories, even some that previously would have dominated for a week or two disappeared, often without having much impact in 2018. This will continue in 2019. Grade: A+.
2. 2018 will be tough for traditional and online media. Unfortunately, true. Grade: A+.
3. Fake news won’t fade in 2018. Unfortunately, true. Grade: A+.
4. Cord cutting will continue but still won't save money: Netflix dominated news coverage and more media companies are offering streaming services but we did see an uptick in coverage that cord cutting is complicated and expensive. Grade. A.
5. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality still won’t be everywhere. Both VR and AR are making progress but neither is there yet. Grade: A.
6. IoT will continue to be victim to cyberattacks. This did not get as much attention as we expected but that may be because IoT and Smart Homes have not been broadly adopted yet. Grade: C.
7. The future is still looking cloudy. This may be the one tech trend that has yet to experience a backlash. Grade: A.
8. Driverless cars attract significant coverage. Got lots of coverage in 2018. We think it’s going to take longer than most people think for driverless cars to get wide approval. We also said we think electric cars will generate more media coverage. Tesla certainly got tons of coverage in 2018, not all of it positive. Grade: B+.
9. There's never enough cybersecurity/privacy. Unfortunately, true. Grade: A+.
10. NFL ratings will continue to decline. We were right for the 2017-2018 season, because overall, ratings were soft. The 2018-2019 season seems to be rebounding (which we realize is a basketball term). Grade: B-.
11. Corporate boycotts & consumer boycotts will continue. We saw some high profile boycotts from brands that pulled their advertising from controversial hosts. This will continue in 2019. Grade: B+.
12. Drug pricing will continue to get a lot of attention. And we said, “But there won’t be an easy solution so don’t expect much except outrage.” Grade: A.
13. Wearable tech will still not be as mainstream as people in the industry were hoping. True, which is why we did not see much media coverage about wearable in 2018. We still believe wearable is making progress but 2018 was not its year for media coverage. Grade: B.
14. STEM will continue to be important. STEM is important but isn’t getting the media coverage it used to generate. Grade: C+.
15. 3-D content, 3-D TV and 3-D printers will still not be as popular as they are cool. Correct (we still think). Grade: A.
16. Artisanal will still be a hot concept. True as far as we can tell but that doesn’t translate into media coverage. Grade: C.
17. e-Wallets still will gain traction in 2018 but mostly for Millennials as opposed to their parents. True as far as we can tell but that doesn’t translate into media coverage. Grade: C.
18. Content management remains king.  True as far as we can tell but that doesn’t translate into media coverage. Grade: C.

Let us know if you agree or disagree with our grading or if we missed an ongoing trend in 2018.

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.  

TrendReport 2017: Additional trends to expect

Each year we post our annual list of trends and predictions, as we did in Dec. 2016. We only posted our top five trends but, as usual, we actually identified many more. We recently added a new one about boycotts, with the twist being the boycotts were conducted by big brands not by consumers against those brands.

But each year, we typically identify more than a dozen trends, and we felt we should post the rest of these here (actually, we meant to post them a couple of weeks ago but have been busy).

Here are the rest of the trends we think will have an impact in 2017.

1.    2017 will be a tough year for traditional media. Financial sustainability used to be print media’s primary challenge. Not anymore. While still an issue, it has been replaced by the ascent of fake news, which has attacked traditional media’s most important value: credibility. In the last three months of the campaign, according to BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman, fake news stories outperformed and were shared more frequently than real news. Publishers need to figure out how to re-establish their own credibility, make facts relevant and attract readers (and revenue) who may or may not care about whether news is fake or real. We expect to see declining circulations and revenues at real news organizations, followed by more layoffs and smaller papers.

2.    Social media addiction becomes recognized as a thing. It’s not just kids who can’t put down their devices. It’s everyone. We expect more stories (spread on social media) about how to break the social media/device addiction. Here’s the problem: You can’t live without your smartphone: You don’t know anyone’s phone number without it. You can’t text them without it. Meanwhile look at all you can do with it: pay for things, shop for things, turn on and off devices in your home, much less use it to not have to interact with anyone. Taking a break from your device is healthy but impossible, and we expect more content in 2017 about this as an issue.

3.    Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality still won’t be everywhere. Many newspapers feature VR content. And the NBA is now testing VR. But we don’t think VR or AR like the faddish Pokemon Go will be ubiquitous yet in 2017. Solvable problems include VR headsets that offer an improved immersive experience than the cardboard headsets (that resemble cereal-box prizes) distributed by some newspapers so readers could access VR content or the current high-end headsets. Providing a feedback loop from user to the headset/content could be around the corner – a real corner. As with other tech, VR and AR need more content to encourage people they need to have it.

4.    Expect a cloudier 2017. Cloud computing has been a full-fledged trend for several years now. But we expect that it will evolve, to reduce the costs of cloud computing and to enhance capabilities.

5.    Artificial intelligence will continue to surge. AI become the big tech trend covered in the media in 2016. While there is overblown fear that AI-enabled robots will take over humanity, we expect to see AI built into all sorts of consumer and B2B environments – and to be featured in more Hollywood movies and TV shows.

6.    Drones still won’t take off. Consumer drones look like fun – for a couple of hours. We think the real market will be B2B, not just for deliveries (which we think is still a couple of years off). We expect B2B drones to help do things that are hard or risky for humans to do such as checking train tracks or oil pipelines in rural, hard-to-otherwise-reach locations. B2B use of drones, like B2B use of robots, will drive the market.

7.    Globalization will be a hot topic. From free trade agreements to tariffs, job losses, Brexit and the U.S.’s relationship with other countries, and the nature of globalization itself will be a very hot topic in 2017 and beyond. 

8.    Interest in voice speakers will turn up. Farhad Manjoo at the Times says gadgets are dead but there’s one area that he’s wrong: digital voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home. These two assistants/speakers are designed to be more helpful than digital assistants, and we believe this will be a big year for them, and that IoT connectivity will likely operate through them. Alexa and Home are the killer app for smart home technology in the living room, like lighting, home Wi-Fi networks, and thermostats but also may be the key to IoT in kitchen appliances.

Ongoing trends:

1.  NFL ratings will continue to decline.

2.  Drug pricing will get a lot of attention

3.  Wearable tech will still not be as mainstream as people in the industry were hoping.

4.  Progress to a driverless-car future will slow down – but not for the reason you might think. The closer we get, we will recognize that aspects of driving that we took for granted are more complicated to solve when a human is not driving. These tech issues must be solved even before we get to solving liability issues.

5.  3D printers will continue to proliferate in schools but remain unnecessary in the home.

6.   Eventually consumers will realize they can’t easily, more efficiently or more cheaply cut the cord to cable – since the bandwidth comes from the cable company. But it might not matter. People watch on many devices – but usually not on their TVs – so streaming services will continue to be popular, even if duplicating cable offerings.

7.  eBook sales will continue to plateau while traditional book sales increase slightly. (Meanwhile, sales of vinyl records will continue to climb but will remain a niche market.)

8.  e-Wallets still won’t be as widely adopted as some were projecting. They will go mainstream but not in 2017 or 2018.

This now completes the list of most of the new and ongoing trends we identified in December. We purposely did not want to add new trends that came to light as a result of changing global political realities or predictions that only would have been obvious after the fact (like Bill O'Reilly's departure this week from Fox). 

Let us know what you think about our list -- what we missed (not including political or unlikely predictions like one about O'Reilly). As always, we will issue a report card on these trends later in November.

Are We Ready for Wearable?

In Dec. 2014, we predicted 2015 would be a big year for wearable tech, and it didn't really turn out that way. As we noted in Dec. 2015.

In Dec. 2015, we predicted lots of news coming from CES about wearable tech, and we were generally right. There were all kinds of new wearable tech items presented, for example smart clothing of all kinds (as well as some that seemed more punchline than smart).

Our initial reaction to news from CES is that wearable tech is not quite ready for prime time in 2016.

