January, 2022. Hordes of marketers, both client and agency side, arrive at their desks after the Christmas break, open their emails and see a message marked URGENT. It’s title: “We need a metaverse strategy. Yesterday.”

By now, you’ve probably already read a dozen metaverse-related think pieces on how our reality will — literally — change and marketers need to get involved or be left behind. Nike has already purchased a metaverse company called RTKFT. CNN even declared that “the metaverse won Christmas” after Occulus briefly became the most downloaded app from Apple’s app store.

But if the metaverse does change marketing as we know it, it won’t be in 2022. Popular Christmas presents don’t necessarily mean anything — although you could argue that Tamagotchis were an early forerunner of the metaverse insofar as they created a virtual world.

And while the metaverse is loosely defined, it’s already existed in some form since the mid 2000s when Second Life was launched and used by IBM to hold business meetings and by Toyota to create virtual customisable cars.

Metaverse platforms have evolved since then — in some respects, it’s a classic case of waiting for first the technology and then user behaviour to catch up.

Buying virtual items is more commonplace, although it’s easy, if you spend money on accessories that only exist in Fortnite, to assume that it’s a widespread behaviour, when it sits at one end of a technology adoption scale. At the other sits 21% of Americans who still use a bank teller as their primary source of managing their money.

What we’re really talking about in 2022: gaming

Realistically, when we talk about the metaverse today, we talk about gaming. You can buy exclusive Nike Jordans in Fortnite, take in a virtual Gucci installation in Roblox, and visit Joe Biden’s Animal Crossing Island. It’s sometimes fun, sometimes makes strategic sense, but is a long way from the vision Mark Zuckerbeg tried to sell us when Facebook rebranded to Meta.

There’s not any guarantee that Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse will be what the metaverse actually looks like. Or that it will ever transcend gaming. As tech analyst Benedict Evans wrote in his look ahead to 2022: “AR and VR might be the next smartphone, but they might also be the next smart watch, drone, or games console — very cool but a narrow market.”

Where the metaverse — or rather gaming — gets interesting from a marketing perspective is how it develops as a media channel. For global brands such as Nike it can currently be seen as a more cost effective way to continually build towards brand targets on a global basis for less than it would cost to build equivalent reach in each of the global markets with this specific target audience.

And there are also earned and owned opportunities. Burger King’s Stevenage FC FIFA hack is probably one of the smartest examples of this and far more effective in terms of building mental availability with a wide audience (that isn’t other marketers) than their Cannes-winning Mouldy Whopper.

Gaming — and that term should be applied loosely, as it encompasses a lot of different types of media — could develop in a multitude of different ways, all of them similar but different to traditional advertising channels.

Streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube are gaming’s version of BVOD or SVOD. In-game advertising is really just out of home in a virtual world. Sponsorships of games or gaming tournaments are no different from their offline equivalents, insofar as their objectives are the same.

A metaverse strategy is no different from a media strategy

In short, Metaverse advertising in 2022 and the immediate future, doesn’t look vastly different from other channels. The strategic objectives that lead Brand A to sponsor a gaming tournament and Brand B to sponsor a football league stem from the same place. Pre-roll video adverts are still pre-roll video adverts whether they’re placed in front of gamers or baby boomers, it’s just the strategic decisions around targeting are different.

It may take some time for gaming to fully become a media channel. Or it may not happen at all. Last year games developer EA was forced to deny they would be launching in-game adverts across their titles. Personally, I take the more cynical view that there’s very few spaces that advertisers won’t bastardise, so it’s bound to happen at some point.

But even if a fully programmatic in-game ad exchange is some years ago, the likes of Microsoft, Sony, EA, Epic, and, yes, Apple, have a wealth of first party data on their users. It would be a surprise if they haven’t looked at Amazon’s growing advertising business for shopping and decided they want in on a way to better monetise the targeting capabilities of said data.

Beyond gaming, any ‘metaverse’ revolution is likely to be a mixture of the mundane — there’s only so much excitement that can be generated by another ad tech platform — the gradual, and a few eye-catching stunts that may or may not actually deliver any value to the brand.

Nike are probably a little ahead of the game and their purchase of metaverse company RTKFT makes strategic sense: people already buy virtual clothing for in-game avatars, so why not buy a company that can build high quality virtual trainers and leisurewear for avatars.

There are also opportunities for new products solely built around the metaverse — don’t be surprised to see insurance for virtual goods as a bolt-on to your home contents policy in the future.

But the metaverse is still limited by what can be achieved from a tech perspective and how readily consumers adopt new metaverse-focused technologies, whatever they may be.

VR is still searching for a use beyond gaming and art exhibitions and rebadging it as the metaverse still won’t persuade a large selection of the public to spend large amounts of their day with a headset strapped to their face.

And the worst of social media — misogyny and abuse — is also present in the metaverse. Reports of groping in Horizon, Meta’s latest virtual reality venture, are no less disturbing than real life (and while Meta’s response to the allegations predictably depressing), while allegations of child labour and grooming on Roblox are deeply troubling.

All of which is to say that the same issues that marketers face outside of the metaverse — is this an effective use of my money, is it safe for my brand to be associated with this space — are no different inside the metaverse.

So, yes, it’s 2022 and the metaverse is here. Probably. Sort of. Whether your brand should be on it or not is a question best placed for your media strategist to answer.

Do you really need to have a metaverse strategy for your brand? was originally published in Better Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Engagement metrics do not correlate with sales volume” and “It’s hard to control and plan for earned media.”

These shouldn’t be surprising conclusions. PR professionals can attest to the second sentence, while anybody who has worked in social will have inevitably been faced with the question: “We’re getting a lot of likes. What does that mean?”

But when the internet is also inundated advice from thought leaders telling us that organic social is the path to marketing nirvana and that cutting your marketing spend on inefficient paid channels (TV is dead! Radio is dead! Facebook is, er, dead! Clubhouse is definitely dead) then it makes it easy for those who hold the budgets not to say to the social media manager “you’ve got no budget this year because we’ll be able to go viral.”

[The correct response to this is, of course, yes but the thought leaders are building their personal brand and only need 1–2 well paying contracts per month to live comfortably. They’re not trying to increase the sales of the country’s 5th most popular chocolate biscuit brand. At which point the Head of Marketing will probably ask “so how will you increase our sales?” and it all gets a little awkward if the word engagement is mentioned once in the response.]

So let’s repeat this again, in Facebook’s own words: “Click through [engagement] rate does not correlate ideally to ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend).”

Amusingly, in the same Facebook deck, there’s a McDonalds case study that attributes between a 2.8% — 3.2% attribution of in-store sales to Facebook and Instagram advertising, which also possibly suggests that Maccas could switch off their Facebook performance marketing spend and probably not see any noticeable difference to the bottom line.

Dunk in the dark launched a thousand wrong strategies

That social media engagement doesn’t correlate with sales isn’t really a surprise. Many marketers have been banging this drum for years. It’s worth reading Mondelez’s former Head of Social Media, Jerry Daykin, on Oreo’s 2013 Super Bowl Dunk In The Dark Tweet that launched hundreds of social media war rooms and marketing goals built around virality.

Daykin, who wasn’t involved in the Oreo activity but was an insider to the numbers, notes that Dunk In The Dark was part of a wider print campaign and the cookie also advertised during the Super Bowl.

Crucially, the number of people who remembered Oreo’s activity, outside of the marketing community, was low, the amount of earned reach, which Daykin estimates to have been between 500k — 1m, was a fraction of the cookies Oreo sells in the US each year, and subsequent Oreo activity that had substantial paid spend behind it was much more effective.

Don’t blame Facebook for the engagement myth

For once, the engagement myth isn’t really Facebook or Twitter’s fault. Facebook in particular has been producing good quality research for several years that’s confirmed this fact repeatedly.

And while it’s true that in the early days of Facebook, it was a lot easier and cheaper to go viral [albeit still not at a scale that would account for Oreo’s total cookie sales], once the blue behemoth throttled reach in the newsfeed to maximise advertising profits the benefits of organic content dropped away quite rapidly.

If anything, social media’s biggest budget efficiency probably comes as a customer service channel, although that’s infinitely less sexy than a viral Tweet, so it doesn’t get quite as many headlines.

Engagement. Because engagement.

If you go back further to the days before Facebook had advertising, engagement was one of the very few metrics a social media manager could report back on with any confidence. As somebody who worked in social media around 2008, I was also guilty of this.

It was one of the better metrics we could think of at the time, and it instinctively felt important, because brands being able to talk directly to fans… seems important?

Not many of us at that time were trained marketers either — we generally got our jobs by being good at the internet. And if we didn’t quite understand what these new websites did for businesses, the marketing department sure as hell didn’t either. Had we actually listened to each other, we’d have probably settled on reach being a far more important metric to track.

Again, though, engagement is a metric that refuses to go quietly. Is there a value in cultivating a rabidly loyal following of your brand who hang onto your every word and pithy Tweet? Surely cultivating loyalists is not a bad thing?

And this is where engagement starts wobbling a bit into the it depends territory. For the majority of big, well-known brands it’s a nice to have and can be helpful in some very specific circumstances and campaigns, but it’s possibly not worth spending time or money on for the return back. Largely because you’re probably cultivating and nurturing people who would have either a) purchased your brand anyway or b) have no intention or ability to purchase your brand at any time in the near future.

In How Brands Grow, Bryon Sharp uses the example of Harley Davidson’s largest customer base not actually resembling the stereotypical freedom loving bikies. They’ve made the brand memorable, but other than not alienating them, Harley Davidson doesn’t need to work too hard to convince them to purchase another Harley.

Similarly, Tesla famously does not advertise and has a rabid online fanbase. But it also sells a lot fewer electric vehicles than emission scandal-hit VW, and cannot always fulfil demand for Teslas due to production line issues. Unless Musk‘s army of online fanboys all purchase Teslas (that’s assuming the company can actually deliver them), they’re probably not going to be particularly helpful to growing the brand.

Who actually benefits from brand engagement (hint: it’s not the brand)

Another example. One of my old agencies was asked to help with the social media strategy for a buildings material manufacturer.. Their agency was, at the time, investing heavily in organic social for one of their premium cladding ranges. On the surface, it was easy to see why this approach made sense.

This company produced genuinely beautiful, breathtaking home renovation products that were built for Instagram. Their account had a several thousand followers, which was impressive against their competitors. The agency also put a small amount of spend — a few thousand dollars — behind key posts. The engagement numbers looked impressive. In fact, that was just about the only number that cropped up in any reports.

The reality was a bit different. The majority of the followers were in their early 20s and as far away from the target audience as you could get. Unless this was a particularly affluent young homeowner audience, it’s doubtful any of them would have been in the position to buy the product for the best part of a decade.

In addition, many of them didn’t even live in the same country that the product was available in. The number of people the small volume of paid reached was a minuscule fraction of the total homeowner market, and consumers couldn’t actually buy the product as it was only available to sell to trade and most builders knew and asked for it by a different name.

But the engagement metrics looked good.

Is engagement ever good?

A few caveats here. Engagement and earned media is not a total waste for all industries and all companies, if there’s a clear strategic goal. TV and sport, for example, when done well, can drive the cultural agenda. There’s also a handful of brands who’ve learnt how to play the algorithm well and have probably been able to reallocate marketing budget elsewhere as a result.

And yes, the likes of TikTok and LinkedIn can still offer impressive organic reach off the back of strong engagement.

For certain target audiences it makes a degree of sense to invest in content creation for these channels, albeit this is a risky strategy without paid media to back it up or a clear view of what you’re trying to achieve. Clever social marketing — something that Netflix does well — is still complemented by PR and advertising.

Engagement can also be very successful for smaller, growing or nascent brands and products that know how to work the algorithm and quickly scale to a solid customer base or post impressive retention or repeat purchase numbers. Lack of scale among buyers isn’t as much of a problem here.

