This time last year I made 13 predictions for the year - things that might affect the communications landscape. I thought it would be nice to see how it went. I think I got 11 out of 13.
1. Video becomes all-pervasive. For this one I have anecdotal evidence that you see more video on websites generally. Maybe a littl ebit more interestingly, it seems to be standard practice now to seed new TV campaigns on YouTube to create a bit of buzz before the ads hit TV screens.
2. YouTube will commercialise. This happened on May 11th with a variety of formats that start to blur definitions of direct and brand communication.
3. Agencies evolve. The agency landscape is in flux (and continues to be so). The requirement to beat ad zapping, and to deliver big ideas in multiple channels has seen new agency positionings come to the fore this year (think Anomaly and Zeus Jones, or BMB's design briefs from First Choice)
4. Admovies. The emergence of longer ad formats to regain consumer attention - and we saw 9 minute ads for Shell (although that's a bit of an ask for a media buy).
5. Brand openness. Some of the brands that really seemed to break through this year tended to open themselves up to public participation, or open the kimono to reveal the pains and sweat of running a business. Think about brands like Howies or Onitsuka Tiger.
6. Web 2.0 services will only grow if they are useful - I did predict a pop in teh bubble of Second Life and I don't think I've seen anything in the media about it except for their CTO leaving. I always felt it wasn't truly useful. I did think we'd see more of services like Loopt and the social networks. Facebook put on 41m new users this year.
7. Mapvertising had started to appear in previous years driven largely by Google Earth but we've seen a bit more maturity in campaign activity, from BA, Jet Blue or Target painting, well, targets, on their roofs.
8. The environment becomes marketing's problem. Well, 2007 really was the year of green marketing. We ran campaigns for BP and the COI that you really wouldn't have seen in previous years.
9. Web 2.5 emerges - the always-on-you, filtered web. I thought there'd be a lot more expert/filtration of community content but what seems to be happening is the middleman is being cut out through community empowerment on web 2.0 platforms (think: crowdfunder or zopa)
10. Co-creators get paid. It follows if you want consumers to create content or influence product design that you'll have to pay them properly, rather than expect them to do it to idle time away. Witness the Lego factory or Netflix prize to develop improved user prediction software.
11. This is one I think I missed completely. I thought mobile IM would come through strongly in 2007 but instead emergent platform like Facebook over O2 seem to presage the way forward.
12. This one is in two halves, one of which I got spectacularly wrong - that the iPhone would be vapour. Oh well. But I did thnk Apple would have to back off DRM or wobble. iTunes Plus debuted in the spring.
13. Console content. I thought we'd see branded content emerge to take advantage of the networking power of new gen consoles. It's happened to a degree - that brands are getting cuter about embedding in game content, so I'll give myself half again.
What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment