11 trend predictions for 2012

Ben Phillips and I looked into the murky crystal ball and pulled out eleven amazing trends/headlines/things that you will see in 2012.

1. The 1% fight back #occupycenterlink
2011 was dominated by the #occupywallstreet movement, and the 99% protesting against the gross inequality of wealth distribution in the western world. In 2012, the 1% will strike back. Expect a similar format of protest to what we saw in 2011, with a couple of minor variations. Whilst the disgruntled masses occupied the bastions of capitalism, the idle aristocracy will occupy benefit centres, fighting against the unjust support of the less well-heeled. In the #occupycenterlink movement, bankers, lawyers and other associated gentry will erect Gucci tents and don Ralph Lauren ponchos. Through Bose megaphones they will rally, arguing for a termination of the welfare state and a restoration of true laissez-faire economic policy. Whether this movement will generate the same momentum as its poorer counterpart remains to be seen.

2. G-Stalker
In an attempt to leverage recent facial recognition patents, as well as digitally enabled voyeurism, Google will launch G-Stalker. The G-Stalker application enables a stalker to obtain every piece of information about someone that they are close enough to take a photo of. It works as such: the stalker sees an attractive woman sitting 15 yards away from him in a restaurant. He is old, recently divorced and sexually frustrated, so he pulls out his smart phone with a 10 megapixel camera and activates G-stalker. He holds the camera subtlety in the direction of the stalkee and waits for the patented facial recognition technology to do its magic. 5 seconds later, he has a name, phone number, address and a URL of every social networking site she belongs to. He leaves the restaurant, follows her on Twitter and mentally prepares himself to retweet even her most inane utterances in a feeble attempt to be noticed.

3. The demise of European fashion houses
High fashion has been criticised for many things over the years but none have managed to dent its allure to consumer hoards around the world. Times however, are changing. If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that allowing the masses to create is always a better option than reserving it for those who have spent years honing their craft. Enter Etsy. Etsy has proven that a talented, experienced fashion designer has nothing on your best friend’s sister who is in fashion school and is crocheting beanies in her free time. In what truly is a modern day peasant uprising, expect these Etsy queens and their unfortunate boyfriends to topple 1000 year old fashion houses with ill-conceived dresses, blazers and scarfs. A Louis Vuitton designer, whom asked to remain anonymous, recently told me “This is the Youtube of the fashion world. Unfortunately for us, people just want to look like depressed, malnourished hippies”. Expect high street retailers to adjust their procurement policies accordingly.

4. Social media sentiment monitoring replace the election process in France
The French election is coming up in 2012. Given the relatively poor voter turnout in previous years, I forecast that the traditional, antiquated voting process will be cancelled completely. In its place, social media monitoring firms, with their highly accurate sentiment analysis, will survey opinions of French citizens across social networks, blogs and other online forums. Citizens will be encouraged to express their opinions of candidates, and these opinions will be monitored and evaluated by the powers that be. At the conclusion of this process, the firms will deliver the results of the election and the government will take its rightful place. This anticipated development is perfectly aligned with one of the most observable behavioural trends of an election year: an explosion of ill-informed political experts using their personal social networks to push an agenda.

5. “Goldfish syndrome”
There are too many screens in our lives. Laptops, second monitors, iPhones, Blackberries, iPads, screens in retail, screens outside, TVs at home, TVs in our bedroom. The effect of this is that our concentration is being pulled from flashing screen to flashing screen more frequently than ever before, undermining our ability to actually think and function. We now no longer have the ability to concentrate on anything for more than 10 seconds at a time and given the continued explosion of multi-screen culture, I expect Goldfish syndrome to finally hit critical mass in 2012. The effects of this will be varied and profound; GDPs will further plummet as we aren’t able to concentrate on a single task for more than 10 seconds. A new range of mobile phone tariffs around 10 second conversations will be introduced, ensuring we never forget who we’re speaking to. Books will finally be killed off for good as no reader can focus on anything more than tweet length, reducing the need for paper and enabling a healthy regeneration of the Amazon. The sophistication of cars will grow significantly; this new intelligent vehicle will remind their driver every 10 seconds where they’re going and what they have to do there. Dystopian futurists will label this “the broken record society”, but this author can see a range of benefits, most notably a decline in anger and frustration because we can’t remember the origin of our misery. (side note: this paragraph took 2 weeks to write)

