Predictions for 2017

The inherent problem of being able to produce enough content, when you turn that on its side as someone who consumes content, both from a consumer perspective and from a business perspective, it's really being able to distill long form content or big ideas into small bites of information that make me want to do more. You may be better off with less quantity, lower volume, fewer points of contact, but at each touch point it's just a higher quality engagement, it's a better event. And that means it's going to be tougher and tougher to stand out unless you choose to pursue things that are very different from what everyone else is doing. So my guess is that it will continue to be, it has been the last few years, and it will continue to be a major advantage to be an early adopter. I think we're about ready to engage in the retail experience with actual humanoid robots. I think as well that considering the dystopia that the movie industry and the sci-fi novelists have put into the minds of people, me as well, it's not what's going to happen. I think that we'll learn to live with this, I think we'll learn to embrace the fact that robots and AI is here to help. And I'm super interested in how will we create artificial intelligence, how will we use artificial intelligence, how will brands leverage artificial intelligence to achieve their objectives. Video is the gateway into augmented reality and virtual reality. I think if you don't have a video strategy today, you'll never go into augmented reality and virtual reality. It's a stepping point, and it gets you into a creative process of 3D. Every brand that says a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video, how many words is that worth, and how much is augmented reality or 360 cameras. Some of the things that we're seeing become a little more popular, but not a lot of people have started doing it yet, is inbound and outbound campaigns, people are integrating video into that on a more personal level. It's more about relationship building than it is just trying to make a sale. So say somebody's reached out to you and they've recorded a really short 30 second video, that's way more engaging and makes that person more memorable or that company more memorable in your mind than if it's just a generic video that they send out. And marketing automation platforms are making that really easy to do. We need to get a lot smarter about how we use data, and also about how we can use data to create more valuable experiences and not just personalization for personalization's sake. But it's just, again, back to the short term nature of marketing, it is so tactical, but it doesn't drive a business result. And I think there's so much data in the world that I just think that we're going to see that shift away from things that don't work towards the things that do. To succeed in the future, I think you're really going to have to learn how to read and understand data. Because now that this data is going to become easier for you to see, you're going to need to interpret it correctly and use it correctly. So it's going to force you to start thinking more creatively. I think the skill set that the marketing team and the communication responsible persons in a company need to do is to build a lot of analytic understanding. And I'm not talking just numbers, it's not just Google Analytics and try to understand your audience that way. You need to understand your audience in a contextual way. In 2017, two factors that I really see as being important are content promotion and content personalization. And personalized video marketing, I think, is coming next. I think personalizing your own story, it's kind of like choose your own adventure. If you used to, as a kid, you'd choose which story you wanted to see and how you got from point A to point B could be different for one person as it would for the next. I think the same thing will start to happen for video. And then I think, again, ARVR is going to be really exciting and it's going to change the world as we know it as another marketing channel. I think Facebook Live is going to be one of the bigger players. It's almost going to become the YouTube of live streaming. That's where I see it going. And everyone's trying to work out how to create this live streaming video. But the reality, too, is with live streaming, though, is you actually have to have other audiences to help you promote that. If you want to be clever as a digital marketer, as a small to medium business that doesn't have huge budgets for marketing, you're going to have to get good at growth hacking, which is the intersection of creativity and tech. So you can piggyback and get audiences' attention without actually paying for it. 360-degree images on Facebook, you're doing the whole thing, pano, video, live. I believe that these are gateway drugs that people like Facebook are putting in our hands and making it very accessible and giving brands and marketers higher ranking, accessing more and more their likes and followers rather than paying for it because it's their gateway drug. Facebook has made a heavy multi-billion dollar bet, not just on Oculus. I think that they're making the bet on virtual being the next platform. And rather than them having Facebook on a web experience, this is their play to become that next web. You know, 81 percent of Internet traffic by 2020 will be video. That doesn't mean that all of video is good. It doesn't mean that everybody's doing video. So I won't be surprised over the next couple years. We see more video in more creative ways. People love to watch video. Obviously, we're seeing the boom in video with Snapchat and Facebook. That's fantastic. My problem with that is that most of the brands that are doing it, they're doing short-term campaigns, which I think is a waste of time. If you're going to do something, let's commit to it, let's put our resources to it, and let's create something valuable over time. My advice for a lot of these brands is get in the video today so that it prepares you to understand the creative process, understand all of the things around the experience. And then you'll be prepared once augmented becomes more of a reality for our audience and then once virtual reality kind of reaches a more critical mass. So that's probably my strongest prediction. I also think we're going to keep seeing a rise in what I call dark patterns. So this is essentially user experiences that are designed to interrupt a visitor's flow, interrupt their experience in order to capture value from them, right? Get them to sign up for something, get their email address so that you can market to them later. And this has been relatively successful for a lot of marketers. I think it's going to keep being successful, but I'm hoping, I'm thinking and hoping that in 2017 we reach that tipping point where it starts having worse and worse returns, where basically people get sick and tired of it, they hit the back button, you find that putting these dark pattern kinds of UI elements on websites and apps removes value rather than add it. Maybe I'm idealistic, but that would be great to see, right? Because I hate it as a user, I hate recommending it as a marketer, I know it can be effective, but it feels wrong, just straight up wrong to do that.