We're not claiming credit for that insight by ourselves. In his Style section column, "Where Wearable Technology Ends Up (Hint: Not Your Wrist)," Nick Bilton looks at why many wearable tech devices have just not caught on. It's because they're ugly and power hungry, and can seem like you're wearing a fax machine on your wrist.

But Bilton says it may come down to price, that's it's hard to justify the purchase of a wearable device that offers limited value but costs as much as a smartphone. I'd agree with that but I think it's because the value, even as a fitness tracker, isn't there yet. There are too many different proprietary tracking algorithms and it's hard to interconnect. If I have a FitBit and my buddy has a Jawbone, we can't compare our workouts because there's no way to get those two devices to communicate with each other. Yet, I guess. It may be hard enough to find a workout buddy but now I have to ask my workout buddy to switch to my device. (It's perhaps not worth noting that I don't have any friends with whom I'd want to compare workouts with, but that's for another blog post.)

Anyway, worth reading Bilton's article.

Key Predictions for Trends in 2016, Part III

Here's our third set of trends that we expect to have an impact in 2016:

1. The market for wearable tech and for IoT will continue to grow. Expect IoT-enabled tech to be a big story at CES.
2. 3D printers will be popular in schools.  Getting students comfortable with 3D printers is a great for seeding the market, but don’t expect them in every home just yet.
3. The importance of a college education will continue to generate media interest. The media will continue to look at whether a college education is worth the student debt loads as well as what kind of education we should provide our students. In an age of instant access to facts, memorizing certain facts may not be as helpful as actually understanding the underlying issues around history, science, literature, etc. and may not be indicators of future career success.
4. Crowdfunding will lose buzz. With even Hollywood A-listers turning to crowdsourcing their projects, we expect the novelty of crowdfunding to fade, which will make it harder to raise money this way.
5. eBook sales will plateau. After years of growing sales, eBooks’ momentum stalled in 2015. eBooks aren’t going away but they won’t totally replace traditional books, as some had feared or predicted. Increasingly, buyers may demand the ability to make a cross-platform book/eBook purchase, much as already happens with music purchased from Amazon, where you can the actual CD and direct download to your phone. 
6. Drones may start falling back to earth. Like Icarus, drones may be flying too close to the sun – and airplanes -- but there problems go beyond that. While Amazon has unveiled a possible drone to help it make deliveries, consumer drones may be the cool gift that sits in a corner until they answer this question: What do you do with a drone after you’ve taken aerial photos of your house? 
7. Will FinTech shake up traditional banking? Apps that support banking and financial services, like Apple Pay, Google Wallet and others, will generate a fair amount of business press coverage under headlines questioning whether FinTech will disintermediate traditional banks. FinTech will make inroads but won’t go broadly mainstream in 2016. That includes Bitcoin, about which there was much buzz in 2014 and almost nothing in 2015 except when some reporters thought they had uncovered the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the apparent mysterious inventor of Bitcoin.
8. China may live in interesting times.  There’s a lot going on that will get coverage here. Expect coverage about the environment, including Beijing’s epic pollution and a lot of coverage about its economy, including the impact of the Renminbi being named by the International Monetary Fund as a main world currency, rising wages and an aging workforce, all leading to a possibly slowing economy. And continuing from prior years, there will be a lot of coverage about intellectual property infringement and Beijing-sanction hacks against U.S. companies.
9. The concern about cybersecurity, privacy, encryption and government surveillance is already changing. Due to the tragic events in Paris and San Bernardino, many will take a 180-degree turn on government surveillance, and demand the government to do more, not less. Expect more coverage about cybersecurity and privacy – especially as the EU enforces stricter data privacy rules (which will have an impact on cloud provides likes Amazon Web Services). Interestingly, despite the Vtech hack, which may have made children’s information available, we don’t expect much coverage about smart toys and privacy.
10. A big issue with driverless cars won’t be the technology or safety record. It will be the insurance requirements and state laws. California recently said that driverless cars will need a steering wheel and a person who is certified to drive – even as Google has designed a driverless car without a steering wheel. (The reason: it will be the transition from driverless to driver when accidents could occur.) But auto insurance will see that premiums will go down as accidents decrease – and that will change one dynamic of driverless cars (perhaps not theft, however). 