My wife, for example, has built a small, profitable decorative mirror business largely through Instagram. But she only has to sell a handful of products each month to show a profit after her fixed and variable costs (it helps that she doesn’t discount). So Instagram’s organic reach is entirely sufficient for what she has the time to make and the money she sinks into production and product development.

On the other hand, WARC’s excellent white paper ‘Rethinking brand in the age of digital commerce’ shows that many ‘internet’ businesses built off cheap bottom-of-funnel digital marketing, including organic social, hit a point where they cap out and literally cannot grow any further without investing in brand as well as performance. Engagement serves them perfectly well until they hit their natural growth ceiling.

But at the end of the day marketers, like people, can be quite irrational. Even when Facebook types out the words that engagement does not cause sales, their account managers will still be trying to explain the same finding next year, and the year after, and the year after that.

Because as long as there are thought leaders who use engagements to promise untold marketing riches, there will always be marketers who go all in on an earned strategy. Budgets are reallocated, targets become unachievable, and tactics and outputs will become a series of unlinked and unliked executions commissioned in the name of engagement.

Occasionally, just occasionally, one of these executions may go viral. Once in a blue moon, a brand may go beyond viral and actually enter the realms of cultural conversation, like Weetabix’s baked bean Tweet. And for those who are a mixture of lucky and well planned, heavy engagement may produce a very short term spike in sales as a result of a temporary increase in salience.

But that’s a best case scenario. As for every brand that “does a Weetabix”, there will be hundreds of others churning out mildly engaging content with questionable results, and still having awkward conversations with the people who hold the marketing budgets.

Facebook’s own data shows that brands have been doing social media wrong for many, many years was originally published in Better Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If 2020 taught us anything, it was the sheer pointlessness of trying to predict the world ahead. A global pandemic was probably quite low on a lot of media, tech and cultural predictions, although smarter people than me would have been monitoring the new flu-like virus that was emerging in China a little over 12 months ago.

So given few of us can say with any confidence when this pandemic will start to truly recede, it seems a little trite to be making predictions. And yet here we are. Ten ways the world will change. Here’s why retailers are dead forever. Why your brand will die without a Clubhouse strategy.

I’ve always tried to make my start-of-year thoughts a bit broad, and this January is no exception. New tactical channels are interesting, shifts in behaviour are probably more useful to strategy.

The below is based on a lot of reading, the odd bit of data, and a few rabbit holes. I think it’s quite interesting. Hopefully you do too.

Creative solutions to old problems

Have you even experienced 2020 if you didn’t have somebody in your LinkedIn feed noting that Isaac Newton discovered gravity and invented calculus during his isolation from the bubonic plague. While the truth may be somewhat more mundane, there are a couple of trends that the global pandemic has somewhat accelerated.

Firstly, a lot of clever creative and strategic thinkers have more time on their hands (assuming they’re not homeschooling their kids). There’s a lot to be said for having time to think. Secondly, some people who have lost their jobs or been furloughed will use unemployment as a catalyst for launching the new ideas that have been bouncing around their head. Because if not now, then when?

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re about to see a boom in entrepreneurialism or that the next Renaissance is just around the corner. As the Financial Times notes, it’s a very high risk strategy to launch a new business at the best of times. But the conditions are at least in place for new ideas or old ideas done better.

Closer to (my professional) home, 2021 is likely to see a new breed of marketing agency. A lot of experienced senior staff have been pushed, jumped or just fancied a change of scenery, which will lead to more interesting independent shops.

Given the trend of holding companies to attempt to consolidate their bigger accounts under one roof (consulting + creative + media + other things), there will be a few mid-size accounts who may feel it’s worth taking a chance on people they know and trust rather than big names. If it’s an interesting year to be starting a new agency, it’s a year of opportunity for clients to pick clever, talented smaller companies and build something special.

The workplace is not dead.

Have you even experienced 2020 if you didn’t have your LinkedIn feed full of hyperbolic proclamations that the traditional office was dead and that the pandemic would kill the need for office space. Silicon Valley suddenly discovered the joys of not commuting while finance departments started calculating how much money could be saved by downsizing office space.

But while Zoom calls and remote events have become, quote unquote, the new normal, that doesn’t mean it’s suitable for everyone. Or even feasible.

In June, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that around 37% of jobs in the country could be performed entirely at home. That means the remaining 63% required some form of interaction at least some of the time.

And this assumes that everybody who can work from home will want to work from home. JLL’s research (from a sample size of 2,033, so not huge but large enough) noted that 74% of workers would like to work from the office in some capacity.

Rather than definitely declaring the home the new office — something that would make both HR departments and insurers nervous — the pandemic has shown that there is a different way of approaching work.

Open plan offices may be hideously inefficient, but they’re also a good melting pot for incidental ideas and conversations and cross-team collaboration. You may never have a Zoom call scheduled with the UX team, but that doesn’t mean that a ten minute chat in the kitchen can’t spark a business-changing idea.

For creatives, especially, the lack of collaboration can be tough. Sales teams too will have seen some interesting disparities in performance between those who thrive in the office and those who can sell without distractions.

Offices and businesses will eventually want to return to something approaching a level of normality, but may also look at creative solutions for utilising unused office space. Perhaps this may lead to more quiet zones or areas where people can work uninterrupted. Maybe it means more hotdesking. Maybe it means cohabiting with smaller, inventive startups, where both sides can learn from each other.

The future of work in 2021 probably isn’t hugely different from 2020 or 2019. But the companies that are really enlightened — or can simply afford to do so — will find a way that gets the best out of the whole team.

Lawmakers will be gunning for Big Tech, with mixed effect.

Have you even… no, we’ll stop with that line now. But 2020 saw a lot of regulation drawn up and investigations and lawsuits going after Big Tech. Add in documentaries such as Netflix’s somewhat over-produced The Social Dilemma and it’s clear who will be the villain over the next decade. If The World Is Not Enough was being made today, the big bad would be modelled on Zuckerberg not Murdoch.

And yet, in 2021 at least, anybody who is hoping to see Facebook, Google et al taken down a peg or two is likely to be disappointed. Part of this is due to the sometimes glacial pace legislation moves at — antitrust lawsuits can take years — but also because nobody has really attempted to answer the question “What are we trying to regulate?”

If that sounds confusing, it’s a reflection of just how intertwined the likes of Facebook and Google are in the world. Are we trying to tackle anti-competitive practices? Or protecting worker rights? Or protect democracy? Or the role the media play in a healthy democracy? Or the mental health of users? Or the large amount of ethically questionable content sitting on these platforms?

Answering “all of the above” isn’t really the solution. There’s a lot of separate issues that one bill would be unlikely to be able to cover, and badly written or ambiguous laws benefit tech companies more than they do the states and their citizens. Or worse, have unintended consequences, such as California legislation to provide more protection to gig economy workers effectively banning freelancing.

Writing laws against big tech also assumes no ulterior motive on the case of the legislator, which isn’t always the case. Australia’s media bargaining code that forces Google and Facebook to pay for journalism is really just a tax dressed up as regulation that benefits larger media companies over smaller publishers.

The other issue facing lawmakers tackling Facebook, Google and Twitter, is where to draw the line for what is and isn’t permitted on a private platform. Social media may have kicked Donald Trump off their platforms, but there was nothing in their T&Cs that could have stopped Zuckerberg and Dorsey taking this action several months, or even years ago.

There are also laws against hate speech that vary from country to country that should act as a patchwork takedown — and suggests that regulation is there if the lawmakers decide to use it. But if you’re drafting new legislation around what’s permissible, where do you start? And how do you apply it consistently, given the global scale of these platforms? And how do you ensure that an authoritarian-esque regime such as the Phillippeans doesn’t use it to suppress dissent?

The current issues that legislators are grappling with on big tech are not all the same that led to, say, the breakup of Microsoft. Broad laws against platforms are probably unlikely to work at scale, assuming the work at all, while successes are more likely to be smaller and in specific areas, such as data privacy, where clearly legislation already exists.

Where we are probably heading in 2021 is a handful of legal jurisdictions acting as default global legislators. These are most likely to be the EU and California, given the work already done around privacy in these states.

The rest of the world will then follow or attempt to pass altered versions of the same law, leading to a patchwork approach that may cause a few headaches for Facebook and Google but probably won’t change anything drastically, unless the Biden administration decides it really wants to gun for Big Tech.

So this is Big Tech and the law in 2021: a lot of sabres will be rattled, a lot of time will be spent debating Something Should Be Done, but don’t expect to see millions wiped off Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth just yet.

Voice technology finds its voice

If voice had a Gartner hype cycle to itself, then it would probably resemble the design of a new ride at Alton Towers. Every time it looks like voice is on the verge of a breakthrough, it stalls.

I can remember musing half a decade ago in these predictions how voice technology could change SEO or how you buy insurance. It’s now 2021 and I’m still typing “cheapest car insurance” into Google no matter how many cheerful adverts Amazon or Google put on TV of pensioners dancing around their kitchen as they prepare meals on YouTube.

But if 2021 is to be the year of voice, then it’s potentially about to unleash its secret weapon: being supremely boring.

Boring is not bad. It means it’s become an essential part of your everyday life. It’s built into TV remotes. It becomes a muscle memory to ask Siri to call your partner as you drive home. It becomes part of those mundane, everyday tasks and actions that you did perfectly well before voice technology but are now second nature.

An alternative Gartner hype cycle for voice could be written as
1. Disruptive voice technology becomes a reality;
2. Silicon Valley gets very excited and declares everything that came before voice as dead;

3. Marketers leap on the trend and release a voice operated beer bottle that allows the brand’s animal mascot to talk back to you in a variety of voices. Approximately ten people who don’t work for the beer company or its agency use it, but it wins a Cannes Lion;

4. Product designers start creating voice enabled smart fridges because they can;

5. The CMO or CFO asks how effective was the $750,000 investment into the voice enabled choose your own adventure game to promote their rice cake brand, and can they soon see some ROI;

6. Thought leaders pronounce voice dead, launching a thousand one line LinkedIn posts;

7. A product designer quietly slips voice into their Smart TV remote, as it strikes them as quite useful to search for Netflix shows by voice rather than spending 10 minutes typing the show title into the screen;

8. People who don’t own smart fridges, IoT enabled lighting and heating, or have a Clubhouse invite start speaking to smaller, more mundane devices as second nature.

9. A marketing agency proposes a VR beer bottle experience, where the brand’s animal mascot performs a series of popular TikTok dances. Agency books hotel rooms in Cannes, just in case.

Voice’s greatest success in 2021 will be to replicate the prevalence of QR codes in 2020. Nobody really asked for QR codes to make a return, but they’ve become commonplace as a sensible solution for track and trace, and a host of other mundane but quite useful tasks, such as renewing your insurance policy via direct mail.

There will be some genuinely innovative ideas in voice proposed in 2021 — the education sector would be an obvious candidate — but a lot of voice’s progress hinges on how close the vision matches up to the mass market and ease of use. Which is why the TV remote control will probably be the most interesting thing to happen to voice this year.

Ad fraud will take centre stage as marketing measurement gets worse

Anybody who has followed Dr. Augustine Fou, the digital marketer turned ad fraud investigator, will know that something is rotten in the state of digital advertising.

This isn’t exactly new news, but it finally seems as if 2021 could be the year that the industry finally starts gunning for dodgy ad tech. If marketers and lawmakers were really serious, they could make headway tackling ad fraud. There has been enough of a shift over the past 18 months to suggest the right questions are finally being asked.

Too many marketers — especially those with demanding short-term targets — are reticent to turn off digital advertising in case it hurts their boss or client’s short-term goals or leads to awkward questions. But there’s two arguments for better digital advertising that are becoming harder to ignore.

The first is a steady trickle of industry articles that show that turning off or reducing digital spend doesn’t actually make a difference to overall performance. P&G, according to Dr. Fou, saw no change to business outcomes when they turned off their $200m digital ad spend.

These types of headlines are starting to make their way to C-suite level, and when the CEO and CFO read their multi-million dollar digital ad spend is disappearing into a black whole, then they’re more likely to ask awkward questions. Plenty of senior marketers will have seen this coming and will have already changed course.

The second element is the growing awareness that ad fraud isn’t a victimless crime run by bots and algorithms. Those who profit from ad fraud often have links to terrorism and organised crime, while the amount spend on fraudulent activity could be enough to keep some people in a job.

For the first time in a long time, publishers have a very clear positioning argument to put in front of advertisers: pay an ad exchange and have no idea where your money will go or where your ads will end up, or buy premium inventory from us with guaranteed quality eyeballs.

We’ll probably see a few more ad tech fraud headlines before the end of the year. Some reports may prompt an immediate shift — although given how many advertisers quietly slip back onto platforms they’ve pulled out of, such as the Facebook or YouTube boycotts, I wouldn’t hold your breath. The fear of missing out may be more of a pull than the concern of wasted millions.

Content discoverability relies even less on the content than before.

This should be relatively obvious to anyone who works in SEO and social media. Content (by which I mean brand output on channels that aren’t really above the line advertising) is not — and has never been — build it and they will come.

But this year, senior content roles will change even further, possibly to the point where heads of content are more akin to a hybrid of a head of product and head of brand role than just content production.

Content has always been a means to an end. It’s also an incredibly expensive resource suck if you’re not entirely clear what that end is or even how to get there. Just producing content — even good quality content — isn’t a recipe for success. At least good quality content produces a better class of digital landfill.

Brands who do content well in 2021 will have leaders who understand that content is about much more than just the output. That Google’s focus for the year is on tech and user experience as much as it is quality of content. That it’s not enough to create an engaging new newsletter, podcast or data visualisation: people have to know about it to find it useful, and to ultimately provide a benefit to the business.

Essentially, senior content leaders have to have a strategic focus and be clear on their distribution tactics, positioning and ultimately end goal (traffic or simply creating content and then paying to get people to look at that content probably isn’t really the best use of budget most of the time).

Yes, exceptional creative content should cut through to some degree. But it will only succeed if you’re clear why you want the content to cut through and how you’ll get people to see it in the first place.

And if your agency suggests the solution to your content strategy is to create more content and open a new social channel, put the account up to pitch. It’ll be cheaper and a better use of your time and budget.

Anything else?

As ever, these ‘trends’ are just a snapshot of what I think may be interesting in 2021.

There’s a lot of fascinating technical developments — I quite like the idea of etailers giving you a breakdown of your carbon footprint — or just simple shifts in thinking because a few early adopters have started to make a lot of money.

For example, I’m fascinated by how Substack will evolve its platform, but I’m sceptical that everyone will be able to make good money from a newsletter. I’m even more fascinated by how Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox will evolve.

And not everything will be good. Deplatforming hate speech from social platforms is still a game of whack-a-mole and the horses bolted from the stable door a long time ago (sorry not sorry for a horrifically mixed metaphor). The fragmentation of the internet is inevitable as more walled gardens appear around states, technology and communities.

Really, we’re all just trying to get through the mess that is the world right now. The above is food for thought. It may or may not be relevant to you or your work. If you can get through 2021 sane, doing good, effective work, and having a bit of fun experimenting with something new then you’ll probably be doing better than a large percentage of people. Good luck. We’ll need it.

Newsletters were, on the face of it, an unlikely candidate to be 2020’s hot new medium. They’ve been around pretty much since the internet was invented and are possibly one of the least sexy formats available, partly because if you make the design too fancy, you’ll probably break a few inboxes.

And yet, here we are. Journalists and thought leaders are setting up their own subscription services, firing off regular emails with long hot takes. Publishers are doubling down on email subscription over social media. The humble inbox is having its moment in the sun as marketers realise there’s more to Gmail than some cheap display advertising and firing spray and prays into your inbox.

But if newsletters are no longer the past, they’re also not quite the future either (Adam Tinworth has a good piece around this).

Newsletters are certainly not saviours of journalism and a lot of new companies or even solo writers who are building a business around newsletter comms will probably fail. At the same time, there’s a very good reason why publishers should continue to prioritise the humble inbox.

The plus side: taking back control

Let’s unpick this a bit more. Firstly, the positives — and there are a lot of reasons why newsletters are here to stay and form an important part of the publisher ecosystem.

The main advantage here is that newsletters give the sender control over their first party data, even if the production is done on a third party platform. After years of trying to rely on the likes of Facebook who were at best indifferent and, at worst, actively harmful to publishers, news brands are discovering they had a potentially profitable and easy-to-active source of clicks at their fingertips.

It’s much like the teen high school movie where the heroine realises the popular school jock isn’t all he’s cracked up to be, and the shy introverted nerd who’s spent the whole film being ignored is actually a much better fit.

Newsletters allow publishers — and individuals — the opportunity to build a direct 1-to-1 relationship with their users. They own their customer data and have control over distribution and how the newsletter is seen (algorithmic inboxes aside).

And that direct relationship allows for a very classic tactic: convince your loyalists to pay more for a premium product, while enticing a more casual buyer in with a lower tier cheaper or free offering, the ladder of which can be made profitable by adverts and sponsored content.

As long as you can manage subscriber churn and have a compelling enough proposition to keep people opening and clicking then it’s relatively straightforward to do well and drive a lot of value from your audience for relatively little cost on both sides (ok, it’s not quite that simple. But more simple than trying to work out how much of your programmatic inventory is being clicked on by a human). Newsletters have the potential to be a stand-out star on the P&L sheet.

It’s also incredibly easy for individuals with profile — star journalists, freelancers, thought leaders, LinkedIn hustle-porn bros — to leverage their followings and networks to create a relatively stable income source. Even as an individual, if you’ve got 50 subscribers all paying $10 a month, it’s at least $500 you can plot into your monthly budget. In a world of freelancing that can sometimes make the difference between a good month and having to eat beans for a week. Be big enough to get a small amount of sponsorship and you’ve got a potentially strong and steady income stream.

Everybody else is doing it so why can’t we?

But the same elements that make it so appealing to individuals are also the very reasons it will be tough for the majority of solo entrants. Marketing professor Mark Ritson’s “Virtual Yoga With Gary” sums this up well. His wife’s yoga teacher went fully remote during lockdown but hadn’t accounted for the fact that he was now competing with a large number of other virtual yoga teachers, as opposed to doing 1–2–1 sessions at home.

There’s a super low barrier to entry. Anybody can start up their newsletter for a small monthly fee, and knock up a half decent template with the help of a free Canva account. It’s much easier than podcasting or YouTubing, both of which require more time, equipment and a specialist skillset.

This means that you’re not the only game in town. It’s the Brick Lane of brand building. There’s a lot of curry houses and the customer can be very discerning where they want to spend their money (if they’re smart, they’ll take a tube to Tooting Broadway instead for a cheaper, superior curry).

Theoretically this shouldn’t be a problem. There’s enough people and newsletters to go round, surely?

Well, yes and no.

Ultimately even a $5 a month payment is still a $5 a month payment. Add in the likes of a Netflix and Spotify subscription, plus an online subscription to your news publication of choice. Suddenly that $5 becomes easy to cut.

Your superstar freelance journalist is suddenly no longer competing for byline space with other writers. They’re having to convince their readers that they offer better value than signing up to The Economist, while also combating subscriber churn and acquiring new readers. All on a fraction of the budget, resources and time of their bigger competitors for attention, both in and out of category.

There’s also the need to hold the subscriber attention as well. Newsletters aren’t competing for space in your inbox. They’re competing for your time and attention versus almost anything else you can think of filling your day with.

There’s plenty of good free newsletters from individuals and news publications. These freebies also compete for a reader’s attention. It only takes a few weeks for the solo subscription newsletter to drop out of reading habit — maybe due to a couple of iffy weeks, or a couple of free newsletters that cover the same area better — and that’s $10 of income gone.

Big publications can weather the ups and downs of subscriber churn a little easier given their large subscriber numbers, but the solo newsletter auteur is likely to be running on tighter margins.

So, to recap, our newly empowered freelancer has to define a clear brand positioning that’s more compelling than the established competition, keep front of mind for new subscribers, provide better content than lower or zero priced entrants into the market and keep a clear eye on profit, loss and time spent creating the newsletter. Given that time is, quite literally, money to many freelancers, an ineffective or low impact newsletter could actually be costing them cash overall.

That’s a steep learning curve for any young marketer, let alone a journalist or thought leader who perhaps isn’t quite as commercially-minded as the competition.

Where individual-led newsletters may be heading

Of course this is a little simplistic, just as it’s dangerous to made broad, sweeping assumptions about any kind of marketing. There are newsletters that provide more value than just subscription and revenue.

Tech consultant Martin Bryant’s daily Big Revolution newsletter is just as much about showcasing his knowledge and abilities to land bigger, profitable consulting work as it is to drive revenue through the newsletter. Then there’s analyst Benedict Evans, who offers a premium and free version of his no-frills newsletter, but also can use it to promote an exclusive $500-a-head limited space event, in the same way that Time Out, say, can push live events (at least, it can when there’s no global pandemic).

But all of this requires a lot of effort and hard work. It will be no surprise to see many well-written popular newsletters crease publication because the creator has neither the time nor the money (or is not generating enough money to make it worthwhile) to keep publishing. It’s why I’d expect, as ever, to see consolidation in the hands of publishers and bigger names. It’s what happens with every free-to-entry comms platform.

This isn’t to say that newsletter creators should shut down immediately. There’s enough space for well-written, entertaining independent newsletters that are financially viable for their authors, while many people will simply create out of love and enjoyment.

And newsletters will not go away as a key part of publishing. They’ll evolve, as any medium does, but they offer a lot of value to those who do it right. They won’t save journalism, but they can help. As ever, it’ll be toughest for the smaller players. But wasn’t that ever the case. Very few shiny new objects remain truly egalitarian for a substantial period of time.

Why Journalists May Have a Big Problem With Making Money Through Newsletters was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It seems somewhat superfluous to write about marketing issues in a time of Coronavirus. LinkedIn is a depressing mixture of friends and acquaintances who have seen projects cancelled, jobs vanish, and everyday bills become a real problem, mixed with pseudo-struggle bros who are telling us to hustle harder because that’s what struggle bros do at times of crisis.

But throughout the sheer madness and unpredictability of the past weeks, I keep coming back to one key tenet of the working world I inhabit: tone.

The world is a confusing place at the best of times, before you throw in a global pandemic. People are scared. They want clarity. They want to be spoken to like a human. Even if you can’t, in all honesty, tell them everything’s going to be alright, you can reassure.

Tone goes a long way to making a difference. It can make a politician like UK chancellor Rishi Sunak appear calming and statesmanlike (the bar here has, admittedly, been set quite low in recent years), or it can add to the confusion, as Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s press conferences have occasionally done.

And for brands? Well, it’s a tricky one. Even brands who have a clear tone of voice will have approached the crisis with trepidation. Sensitivities are heightened in these times, with previously innocuous adverts understandably getting pulled. Suddenly, a population isolated becomes a population spending more time on social media, or perhaps more inclined to idly flick through branded emails they wouldn’t usually open. That doesn’t necessarily mean these people want to hear from your brand, though, especially if what you have to say is irrelevant or insensitive..

Should a previously irreverent brand become more serious? What about a more reserved brand who might want to reflect that humour has become part of a coping strategy with isolation? A well-intended, but poorly crafted and ill thought through social post is only a clickbait headline away.