6. First person uses a QR code
In what will be seen as a massive coup for the QR Code community, in 2012 the first normal person will use a QR Code. Steve Stuart will be caught at a bus stop taking a photo of a QR Code for access to the BHS of The Hangover 3. QR Code fan boys will make this into an exciting case study video which will be RTed for dayzzzzzzzz and used to slam down the throats of marketers why their billboard needs a code innit.

7. Groupon to get out of debt crisis
Greece will become the first Government to turn to Groupon to help solve its debt crisis. The Government will look to sell off one of their greatest assets the Parthenon. Offering bricks that will last a lifetime over the group buying site. The bricks will be at the ridiculous reduced 90% off price for only 2 days only. This will be seen as the first step of the Greek Government to take control of their problems.

8. Head of Mobile, we were wrong not ‘The year of the mobile’
On December 31st 2012, Phillip MacPherson, Global Head of Mobile Development Foundation will come out with a statement apologising for inaccurate statements provided to the media in 2001, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011 which have all alluded to it being ‘The year of the Mobile’. ‘Clearly we have got it wrong the last few years, we got a little excited when the Nokia3310, WAP iPhone, iAd, all coming out and thought it was our time.’ However MacPherson still has high expectations that mobile advertising will leap frog urinal advertising as the 13th highest revenue media environment in 2013

9. Amazon launches Kindle Phone
Off the success of the Amazon Kindle, Amazon make their first play into the crowded mobile telecommunications space. ‘We really tapped into something with the Kindle, people just wanted a device that just did one thing, people just wanted to read books on it’ stated Adam Right, lead UX for Kindle Labs. 'Amazon have taken this strong insight and have applied it to a mobile device that simply just receive calls and texts. Get ready for the game changer.'

10. 'I hit my internet peak 10 years ago' - Prolific emailer
On the 10 year anniversary of Jerrod Leon registering the email address hotmale@hotmail.com, he finally admits that he may have hit his Internet peak 10 years ago. I am your classic middle aged guy reminiscing on the time he was QB for his High School Football team, only I hit it on the internet. I am on the down hill slope afterwards, I thought I might be able to replicate the Internet Greatness with getting Facebook url '/MarkZuckerbergsMum' but none of my mates laugh anymore and they are getting tired of me pulling out my business cards at bars trying to impress girls.

11. Buzzfeed, Home of LOLCats, Memes and Celebrity Gossip becomes the most influential site in the 2012 US Election
Oh shit that is actually happening.

After industry blogging

Industry blogging (Op-ed blogging) is definitely on its last legs. I think there are now three routes that I can see people taking if they still want to be having a voice in the industry.

Content Syndicators (Brainpicker, Digital Buzz Blog) this is a hard role as you have to be trawling a lot of content and on top of everything, the only big example in Australia that I have seen for this is Digital Buzz Blog.

Content Creators - Creating small projects that will get you attention. Usually these take a long time to create. Re: Digital Creatives doing Awesome Things

Become a News Source (Mumbrella, Campaign Brief) breaking news stories about the industry.

What other routes can people take?

Reviewing the success of the Occupy Wall St Communication Strategy

It is amazing to reflect on how much the Occupy Wall St movement has achieved in just 2 months. You would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of the OWS movement. I think there is a number of interesting communication tactics that they have employed which have helped them gain a lot of coverage. Here are some of the stand outs to me.

Tactics
Occupying physical space - Occupying actual parks has given people a place to congregate and learn more about the movement, it has also helped to give a visual representation of how many people there are.

Occupy replication - The easy format for replication of taking over a public space was easy to mimic across the world. Hence it helped to spread the idea globally through local activations.
99% - The '99%' as an overall idea is perfect,  it is an easy to understand concept which in nature is inclusive. It has been propelled through the tumblr of the same name.