Let us know if you agree or disagree.

Please note: We're going to take a break for Christmas and New Year's -- which isn't to say we won't be working, just not blogging.

Happy Holidays, and see you in 2016!

Track Record for Our 2015 Predictions

A lot of people issue predictions, but we feel it's important to look at the prior year's predictions to provide some integrity to the process. But it also helps us focus on changes for the following year.

We try to cover a lot of ground when making predictions, certainly covering our client's sectors (without taking away from what they're doing or hyping what they're doing). But there's a lot of things we miss. For example, we -- like most of the rest of the world -- did not predict that Donald J. Trump would be a GOP front runner for five months. (We're guessing that only Donald J. Trump would have made that prediction last year.)

So here are our grades based on the trends we predicted for 2015:

Here are our predictions for 2015:

• Wearable tech will be big in 2015. Wearable tech was successful but not necessarily "big." That's in part because most wearable tech is still in the oxymoron stage – where it either works as fashion or technology or neither but not both. But the other reason it's still not enough reason for most of us to buy and wear them. We still feel wearable tech will become mainstream but maybe in 2016. Grade: B-.
• Expect sensory overload. Just don't expect that yet. We meant that the Internet of Things (IoT), which will use built-in sensors, networked-enabled smart devices to capture information and communicate to bring a higher level of convenience for humans, would overwhelm us with too data from sensors. Clearly that didn't happen in 2015. On the other hand, we said "within two years," so that means we still have time to be rigt, if this happens by 2017. Grade: B-. 
• Content management remains king. We got this right though we've seen some decline in the impact of infographics (though they're still flourishing on Pinterest). Thought leaders through blogs, videos, bylined articles, social media, traditional media will remain strong in 2016. Grade: A.
• Watch for the monetization and maturation of social media. We were right about Snapchat but wrong in terms of Twitter, which has matured but has not been able to apporiately monetized its users. The revolving door of Twitter CEOs validates that others are expecting monetization even if Twitter can't deliver. Grade: B.
• More will cut the cord in 2015. Streaming services did become ever more popular this year, with new apps from HBO, CBS and others. But the realization finally seems to have hit that cutting the cord isn't simpler, may cost just as much, and that to be able to stream video from the Internet, you still need Internet access, which is still provided by cable providers. (Check out this recent Bloomberg Businessweek article: "Cutting the Cord, Not the Cost.") We got this one right. Grade: A.
• The importance of a college education will continue to generate media interest. Because student debt continues to grow, the value of an education became an ongoing story in 2015. Expect that to continue in the election year. Grade: A.
• After a couple of more-or-less stable years, 2015 will be a rough year for print media. Unfortunately, we were write about this. There were layoffs in newsrooms in Philadelphia, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New York Daily News. (And not just print:  even ESPN laid off several hundred employees.) According to Poynter, the reason: "This year has been a worse year, not a stabilizing one, for advertising. Digital and other new revenues are not making up those loses. As new strategies (like paid digital subscriptions or contracting printing) settle in for a few years, they still generate revenue but not growing revenue." Grade: A+.
• There’s always going to be a new site generating lots of buzz, but those may not be the ones to reach your customers. By way of example, we cited Yo, an app generated a lot of buzz in 2014 because it allows you to say only “Yo” to your friends. Haven't heard much about it in 2015 so we think that proves our point. Grade: A.
• Wearable tech will allow new ways for marketers to interact with consumers. This prediction was ahead of the curve but we remain convinced this will happen and that it will be a bit creepy. Grade: C.
• The temptation for marketers is to be everywhere all the time – but more Americans will try to disconnect, if only for a few hours or the weekend. When a popular meme on Facebook urges people to look up, and turn off their devices, we may be at odd moment. We don't seriously expect people to put away their devices for good – as a society, we are all too addicted to them. But we are seeing people talk about unplugging for the weekend as a sort of electronic cleanse. Grade: A.