Even then, a lot of people will find tone and attitude divisive. A local cafe or bar’s jaunty promotion to shop local is another person’s horror at a call to ignore social distancing. Personally, I’ve found the tone of Australian sports clubs a little unsettling over the last two weeks. While the codes kept playing, the tone felt at odds with the world, as if the virus was similar to a waterlogged pitch. Even with the shutdown, the warrior-like sports tone feels a bit… inconsequential to events on the news. That might just be me though.

Getting the tone right in 1–1 communications

There’s a few areas where tone can be especially jarring. The first is the unsolicited conversations via email. Brands who you barely remember interacting with, brands you’re pretty sure you’ve never interacted with, and brands who five minutes ago were bombarding you with “Gary, don’t miss out on your 30% discount for a product that’s literally going to be useless to you over the coming weeks” are now all solemnly queuing up to tell you that they take your health and the Coronavirus very seriously. In one instance, I’ve had an email that simply told me that the wellbeing of this brand’s customers and staff was paramount at this difficult time. Nothing else. It’s good to know you’re concerned about a serious matter, it would be better to know what you’re doing.

[As an aside, I feel particularly bad for most companies at a time like this. I’ve done a lot of crisis comms, and knowing what tone to strike is hard. It’s even harder if you don’t know if your company will survive or if you’ll have a job next week, and when you’re being pushed to get something, anything out.].

Even then, when there is something relevant to say, the tone in which you say it can be tough, as insurance and travel brands are finding it. It’s reminiscent of a scene in the drama Deutschland 86, where an East German party official attempts to write to his estranged partner to inform them of their son’s death, but ends up repeatedly screwing up the note, as he can’t find the right words.

Those who do get it right manage to strike the right brand of empathy, acknowledgement and clarity. I particularly like this email from Rest Superannuation, sent out after the government announced that Australian citizens could access their super due to the COVID-19 crisis.

“The government announced a new emergency measure for people in financial difficulty, to withdraw super of up to $10,000 in this 2019–20 financial year, and another $10,000 in the 2020–21 financial year. Applications open mid-April and you’ll need to apply direct via the Australian Government’s myGov website.

“We’d encourage you to consider accessing your super as a last resort only, due to the effect it could have on your long-term goals; as well as the impact on any insurance you may have if your balance should fall too low. If you do need to access your super, we’re ready to support you.”

It’s clear — it tells you what the situation is and what you can do. It highlights the risks in taking this course of action. But it’s also non-judgemental, and the underlying tone accounts for the fact it can’t possibly know the current financial situation of all of its members. Above all, it feels like a human wrote it — it’s still a formal relationship, but it sounds considered and reassuring, when it would have been very easy to sound too jaunty, stern, or inconsiderate.

Getting a consistency in tone

The second issue of tone comes when there’s an inconsistency across channels, most often between the language on public channels (often the website and social media), private communication like emails, and the times when you need to speak to a human, such as call centres.

This isn’t a Coronavirus issue — disjointed customer experience, often due to departments working in silos, has been an issue for brands ever since somebody uttered the phrase “I think we need a website” back in the 90s. It’s why CX agencies and consultants will still thrive. And at times of crisis, an inconsistent tone really comes to the fore.

It’s the travel brand that has beautiful, friendly evocative copy or videos on their website, emails that feel flat and written by a robot, and a customer service team who stick so rigidly to a script that all empathy goes out the window.

Many customers will be confused, perhaps even scared. At best, they need clarity or have a simple task that needs doing. At worst, their income could have vanished overnight and the simple act of contacting a service provider becomes stressful and depressing in its own right.

It’s why I like elements of the Rest example highlighted earlier. It’s non-judgemental, doesn’t try to be too clever with language, reassures, and doesn’t presume to know your state.

But an email is only one part of tone across a company. Rest’s well-balanced email tone would fall apart if it wasn’t consistent with the website copy, marketing copy and a call centre experience. It’s why this is such a hard tonal issue to solve — multiple departments all need to be pulling in the same direction, and to take their cues from the brand team, who will own tone of voice. That’s much easier said than done.

One of the best exercises I ever undertook when I was in-house at Direct Line Group, was to give regular tone and communication updates and training to the social media customer service and claims teams.

We did regular writing checks and exercise to get the teams to think about how they’d speak differently across different brands, and co-developed rules of engagement that helped the team understand where and when to flex language, especially when faced with a distressed customer. There was also a one-page laminate sheet for each brand with a quick guide to how and how not to speak in the tone of voice.

Granted, tone never solves every problem. But when you’re dealing with people who need reassurance, opening the conversation and continuing with the right tone can be incredibly important to retaining trust.

Getting your social media tone right

It’s also worth taking time to consider social media comms as a whole. If something will go badly tonally wrong, this is probably the place where it will go wrong. It’s also why a good community manager is vital — and needs support. It’s a stressful role at the best of times, without the pressure of a global pandemic.

For an industry that’s often built around reacting to trends and creating content and adverts that are designed to catch the eye and entertain, and can sometimes operate a bit autonomously from other teams, COVID-19 presents a particularly unique challenge.

During normal times of a crisis, the received wisdom is to dial it down: check for anything scheduled that might seem a bit insensitive, row back on certain type of posts, and return to normal after a short hiatus that allows the crisis, whether one of your brand’s own making or completely incidental, to move on.

But these aren’t normal times. The Coronavirus crisis and shutdown looks set to go on for months. The definition of socially acceptable and social norms are being temporarily overwritten. Culture has rapidly changed as much of the world adjusts to isolation and distancing.

The pressure internally to continue to say something, to keep top of mind and garner social vanity metrics, and to keep selling is something a lot of social media managers will have to grapple with. What was a previously suitable light-hearted tone and everyday tactics need reconsidering.

Unsurprisingly, you will get a few clunking missteps. BMW’s Tweet trying to shoehorn Coronavirus terminology managed to achieve a rare double whammy of being both nonsensical and insensitive. That’s at the extreme end. Many social media managers, to borrow a cliche, need to figure out their new normal and what that tone looks like. All while balancing with the reality that, for some, it’s entirely conceivable their own roles could cease to exist.

Even at sensitive and frantic times on social media, it’s worth carving aside some workshop time with key stakeholders, and those who might be a little less sensitive to social needs. Campaigns and work still needs to go out, but it can wait an hour or two for some sense checking.

This means asking some of these questions: What’s the current tone? Is it appropriate? What are the worst case scenarios for the brand? How would you react on social? What do you customers expect of you? What does society expect of you? Are your visuals reflective of the current world we live in? Do they need to be? What’s the biggest risk if your tone is wrong?

It won’t solve everything, but even an hour in a room discussing these questions should give a degree of clarity and confidence for those involved at every step on the social chain. That said, even if everybody agrees, it will need one team or individual to own and guard these new rules. Given the external nature of this tone, it will probably end up somewhere between PR, brand or social, depending on the organisation.

So what does this mean in practice

It’s unlikely that one piece of misplaced tone will trigger mass desertion of your brand. Providing your missteps aren’t too heinous — and your company survives — you’ll probably be ok.

But companies who do manage an appropriate tone that’s consistent with the brand, and who have a strong customer experience, are slightly more likely to be in a better position when the Corona crisis does eventually start to fade.

After all, it’s better to be trying to rebuild with a happy, loyal customer base who haven’t been put off by insensitive communications, than one who are at best ambivalent and who are open to switching due to a perceived lack of care and empathy. This won’t be the only factor, but a poor tone can exacerbate issues, especially if it’s followed by a spot of doubling down on the initial point of contention.

Ultimately, much of the advice pre-Coronavirus still stands. You’ve no idea how people are feeling. Read the room, or in this case, the country. Ensure you’re clear and that all internal stakeholders are on the same page. And have one team leading the tone and messaging. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get it completely right, but it means you’re less likely to get your tone so very, very wrong.

Why striking the right tone matters in a world of uncertainty was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I first started writing thoughts for the year ahead near the start of the decade, there was a lot of optimism and excitement. It focused on social media because that was going to change the world, right? But as the years have gone on there are, if you will, two trends for trend articles.

The first is that for all the advancement in technology, it currently feels like we’re at stage where social platforms and tech advancements in and of themselves aren’t particularly exciting. Sure, Instagram Shopping will undoubtedly have an impact, and will help new brands grow, but beyond this it’s hard to get too excited about another adtech tweak or Facebook attempt to clone the latest hit feature.

The second is that trends at the moment feel more cultural than technologically driven. Smartphone ownership is plateauing, and while there’s always new approaches to problems and more efficient use of technology, we’re now at a stage where a new generation has grown up with what’s possible and is figuring out how to bend available technology to their will, while older millennials, Gen X and above are more comfortable in figuring out how to adapt to this new world, and are imposing their own values on it.

The result is a fascinating melding of cultures and attitudes. Whereas community managers have been sidelined in social for performance marketing in recent years, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand online sub-communities. The two should meet together in harmony, as qualitative meets quantitative.

And sometimes, just sometimes, a winning tactic involves lip syncing a cat to trap music. Now where did I put that Tik Tok strategy?

That aside, here’s a number of areas that it’s worth paying attention to in 2020.

Brands will be forced to choose where they stand on social issues

Brand purpose was one of 2019’s biggest buzzwords. The internet was awash with articles claiming the way to win was to give your brand a purpose and ensure you were seen to be giving back to society. Various decks and research claimed anywhere between 70% to 85% of millennials wanted a brand to have purpose. In short, a lot.

So it would be easy to jump on the bandwagon and say brand purpose should be the focus of all marketers at the start of the new decade. For some brands, it may make strategic sense. But this trend is far more interesting than just positioning a breakfast cereal as the answer to child poverty. It’s a case of the strange culture war that inhabits the internet, seeps through into the media and forces a brand to make a stand whether they like it or not.

There’s a few elements to this. The first is the perception that a company fits on a particular side of a political spectrum. So, if your leadership team has a prominent supporter of right wing politics on the board, then expect criticism and boycotts from the left, and vice versa. Often the perception that a company has a different political stance is enough to attract criticism.

Secondly, are the incidentals. At the start of the year, I was working with the team responsible for the community management of a relatively popular wine brand. As with any brand, I recommended doing a crisis management session to plot our responses. “Why?” asked the account manager. “What could possibly require crisis management on this brand?” How about the leader of a far right political party pictured drinking this brand? Or the bottle being used in a sex act on reality TV?

These are extreme examples, but not completely improbable. And any response to either are potentially loaded, while saying nothing may create a vacuum. Picking the right response takes a lot of skill.

Finally, those brands attempting to jump on the brand purpose bandwagon are more likely than ever to be accused of hypocrisy. So while Gillette released an advert taking on toxic masculinity, critics were quick to point out that the company charged more for their women’s razor than the men’s version.

And while Nike won plaudits for their advert with Colin Kaepernik, they also quietly pulled their Houston Rockets merchandise from their China stores after the NBA franchise’s owner, Daryl Morey, expressed his support for the Hong Kong protests.

Just as it would be easy to talk about brand purpose, so it would be easy to take a moral high ground against all brands. But being a global business is complex and nuanced. Social media isn’t. A lot of business decisions will annoy somebody.

The big question brands need to ask is who are we comfortable with annoying and what’s the consequences if we do. Gregg’s are a good example of a brand who got their positioning spot on with the launch of their vegan sausage roll. They knew it would attract criticism from non-vegans, they didn’t waiver, their responses were well judged without necessarily pushing their stance on anybody. The result: profits increased for a third year in a row, as a result of attracting new audiences.

So what does this mean?

There’s no telling where a crisis may come from and how it could catch fire on social. Similarly, brand purpose campaigns may come from good intentions, but if the campaign’s values aren’t shared by the organisations, it may do more damage in the long term.

Ultimately, the best way to mitigate is for brands to do plenty of planning with the PR and social teams. It won’t stop a crisis brewing, but it will stress test campaigns. And brands who know where they stand on issues without necessarily putting those issues front and centre (although there’s nothing to stop them if they choose to do so) are likely to emerge in a much healthier place at the end of the year.

The internet will retreat into communities

If there’s a companion piece to the threat brands face on social, it’s the increasing lack of civility on the platform. Zuckerberg and Facebook famously declared it their mission to connect the world. Except it seems that a lot of the world doesn’t want connecting that much.

So while Facebook, Instagram, et al still can deliver reach at scale, some of the most interesting developments come from more closed communities. Facebook and LinkedIn Groups, Slack channels, special interest YouTube and Twitch channels, subreddits, communities that congregate around relevant hashtags. It’s much more comfortable and enjoyable to hang out with people who share your interests than arguing with people who really hate what you love.

Yes, the internet in 2020 looks a lot like the internet in 2002, except with a bit more scale, where forums and LiveJournal were the order of the day. The main “chatroom” (in this case the big social platforms) may be a place where everyone can join in, but it’s not necessarily where everybody wants to be. The 1:9:90 rule of interaction is still very much alive.

This has a number of fascinating consequences, not all of them good. By seeing a retreat to safe(r) spaces online, it increases the likelihood of groupthink and intolerance to opposing viewpoints or those who don’t understand the world you inhabit.

This has always existed — think punk subculture in the 70s, for example, or almost any sports rivalry — but the internet helps amplify and reinforce these views at scale. We’ve already seen how deadly this can be with incel culture or 8Chan message boards. How culture will evolve when groups are retreating from a more public discourse will be a defining question of the next decade.

Given that this article is ostensibly about marketing, we should probably touch on the implications for marketing. On one hand, with certain platforms, the retreat to communities makes it even easier to target adverts by interest, if the data is right. That’s fine up to a point.

But, to somewhat paraphrase Byron Sharp, you’re not going to grow your brand by just getting your loyalists to buy more, assuming they can even buy more. And that will be one of the challenges in 2020. Social media is becoming more fragmented than ever. Reach is available, but communities are where your brand may well take off first.

Finding a way to balance both the power of the community at a granular level with the reach needed to grow the mental availability of a brand will be something a lot of markers will wrestle with. Many will probably waste a lot of money in the process.

Artificial intelligence will take over some copywriting (sort of)

This is a prediction that should terrify me, as a writer. The start of this decade will see an increase in AI writing copy. This has already been a growing trend over previous years, but the end of 2019 saw it become mainstream. The BBC, for example, used machine-generated journalism to publish a news story for every constituency result in the recent general election.

And when you look at companies such as Phrasee, the narrative is clear. Human copywriting is inefficient. There’s hundreds of ways to write copy. Machines eliminate the inconvenient inconsistencies that humans are prone to, will understand how to write in tone of voice, be guided by data not the gut and will increase efficiency while keeping costs down.

At this stage, if you’re a copywriter, it would be tempting to chuck your pen (or laptop) in the bin, and give it all up for a job in McDonalds, as it’s clear that’s all we’re good for. Technology beats humans yet again and marketers and agencies can high five the cost savings by putting all the expensive writers out of work.

But before we all start writing Medium articles bemoaning the lost art of copywriting, here’s why I’m optimistic (up to a point) about the rise of AI in copy.

In some respects, the likes of Phrasee are correct. Copy, in certain circumstances, is inefficient. Email subject lines, for example, are a vital piece of copy that are so often absolutely dreadful. If I had a dollar for every disagreement I’ve had over subject line copy, I’d be able to install a top of the range wine cellar.

AI copy here can be incredibly useful. It can test hundreds of variations that a human copywriter simply wouldn’t have the time, ability or inclination to crank out. It can refine performance and give valuable insights into what words resonate to increase open rates.

Or on social media, performance advert copy can be quickly optimised towards the best results. Given that social copy can often be the last thing written and clients or agencies often have no time or budget to spend on honing the writing, this is again useful.

But there’s a couple of caveats here. Firstly, the copy is functional, not creative. Secondly, somebody will have had to write the original copy that the AI learns from. Thirdly, it still needs a copy editor to review.

The BBC’s general election reporting is a good example of human and machine working well together. AI copywriting allowed the corporation to quickly write hundreds of reports that could never have been done by human writers at scale in the time needed. These reports worked well as the data points were consistent and could follow a template. The same could be said for a lot of sports reporting.

But the machine still needed an editor to check the copy. And a machine couldn’t provide a detailed analysis of why Wrexham returning a Conservative MP or Labour taking Putney from the Tories was a significant event and what this meant for the country as a whole.

And if you’re using machines to write sport reports, you could never do justice to the insanity and drama that unfolded in the recent Wolves versus Manchester City match. A computer report would note that City’s goalkeeper was sent off after 10 minutes and Matt Doherty scored the winner for Wolves late in the game to complete a comeback from 2–0 down. But this doesn’t tell the whole story.

And as for creativity, a computer may come up with taglines based on data. Some of them may even work. But it’s doubtful they could have written KFC’s famous FCK apology or Wonderbra’s Hello Boys. These pieces of copy worked because there was an intimate understanding of the emotions behind the words. That will be much harder for AI to generate.

So, in summary, machines are useful for quick tasks or tasks that require a large volume of copy testing. Editors will only become more useful. And, theoretically, AI should free up copywriters to work on the more complex, in-depth, challenging pieces of work.

I say theoretically, as you’ll undoubtedly read articles about how company X sacked all their copywriters and increased efficiency by 75%. But, like so much copy written by machine, it will lack context. What does this actually mean for company X? At this stage, only a human can write that article. Don’t throw your laptop in the bin and fill out that Maccas application form just yet.

Too many TV bundles will lead to a lot of streaming casualties

The death of TV has been a pretty consistent prediction over the past 20 years. And while TV definitely won’t die in 2020, the off-screen battles for streaming supremacy could be bloodier than Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding. What will be left, though, will look an awful lot like TV. Just… different.

In America, almost every network is launching a subscription streaming service. Across the globe, traditional broadcasters are rushing to monetise their back catalogues and capitalise on the thirst for new content. By the end of the year, there will be so many streaming options, viewers will be spoilt for choice. Not to mention overwhelmed and a little bit baffled.

The average American household subscribes to 3.5 streaming services. In Australia, it’s 1.9 (although both of those figures are pre-Disney+ launch). There are more streaming services than people are willing to pay for, or have hours in the day to watch. And the streaming services are much easier to cancel than cable TV.

That means spending more on content — whether back catalogues or originals — to get people into the service. As film producer Jonathan Tamplin told the Financial Times, “We have doubled the number of series from seven years ago and we haven’t grown the audience at all.” Streaming is probably not the most sustainable industry right now, and there will be casualties.

Take the case of Eleven Sports in the UK. The streaming service had an ambition to be the Netflix of sports, but had to relinquish expensive European football rights after failing to attract enough users. Given that it costs a lot just to keep up with all the places that offer the Premier League, there simply aren’t enough users or hours to watch the content. Eventually, people will look at what offers the best value and content and chop and change according to the release schedules.

Cable TV companies are the most vulnerable, although that in itself isn’t a new trend. And while the number of subscription TV services will continue to rise, in a few years time, the future of TV will look a lot like… TV.

If 2020 is a year of unbundling, 2021 will be a year of rebundling, as those who struggle to attract numbers will team up. And expect some form of revised electronic program guide (EPG), as if the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ have an issue, it’s finding and deciding what to watch. The user experience of traditional cable TV isn’t great, but even the personalisation of Netflix isn’t the best way of tackling the problem.

The level of cultural capital on TV shows will be interesting to assess at the end of year. The idea of shared live cultural moments has been challenged by the rise of streaming. Why wait when you can binge, although shows such as Line of Duty have proved an exception.

It’s why big sporting events are possibly one of the few bankers, and even this is facing problems — witness the NBA’s decline in overall viewership despite having one of the most engaging social media approaches of all the big sports, although expect esports to also start to creep into the category.

Ultimately, though, TV definitely won’t die in 2019. It’s still one of the few mediums that guarantees brand building reach as part of the media mix. But long-term, audiences have made it quite clear that if there’s a TV platform that doesn’t involve adverts, they’ll be very happy to pay for it. That in itself is a challenge. Perhaps 2021’s trend will be a doubling down on product placement.

Podcasts will consolidate as independents get left behind

It may have taken a decade and a half, but 2019 was the year podcasting truly crossed into the mainstream. Assorted predictions have podcasting worth $1bn or over this year. Quite who gets that billion, though, is another matter entirely.

If you look at the Australian podcast ranker, a lot of the top 30 podcasts have very familiar publishers and names: the majority of them are either radio shows or an extension of radio shows. Or have a major publisher like News Corp behind them.

As Juleyka Lantingua-Williams at Nieman Lab writes, “Podcast hobbyists will experience 2020 as a year of reckoning. While some will be happy to produce an episode whenever they can find the time, others will leave full-time jobs and risk it all in podcasting.”

In many respects, independent podcasting mirrors what has already occurred in the blogging and shortform sphere. The really good independents either get snapped up by bigger publishers or become brands in their own right. Others find life gets in the way, and retreat into doing what they can when they can.

For those in the middle, who earn a little bit but not enough to compensate them for their efforts, it’s an unpleasant place to be. Listens and downloads will probably decline as the amount of hours available to listen to podcasts will go towards the big names and celebrities. What was a hobby becomes a grind. Expect several well-loved podcasts to stop producing because the joy or time-money ratio is no longer there (the same could well apply to YouTubers).

This is a shame, because if there’s one thing the internet needs, it’s a diverse, different set of voices that stand out from the pack and don’t adhere to the same old format as everybody else, because they think that’s what podcasting should be. The really creative, interesting work will come from podcasters who either don’t need or don’t want to make money.

So expect niche series (a podcast on every Slipknot song, for example), micro-casting with short episodes no more than five minutes long, three hour long podcasts, fiction, documentaries that aren’t true crime. These will come from podcasters who are frustrated with the concept of three men shooting the breeze in the studio.

And a couple of podcasting predictions that won’t happen. Smart speakers like Google Home and Alexa won’t usher in a new wave of podcasting — discovery and playing is too complex and most episodes are too long, but microcasts may become more exclusive or popular in the platform, as it’s a condensed hit of information.

Secondly, there will not be a Netflix of podcasting. Spotify, Apple and Google will continue to dominate, and will produce some of their own shows, but many will be available on multiple platforms. Apple will get squeezed from Spotify in terms of personalisation and discovery and Google in terms of search. If Tim Cook is really interested, Apple could regain their crown as podcast kings. They probably won’t do that either though.

Esports will take a greater slice of the marketing budget

If there’s one trend it would be nice to see the back of in 2020, it’s the continued obsession with reaching a millennial audience and lumping in generic insights about how this audience want experiences or purpose and repeating this ad naseum. But if you have identified millennials (the oldest of whom are about to turn 40 in a couple of years) and especially Gen Z as your key audience, it would also be nice if marketers would pay a little more attention to esports.

Optimistically, I’ll predict they will. This is largely because Twitch are investing heavily in client solutions and YouTube is increasingly selling gaming as part of its solution to clients. And the numbers are significant.

According to Goldman Sachs, esports raked in $869 million in revenue in 2018 and that’s set to triple by 2022. PWC identified $277 million in revenue through sponsorships. By 2022, over 557 million of us will watch esports, with 205 million of these describing themselves as esports enthusiasts.

Germany already sees the benefits — they’re offering visas for esports players as they look to establish themselves as a major European hub. It also offers advertisers a way to meld both traditional sports sponsorship and more creative ways of tackling the problem. Want to put on the world’s biggest concert? Fortnite is probably your best bet.

Not only do the likes of Fortnite offer marketing opportunities, the audiences are large and global. Up to two million tuned in for the game’s World Cup. Twitch has 15 million daily active user (although not all may stream for a significant amount of time). Here in Australia, one in four have watched esports in some form. And on occasions, Australia soccer’s E League got more terrestrial viewers than the A League, although this doesn’t take into account people who streamed both leagues.

Ironically, the one thing that could really take esports to the next level is a major TV deal, into converting casual or non-gamers to the drama of sport. But then again, as Twitch and YouTube become easier to stream at home, perhaps it doesn’t need it. Come the end of the year, living room battles could be between the football World Cup and Fortnite, FIFA or Call Of Duty.

The Internet of Things will cause a lot of issues for consumers that are all too human

From fridges to thermostats, wearables to doorbells, manufacturers have become obsessed with connecting devices to the internet and apps, regardless of whether they’re needed or not.

But as the connected home grows so does the risk of relying on connected devices, not just from hackers but from the manufacturers.

One of the biggest problems for smart home devices is that the tend to be selling a big, one-off purchases that aren’t replicated for many years. So how do they make money after the sale?

Data is one obvious area, but how comfortable are people in letting these devices know everything about your life. For example, the contents of your fridge could indicate allergies or intolerances, which would be of interest to health insurers. Is this a trade off that we’re comfortable with.

And what of the companies that can’t make money or go out of business? “Bricking” expensive devices won’t be popular with consumers but is likely to be more common as some of the more independent or lower end of market devices simply shut down, or are acquired and shuttered.

This happened with Pebble, which now has a community of enthusiasts dedicated to keeping the software and hardware alive. Expect more communities that aren’t entirely sustainable to spring up around loved but failed devices.

And what of manufacturers who simply refuse to update the white goods software, intentionally brick their machine and leave the user with an expensive home essential that serves no purpose but to take up space. Expect one or two companies to take this approach to maximise profits and to get hit with a massive backlash, especially as earlier devices get older and harder to support from a software perspective.

Ultimately, there will be two winners from the smart home market. The first is any company that heavily invests in brand trust. If this company shows signs it won’t fold anytime soon, can be trusted not to brick their own device, keeps data secure and has a strong brand presence. It sounds simple but many brands in this space will fail to pull this off.

The second is the insurance industry. Where there’s risk, failure and expense, there’s an insurance product on the horizon. As more homes get fitted with smart devices, expect to see cyber and IoT insurance becoming either an essential add-on to home insurance, or a product in its own right.

After all, if a smart oven can try to cook a non-existent chicken at 3am in the morning, what happens when the device gets confused and ends up burning down your house? Or, as John C. Havens wrote, what happens when your AI enabled robot chef cooks the family cat as it offers the most nutritious meal available in the house.

There may be well a third winner: the media. As IOT horror stories become more common, these news stories make great click bait and in-depth investigations. Maybe your smart fridge might just save journalism.

And some quick hits

A few other thoughts I’ve not got time to expand on:

• Newspaper subscriptions won’t save the industry. Consumers won’t be willing to pay for multiple subscriptions and the cost per acquisition will be too high for many publishers. A bloodbath of those in the middle is coming.
• Facebook will be this decade’s Yahoo. It’ll still be widely used, but only as the gateway to something else. Engagement will seriously drop on the platform, as it tries to clone every successful feature from competitors. It’ll still be an effective way to reach people, but will be more of a shell and a gateway than a site within itself.
• Influencers will increasingly get called out on weird, inauthentic posts that only make sense to their filter bubble. The influencers who’ll continue to make money are the ones that still show a certain lifestyle, but have more of a depth to them. Expect a variation of #imperfectpost to be heavily used in 2020.
• Bitcoin won’t change the world.
• Climate change will affect the internet. Server heavy sites that use up a large amount of energy will be in Greta Thunberg’s sights at some point this year.

And that’s it. This decade is set to kick off in a state of flux. It promises to be interesting, never dull, and a tad pessimistic.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know.

But the naysayers who declare influencers the end of civilisation and the cheerleaders who will evangelically preach that your brand will die if it doesn’t shift all its budget into influencers are both wrong.

And if both sides really want to understand how to get the best out of influencer marketing, they could do worse than spending a few hours learning about early 20th century military officers.

More specifically, this means taking a trip to the Museum of Brands in London’s Ladbroke Grove. One of the main attractions is the Time Tunnel — a walk through the evolution of advertising and packaging. And at the start of the tunnel is a very classic approach to influencer marketing.

The early influencers

Featured prominently on cigarette packaging and advertising are a number of distinguished military officers who were, if you will, the celebrity influencers of their day. There’s no selfies but plenty of headshots exhorting the ordinary rank and file to make the brand their cigarette of choice.

Sure, there were no likes or engagement rates to measure — although some of the pictures could pass as early selfies — but the cigarette companies knew who made up their target market, in this case soldiers and their families, and knew the type of people who would could influence their target market by endorsing the product.

It’s not a million miles away from a celebrity endorsement or partnerships. And while the industry may split hairs about the value of celebrities versus influencers, the principle remains the same: somewhere, a marketer has decided that the individual in question has enough appeal with their target market to influence purchasing decisions.

So, whether they’re an officer promoting cigarette to the rank and file, a beauty blogger featuring a mascara line may, Lucille Ball and Alfred Hitchcock promoting Western Union or George Clooney sipping a Nespresso they’ll have been selected in planning as having influence with their target audience.

So, let’s put our budgets into influencers, yeah?

Not that this means we should start funnelling all our budgets into influencer marketing because we’re repeating a tried and tested tactic over 100 years old. Influencers are still a deeply problematic medium — although the same could be said for a lot of marketing tactics.

The problems with fake followers and comment pods to inflate engagement are well documented. Pricing is inconsistent and ROI is a lot harder to prove if you haven’t put good measurement parameters in place.

But probably the biggest issue is one that plagues all of social media: namely, social platforms sold their products as that they could solve and measure every part of the advertising funnel.

It’s the same with influencers. Expect them to build brand awareness, recall and recognition, drive consideration, while also hitting bottom-of-funnel direct response goals, and chances they’ll achieve none of the above. That isn’t an influencer issue, that’s a marketing team issue.

On the other hand, if you issue a clear brief with a single-minded objective and an understanding of how the impact of the work will be measured, and chances are you’ll be able to tell if their endorsement hit the mark.

Successful influencing

Influential doesn’t necessarily mean you need to turn to an ‘influencer’. And influencer shouldn’t be narrowed to just people with followers on Instagram. There’s plenty of individuals or groups who can influence your target market but have very little clout through their Instagram account.

Ultimately, it’s the objectives that dictate who should be attempting to influence your audience, what platform you should be focusing on, and how you should measure success. It’s still classic marketing at heart, whether it’s brand building or a good old fashioned call to action.

So when tech publications gleefully publish articles citing a recent report from analytics firm InfluencerDB about declining influencer engagement rates and musing on the death of sponsored posts, they’re just wrong.

You can build awareness or consideration without needing to show likes. And you can drive sales without needing to show on platform. It’s a useful proxy. But it’s not the killer metric. If you’ve got your objective set up and know how to measure it, then influencer engagement rates are probably no more than an interesting footnote.

Of course, none of this will stop brands throwing money down the drain with poorly thought through influencer campaigns. And it won’t stop individuals with questionable influence taking pay cheques with very little to prove at the end of it.

But if you spend any time at the Museum of Brands, you’ll probably spot one or two endorsements that fell very flat. Because, like modern day influencer marketing, they’ll always be a celebrity or a warrant officer for advertisers to waste money on. And that’s not a new phenomenon either.

What 20th century military officers can teach us about influencer marketing was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If cosmetics company Lush viewed success solely through the prism of hot takes in the marketing trade press then, by any measure, their recent announcement that the brand was quitting its main social accounts (or switching up, to use their terminology) would have paid for bonuses for all of its store staff and then some.

For example, over the last week, I’ve had the following headlines from The Drum and Marketing Week respectively delivered to my inbox: “Lush is the new anti-social gangster, and for good reason” and “Lush’s social media exodus is a risk too far.”

Congratulations Lush, you are 2019’s Yanny and Laurel. So let’s keep the hype machine loaded with a later and probably overly long lukewarm take.

Behind any internet phenomenon is always a slightly more complex explanation. Assuming the announcement wasn’t just a stunt — and Lush have form in this area — then it’s perfectly possible to say that yes, Lush has done a good job of tapping into a sentiment against social media from both marketers and consumers, yes, they are taking a big risk, yes, it’s a brave and bold move, and no, it probably won’t kill branded social media accounts as we know it.

It’s worth picking apart some of Lush’s main points. There’s a lot to admire, and a lot to be confused about, especially as Lush themselves appear to conflate several different aspects of social media in their cross-channel posting that read like it was written by a slightly grumpy strategist who’d yet to have their morning coffee, decided whatever the job was that morning, it wasn’t worth it, and somehow the note slipped through into policy.

We’ve probably all dreamed of being that strategist one day.

Won’t pay, won’t pay

Let’s start with Lush’s initial point that they were fed up of paying to both produce and distribute content through social, at the whims of Zuckerberg, et al.

“We are tired of fighting with algorithms, and we do not want to pay to appear in your newsfeed. So we’ve decided it’s time to bid farewell to some of our social channels and open up the conversation between you and us instead.⁣”

There’s a lot to like here, including a level of honesty. Plenty of brands still churn out significant volumes full of very average content that nobody wanted and few people will see unless they then add a few more dollars to the budget.

In essence, a lot of brands are already spending a lot of money of digital landfill, with no discernible effect, as the content is likely to be too bland to cut through or the distribution and targeting isn’t done at enough scale to shift brand awareness, while the actual content isn’t salesy enough to push the consumer at the bottom end of the funnel.

This isn’t to say that branded content, and especially branded social content, is a waste of time. Some is exceptionally well executed, with audience and objective in mind, and have a robust measurement team in place who can demonstrate meaningful results. And, to be fair to Lush, their content is generally well executed and often has clear objectives (and I don’t have sight of their results to pass judgement on the last point).

For these brands and advertisers, it’s understandable that social media is a point of contention. A lot of strategies I’ve written and seen emphasise less, not more social media, and flag other channels as equally, if not more, deserving of the budget. (That said, I’ve also written and seen strategies that make a compelling reason for always-on social.)

And who wouldn’t want to cut out the middleman and speak direct to consumers. It’s amazing how often email seems to be one of marketing’s hot discoveries of 2019. Building your own platform to own your customer data is rarely a bad idea.

But it still requires numbers. And even though Lush say only 6% of their followers are served their content in their newsfeeds, will they hit the equivalent numbers on Lush Player. Perhaps they may even reach fewer people who’ll watch for longer, which may ultimately be more valuable than 6% of people watching for three seconds.

Customer first?

What is confusing is, having said they want to open up the conversation with their community, then then announce that quitting social actually means quitting customer service on social.

“Over the next week, our customer care team will be actively responding to your messages and comments, after this point you can speak us via live chat on the website, on email at wecare@lush.co.uk and by telephone: 01202 930051.⁣⁣ This isn’t the end, it’s just the start of something new.⁣ #LushCommunity — see you there.”

This is where I have slightly more of an issue with Lush’s decision to pull away from social. Social media marketing and social media customer service are not the same thing, even if they have an impact on each other. They’re often run by different departments with different budgets and different objectives.

You can waste your budget producing dreadful content that nobody will ever see or care about, and can still have a highly efficient and cost-effective team servicing customers through social media that delivers tangible ROI for that department.

The cash saving is probably not insignificant for Lush. The overall customer experience, however, will be poorer in the short-term. Email and phone have their uses as a service channel, especially for complex queries, but if even a proportion of their 569,000+ followers on Instagram, say, regularly use social for customer service, then it becomes problematic and ceases to be a customer-friendly solution.

Again, the sentiment of not being overly-reliant on social media may be right, even if the proposed remedy isn’t. And to the slightly frazzled time-poor consumer who just wants to speak to somebody now about a simple issue without having to wait for an email or use up precious minutes sitting on hold.

Cutting out the middle man

The last part of Lush’s puzzle is setting up its own platform to communicate direct to their customers. It’s not clear what form this will take, but it does tick a lot of best practice boxes.

Ownership of customer data? Tick. Direct 1-to-1 communication with their most ardent and loyal fans? Tick. Control over distribution of message? Tick. Not reliant on social platforms changing their process with little warning? Tick. Reach and scale of message? Hang on a moment.

There’s a lot to commend in investing your budget in your own platform. As a long term play, it gives you a lot more control over your message and the levers you can pull to support marketing activity. However, for a retail-based brand such as Lush, there’s one major problem, namely building your own platform tends to be more effective as a retention ploy.

This isn’t a sector such as travel, automotive or insurance, where first party data can be used to target and convert prospects, or take existing customers and target them intelligently at a big ticket repurchase point. No, at the end of the day, Lush need to keep selling more bath bombs, cosmetics and beauty treatments on a regular basis.

This particular strategy can increase the spend of existing customers, which is no bad thing, but Lush will need to keep acquiring new sign-ups and interactions to grow and hit target, as well as achieving a minimum number of active subscribers, of whatever the metric will be from their own site, to achieve a positive ROI. That’s not easy. And, yes, social can play a role in topping up that acquisition number.

A subtler pivot

It’s also worth noting that Lush’s stores and staff will still continue to be active on social, so it’s not like the company is quitting completely. It’s simply decentralising, which may be where their strategy suggests they’ll get the best return. Good on them if that’s the case — few brands would be brave enough to pivot in this way.

But one final point about the Lush community that they want to foister. Lush has a habit of running campaigns that rely on advocacy and amplification across social media. While this doesn’t require paid media, it does mean their social channels can act as somewhat of a hub.

Whether Lush.com, and Lush Labs, their other owned properties, have enough of a user base to achieve the same effect, or if the average social media user can be bothered to swipe through to the website instead of casually engaging (never underestimate the power of lazy clicktivism) remains to be seen.

As many of others have said, Lush have taken a bold move. It’s not contradictory to wish them luck in their efforts to own their communications while still being sceptical that removing their main accounts from social will actually contribute much other than saving on the salaries of a few social media managers. File under watch with interest and no small amount of baited breath.

If there’s one sure-fire prediction in media and marketing, it’s the proliferation of predictions for the year ahead. Never one to break a trend, here’s a few thoughts of my own for 2019. I’ve written content and social predictions for the year ahead for several years now, but this year it seems quite limiting to just talk about these two disciplines: they’re part of bigger conversations and have been for some time now.

So without further ado, prepare to be well and truly whelmed by the predictions.

Plus ça change

If there’s one thought for 2019, it’s that it won’t look vastly dissimilar from 2018. Which isn’t really how you should start new year prediction articles.

Abuse will still be rife on social platforms. Facebook will continue to play fast and loose with our data. Shiny new objects will be sold in as solutions to problems that don’t really exist. But there’s not really a killer trend or piece of tech that feels like a must have for your strategy.

And when you look at major predictions over the past few years — Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, AI, voice and voice speakers, blockchain, Snapchat, and so on — you’d be hard pushed to say that any of these have caused a revolution, although AI or machine learning have evolved nicely. And please don’t say 2019 will be the year of the mobile. That happened a long time ago.

So despite numerous stats being thrown around that x% of shopping transactions will be done by voice or that x% of consumers want an AR experience (I’m sure they really don’t), it’s unlikely to cause a revolution. Electric scooters? Yeah, nah. Driverless cars? Been a thing for a while and will take a while for the effects to be truly felt, assuming regulation allows them onto the streets anytime soon.

But that doesn’t mean any of the above are dead or should be ignored. So AR is more likely to be continually embedded into shopping experiences. Machine learning should be standardised across comms, theoretically freeing up creative, strategy and tech teams to solve bigger and better problems (although this won’t stop a number of articles quoting marketers saying how much AI has cut their $CPWhatever and enabled them to dispense of an entire department).

There will always be experts who will shout loudly that if you don’t have a Tik Tok strategy to market to Gen Z your business will be dead within a year, but the real value comes in understanding how best to evolve the shiny new object after a bit of that sheen has rubbed off.

It’s all about the community

For all Mark Zuckerberg’s pronouncements about bringing the world closer together, it’s noticeable that the one area of Facebook that’s currently thriving are Groups. Indeed, when you look around the internet, there’s a move back towards communities and interests.

For those who’ve spent many years online, there’s an element of growing full circle. A lot of social media was built out of communities and expanded to take in everybody. In Max Read’s excellent essay, he points out that one of Facebook’s flaws was it grew to take in acquaintances and people we vaguely knew. Eventually, this just became too big for the relationships we build, having people we vaguely knew liking holiday photos was deeply unsatisfying and we retreated into areas that actually interested us, whether that’s sport, fashion, politics, close friends.

Turns out we didn’t really want to connect to the world, just a connection other people who share the same interests.

This isn’t always a positive thing. Witness the rise of extreme political viewpoints and an intolerance towards opposing views. It’s never been easier to be moved towards a more radical viewpoint. On the other hand, what could be seen as niche interests become more mainstream. Twitch is a prime example.

So what does that mean for those who works in media and marketing? Journalists who understand how communities work will get access to better stories — much the same as how knowing your ‘beat’ in the offline world led to better stories. And PR professionals who know and understand the online communities stand a better chance of disseminating their message.

For advertisers, Facebook and Instagram still have the biggest targeting graph, but there’s a new conversation to be had. Do you go for mass reach but low engagement newsfeed advertising, or do you get to know your audience and attempt to play into your mutually shared interests? It may require a little more investment, but developing salience with key communities, either big or small, may be a smart long-term strategy.

It also sees the return to prominence of a role that has been somewhat downgraded in favour of performance marketing: the community manager. Both are important and should work as part of a blended social strategy, but there’s long-term value in nurturing communities. Expect to see plenty of articles proclaiming understanding online spaces being the key to success.

Podcast

One medium it’s understandable to get excited about in 2019 is podcasting. Yes, this isn’t a trend. But it is a format that’s come right through Gartner’s hype cycle and is now out of the trough of disillusionment (other than people who have already proclaimed it dead).

With Edison Research’s annual look at podcasting suggesting a continual rise in regular listening and a sharper rise in overall listening and awareness of podcasts, not to mention a podcast’s ability to lead the news agenda (witness the effect of true crime podcast Teacher’s Pet in Australia), the medium is becoming a regular part of everyday life.

Not that this should come as a surprise. Radio has been particularly resilient ever since it’s demise was first mooted with the age of television in the 1950s and 60s. Breakfast slot DJ appointments still generate headlines and a significant amount of people tune into both commercial and public service radio. Where podcasting has an advantage is the ease of listening and the honing in on particular interests.

For broadcasters, this has the advantage of picking up wider audiences post-broadcast. A niche interest 30 minute programme broadcast in the middle of the afternoon on Radio 4 or ABC can live long beyond its original shelf life. And, what’s more, once somebody starts listening to a podcast, Edison’s research suggests 80% of listeners stay with the episode until the end (interestingly, this is down from 86% the previous year).

Where podcasting has benefitted in the past year has been advances in platforms that have opened the medium up to a wider audience. Spotify’s decision to open up the platform to podcasts, coupled with Google building a podcasting app for Android added a significant number of potential new listeners. In addition, the cost and effort in producing a podcast (already pretty low) keeps dropping with new technology. Video may get our industry’s attention, but podcasts command water cooler conversation.

But before you all run out to buy shares in Acast, iHeart Radio, Whooska, or other platforms, there’s still a few not insignificant challenges to overcome. Firstly, monetisation for creators is still not easy, while the advertising solutions and buying methods aren’t as unified as in other media, while “live” reads risk going to audiences who can’t even purchase your products. It requires a lot of homework. So this is one prediction: media buying on podcasts will get cheaper and easier and brands will want a slice of the action.

And then the second issue. The number of podcasts are growing. Apple confirmed in June that there are over 550,000 podcasts on iTunes. That’s a lot of listening hours. Podcasting is not a nascent trend, it’s well established, so getting a foothold in your market means you have to be exceptionally good or professional. Podcasts already took work to establish. This will get even harder.

But for all podcasting’s positive points, marketers still don’t seem entirely sure what to do with podcasts. Some advertise. Some have set up partnerships. Some have even attempted branded podcasts. There’s no right solution and no one size fits all approach. Podcasting, at least, is not like Instagram influencer marketing given it has a substantial level of depth to it, although it’s much further behind the influencer industry when it comes to organising any kind of consistency across the board of commercialisation.

But despite that, plenty of the aforementioned platforms are making serious efforts to standardise podcasting advertising and collaborations. Given the creative side of the industry is pretty healthy and listeners keep rising, it’ll be in the industry’s best interests to make podcasting even more attractive to non-converts and advertisers alike. It’s an area I’m excited about, and slightly wistful given I stopped hosting a weekly podcast a few years back.

Customer Experience becomes the year’s buzzword

There’s a wonderful piece of research in Marketing Week’s 2019 trends. In it, 42.4% of marketers think their organisation should be structured about the customer (which makes me wonder what the other 58% are thinking), but just 5.8% think their organisation are structured in that way. And while phrases such as Customer Centric and Customer Experience will be thrown around as trendy buzzwords, it feels like there’s slowly a growing realisation that delivering a Cannes Lion winning AR activation might be good for grabbing attention, but it might not actually, y’know, do anything for the person they’re trying to sell to.

But Customer Experience is a broad church, as it goes beyond just the marketing department, and touches on a vast number of areas. So, wrapping a few smaller points into one, hopefully the below will actually become A Thing in 2019 — at the very least, expect to see more forward-thinking organisations adopt the following:

• Being human when called for. So not just blindly following whatever the machine or efficiencies tells you to do, but knowing when to let the tech take over and when to ask if we’re actually communicating in a way that’s human. That especially goes for building a chatbot if it just replicates a phone menu system.
• Ensuring your first experience of a brand isn’t a giant autoplaying pop up or video in your Instagram feed
• Acknowledging that customers go beyond just acquisition. That means working with other departments, often IT, digital, and customer service and joining them all together. Silos aren’t a marketing problem, they’re an organisational problem that needs real will to be fixed.
• Focusing on relevancy of communication rather than out and out personalisation, which can just get a bit creepy and weird at times.

So CX is less of a trend but more of an acknowledgement that 2019 will be the year when some organisations start to shift towards a customer first viewpoint, but also that it will appear in hundreds of powerpoints, keynotes and internal documents that will generate plenty of agreement and no actual actions. Because this sort of thing is hard.

A different pain point for publishers

If the demise of Mic and the struggles of the likes of Buzzfeed, Vice and others showed, 2018 was the year that publishers finally weaned themselves off basing a strategy solely around Facebook’s whims. Zuckerberg’s algorithm change that theoretically cut news organisations out of the newsfeed and the realisation that blindly following Facebook’s latest ambition (Pivot to video! Pivot to vertical video! Do both while standing on your head with your arms tied behind your back!) probably wasn’t the best strategy, there was a renewed focus on their readers.

So for some publications we’re now back in a world of gated content, sign-ups, subscriptions and the like, as publishers look to diversify both traffic and revenue stream. This is no bad thing. However, there’s a question that publishers who are asking for subscriptions need to ask. Namely, how many subscriptions can their audience afford or are prepared to have?

While $10 or even $20 a month may not be much, once you add on a Netflix and Spotify subscription, then one newspaper and magazine micro-payment, you’re potentially looking at $50 a month minimum. For early subscribers, other publications are going to have to work hard to add them to the mix. For publishers, it means they need to continue to offer compelling reasons for people not just to spend time but money on them.

There’s a lot of subscriptions online all competing for your cash — from The Guardian’s voluntary payments, to Medium’s $5 a month, to The Australian, to the New York Times, to The Economist, to trade publications. I like and read all of these named publications, but I’m not going to pay to subscribe to all of them. Rent, food, nappies — they all take priority.

There will no doubt be publications or media owners who fail to get the requisite numbers and may fail. While not a publisher, niche sport streaming service Eleven Sports is already struggling to generate enough subscribers for the European football offering in the UK. And no doubt this will lead to a number of articles proclaiming the subscription model dead (because there’s nothing the media loves more declare the death of a trend).

Subscription models will not die in 2019 though. It just means the early adopters have a head start and the ones that failed aren’t offering a compelling enough reason to generate sign-ups at the requisite volume. That’s a challenge.

This doesn’t mean gated content with no payment is the answer either. At some point, publishers will need to monetise this data, and if handled badly, could lead to a serious erosion of trust in the brand.

There’s still no one answer for journalism’s challenges, but just as a marketing agency needs to have a broad client base to insulate itself from losing an account, so publishers need to have a diversity of outcomes and traffic sources, and not be overly dependent on one source of revenue or eyeballs. Expect a few more crashes from well-known media brands as they attempt to figure out a long-term strategy that sees the likes of social media and Google as a slice of the pie rather than the saviour of their industry.

Social media: changes in influencers, Stories, fake news and videos

These aren’t particularly big trends, which is why I’ve lumped them together, but they’re worth a paragraph or two.

Firstly, influencer marketing. Last year I wrote: “As the discipline matures, there should be more standardised understandings of what success looks like, and what this is worth to a brand. Hopefully 2018 will be the year inflated fees and questionable ROI are consigned to the past in favour of a more solid framework.”

I don’t think we can say that this happened. Brands still continued to pump cash into influencers, while “influencers” became shorthand for “lots of followers on Instagram.” Some wannabe influencers even started making up brand sponsorships to appear more influential than they are.

So what of this year? If influencer marketing continues to take a greater part of the marketing budget then the demands on measurement and ROI throughout the funnel will (hopefully) sort the truly influential from those who merely describe themselves as such and give marketers a clear understanding of what they’re delivering. The need to accurately target communities should see a more thoughtful approach to the discipline that goes beyond just Instagram.

I also suspect we’ll see a lot of mid-tier influencers burn out or vanish — or post detailed descriptions of how the demands of being always on and in a persona take their toll on their mental health. While the latter may be uncomfortable, it may well be that the maturity of the influencer market is driven by its own community rather than relying on marketers.

Secondly, Stories. Again, not a trend, it will be fascinating to see how the more ephemeral format continues to shape social platforms. With Stories content set to surpass news feed content, and acting as a traffic driver from Instagram, it requires a slightly different mindset and understanding of your goals.

Facebook have hardly helped themselves by making news feed ads adaptable to the format with none of the creativity or appreciation of what makes a good story. As the big blue giant continues to look for new monetisation opportunities, expect even more adverts in Stories. If anybody breaks the format, Facebook will through its incessant need to wring every last advertising drop.

Meanwhile, a lot of brands will continue to post to Stories without any understanding of what it delivers, while the algorithm that decides what people see first will become even more opaque as organic reach goes the same way as Facebook.

General fakery, trolling, gaslighting and general hateful behaviour will continue to be a major issue for social media. Users will get even more entrenched in opinions, people and publishers who should know better will increasingly drive polarisation as clickbait, and fake accounts, ad fraud and the general distortion of reality will continue apace. I can’t see any positive breakthrough in this area, sadly, unless social CEOs make it a priority or a country decides to introduce regulation that tackles the problem rather than the headline.

Finally, Instagram TV will continue to struggle unless it can find a breakout hit or a reason for creators to post video in the platform over YouTube. Ditto Watch. Facebook will look for more ways to monetise Messenger. Expect adverts, although the more interesting aspects of Messenger will come from brands who’ve really thought about the Customer Experience.

And Twitter and Pinterest will continue to do their own thing as they start to move further away from Facebook’s idea of social media and become clearer about what they are (news and culture / visual search) and what they deliver that’s a viable alternative to Facebook.

Binet and Field

Expect to hear Les Binet and Peter Field’s names used in a lot of presentations in 2019 with regard to marketing effectiveness. Mark Ritson has been championing the pair’s research heavily, and it appears to offer a sane balance between short-term efficient performance marketing and long-term brand building, and why marketers need to focus on both when they set their budgets.

Whether marketers and agencies who start to quote the pair’s research have actually read it is another question, but it at least starts better conversations outside simple effectiveness. Whether that’s debating the merits of spending on TV, whether content should form part of the mix or how much to invest in simple sales performance tactics over brand building and vice versa, it should lead to more mature conversation.

It won’t stop marketers chasing after short-term goals, spending hundreds of thousands on brand purpose or getting seduced by shiny new trends. But it should at least give strategists a more solid foundation on which to start conversations.

So, that’s my thoughts for 2019. Some of the above may happen. Some of the above ought to happen. And some may pleasantly surprise me by not happening. Happy 2019 everyone.

If you were offered the opportunity to be President of the World for 24 hours, what would your first act be? My answer’s always the same: build a statue of Hal Robson-Kanu scoring that goal in Euro 2016. Ideally outside the Stade Pierre-Mauroy, but I’d happily extend it to versions in Cardiff, Reading and anywhere everyone’s favourite cryptocurrency-investing footballer has played to date.

When it comes to favourite or best goals ever, two years and a lot of thinking has passed, but absolutely nothing can eclipse Robson-Kanu’s Cruyff turn in the penalty area that took three defenders out of play before the striker fired low past Thiabut Courtois in the Belgian goal, and all but securing Wales’s place in the semi-finals.

Sure, there are potentially better goals. You could argue in recent years the overhead kicks by Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo in the Champions League are up there. Riley McGree’s outstanding scorpion kick for the Newcastle Jets is definitely the best goal you’ve probably never seen, or seen but don’t remember when, where or who. Classic goals such as Diego Maradona’s non-Hand of God goal against England, or John Barnes at the Maracana, or many, many more could lay claim to being the best goal of all time.

But there are a number of factors that make Robson-Kanu’s goal so special. Firstly, it’s the fact it’s Hal Robson-Kanu, a decent enough player to have a career in the Premier League, but also a striker whose specialism lay in not actually scoring goals. He was the beloved tireless workhorse who netted just five times in 44 games for Wales, opening up space for the likes of Bale to finish the job with aplomb.

He is a player whose connection to Wales was through his grandmother. A man without a club at that particular point in time. And a player who, if he pitched up at your club, would be met with an “oh, ok” rather than the excitement that sees grown men decamp to training grounds and insert a sex toy in a Sky Sports reporter’s ear.

If this doesn’t make the point clear, let me repeat. It’s Hal Robson-Kanu. Had Lionel Messi, Ronaldo or Paul Pogba pulled off such as audacious move, the internet would be drowned in a sea of mass salivation as pundits and banter accounts all rushed to hyperbolise themselves in proclaiming it the best goal ever scored.

Hell, when Johann Cruyff first pioneered the move, there was mass salivation on sofas rather than keyboards, but this was still Cruyff, an imperious maestro who performed these moves with the nonchalance of James Bond lighting a cigarette while asking for a vodka martini, shaken not stirred. That was Cruyff. This was Hal Robson-Kanu.

Secondly, this was a goal scored for Wales. A team who hadn’t made a major tournament since 1958. A team who were more associated with heroic qualifying failures than troubling semi-finals. A team who were always a balance of brilliant individuals and Championship stalwarts.

Granted, this was a very good Welsh team, easily as good if not better as the 2004 vintage that should have qualified for that year’s Euros at the expense of Russia. It had Bale, Aaron Ramsey, the under-appreciated Joe Allen and peak-era Ashley Williams marshalling the defence. But still, Wales. Hal Robson-Kanu playing for Wales.

And thirdly, this was Wales against Belgium. A team that’s been regarded as an outside bet for any major tournament for so long they may as well change their nickname from Red Devils to Dark Horses. Wales had Hal Robson-Kanu and Neil Taylor (alongside Bale and Ramsey). Belgium had Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Dries Mertens and Jan Vertonghen. Sure, Wales were goo,d but not comfortably-take-apart Belgium good. But yes. Robson-Kanu for Wales against star-studded Belgium.

Then there’s the timing of the goal. The quarter-final between Belgium and Wales was tightly poised. Williams had levelled the match at 1-1 on 30 minutes with a trademark thumping header after Radja Nainggolan’s thunderous 25 yarder opened, and Wales had started the second half strongly when, on 55 minutes, Ramsey’s neat ball found Robson-Kanu with his back to goal in the penalty area. One drop of the shoulder and a shot later, the ball was in the back of the net and Wales were 2-1 up.

This wasn’t just a goal to open the scoring. This was a goal that set up the game for a grandstanding final 35 minutes. It put Wales in the driving seat. It asked Belgium to step up and justify their tag of pre-match favourites. It was a goal that made the semi-finals — hitherto a fantasy going into the tournament — a reality.

Sam Vokes may have added a third to put supporters into dreamland and secure passage to the final four, but that goal, that goal, was the moment that every Welsh fan suddenly realised that we belong on that stage and could actually win the whole bloody tournament. Hal Robson-Kanu for Wales against Belgium in the 55th minute did that.

And finally, there’s the sheer experience of watching the goal, processing what happened, and celebrating like you’ve never celebrated before. For non-Welsh fans, the jaws dropped and the praise started. For Welsh fans, it was an experience like we’ve never experienced before and may well never experience again. We’re used to relative success in rugby (although many of us are still bitterly upset over the 2011 World Cup semi-final when Sam Warburton was red-carded for a dangerous tackle). We’re used to the odd heroic result. But really, we don’t beat Belgium and we don’t do it while scoring goals of the tournament.

That realisation that we were watching history being made, that our relative minnow on football’s world stage had just done something quite brilliant, and the sheer joy of that goal was the peak moment of celebration. If it could be bottled, the store that sold it would command an entire floor of the St David’s shopping centre in Cardiff.

It was pure, unbridled joy that no goal at club supporter level — not Dean Moxey’s 45-yard goal against Doncaster Rovers to set up an FA Cup tie with Manchester United, not even Rob Edwards’s stooping header at Wembley to end five years of exile to non-league — could ever surpass. Exeter City will always get another bite at a big game, even if it takes decades. For Wales, this may never happen again, ever.

And, reader, I am not ashamed to say that when that goal went in, I wept tears of pure joy. I was in a pub near Southwark tube station with a mixture of Welsh supporters and friends. When Robson-Kanu twisted past the Belgian defence, we gasped. When Robson-Kanu nestled the ball in the back of the net, we looked at each other open mouthed. And then we roared, we hugged each other, we hugged strangers and the refrain “Gwlad, Gwlad, pleidol wyf i’m gwlad” rang out from the newly-formed Cymru crew in the bar. It’s a moment that can never, ever been replicated. And nor can my hangover the next morning.

If this goal were a scientific equation, it would read something like (Robson-Kanu x [Wales + Belgium])/OMG + beer. Men in white coats could try and replicate it time and again, but it Wales, at least, it would be as elusive as Higgs-Boson. Like an eclipse, it only occurs when all planets align and a very specific point in time.

Other countries may have their own equation. Other supporters may have their own version of the goal. But try telling any Welsh supporter that there has ever been a more glorious goal scored in footballing history than that night in Lille and they’ll simply start by replying “But Hal Robson-Kanu…” before their eyes mist over and their brain returns to a happier, more simple time.

Hal Robson-Kanu. Forever immortalised, never bettered.