Veterans on the front line - They have strategically put Veterans on the front line, this has made for amazing imagery as they are the first ones that the police confront.

They have also become some of the most vocal voices in this fight


Splintering the message - Similar to any campaign you need to give people new ways to talk about the message beyond the police brutality. This shows that they may be able to keep creating new ways to keep the message top of mind coming into the election year.


Capturing everything - For the last 2 months, one of the astounding things is that amount of documentation of the event. The media has really helped propel this and make it a priority for politicians.

I am looking to write a follow up piece to this, on the problems the OWS movement currently faces and how I see them moving forward.

4 Digital Creatives doing awesome things

For most Advertising Creatives creativity does not stop at 5:30PM Friday, most have some kind of creative outlet outside of work whether that be writing children's books, tshirt lines or even setting up charities.

Digitally a growing trend that I am starting to see is Digital Creatives using the internet as their canvas. The type of art that I am most interested in is when Creatives are creating cultural statements through their pieces and capturing the attention of the masses. Here are some of my favourite;

1. Jeff Greenspan (Creative Director at BBDO)

Urban Traps (Hipster Traps)
The Most Exclusive Website (Mike Lacher and Chris Baker)
LetterBombing (Chris Baker)


2. Mike Lacher - Creative Technical Manager - Google Creative Labs

Mikala Bierma Youtube Channel
Waiting for Bieber
Shady URL
Geocities-izer



3. Ji Li (Creative Director at Facebook)
The Bubble Project
Goolery
Dummer


4. Chris Baker (Writer at Google Creative Labs)

The Likeable Constitution (Jeff Greenspan)
The Call to Action Generator

As I start to learn Photoshop and Coding I am hoping to start making some of my ideas come to life. Watch this space!

Digital Strategists learn Photoshop in 8 hours

I am really trying to grow the creative side of my brain at the moment. As I discussed in my previous post on Strategy bullets, I have really been limiting the creative side for the last few years. One of the other main barriers to me being creative was I didn't have the skills to be able to execute an idea (e.g couldn't mock it up in Photoshop, couldn't code up the idea).

I was inspired by Pon Kattera, to change this the other day. He recently taught himself Photoshop via online tutorials on lynda.com. With his glowing endorsement I signed up.

I took the Photoshop CS5 Essential Training course and have taught myself the basics to Photoshop and completed my first mock ups for work on Friday. I was surprised with how good it actually was! It is cheap at a flat rate of $25 a month for all the courses you want. You have to give it a good 8 hours and it usually helps if you have someone with you who knows the basics of Photoshop.

On a side note if you haven't watched 'You suck at Photoshop' tutorials before you need to watch them!

The new data capture - Emotional DNA Data

Collecting and creating meaningful conclusions from personal data seems to be all the rage at the moment. One area that seems to have been overlooked but of interest is emotional data capturing. Emotional DNA is left on everything photos, places, people, foods. All these can elicit powerful emotions from people.

My work colleague Kendra Salvatore came up with an interesting concept of emotional geographic mapping. Basically what if we were able to visualise the emotions we tie to different places.


One of the exercises that she does is to manually map emotions from different places. I have had a stab at it for Melbourne and Sydney which was a pretty interesting task. However I think this would not need to be a manual thing, you could hook it up to Foursquare or Facebook Places and give a little emoti on what you are feeling at the time (think Nike Plus).

'Going to your happy place' could now become prompted by technology, with a mechanic that understood what places are that happy place. Fornino's and their White Truffle Oil Pizza

Putting down the Strategy Bullets

'Strategy bullets are the fastest way to kill an idea.' That guy, 2011

One of the biggest brain shifts I have had moving to BBH, is changing from a strategy mainframe to a creative led position. Strategy is a very left brain activity, coming up with creative problems is definitely a right brain activity.

A lot of Strategy revolves around looking for patterns and the inferring meanings from these patterns, whereas creative requires you to look forward and look for new patterns. This creates a lot of tension when the two parties meet.

I noticed in creative concept meetings, I was able to kill a number of thought starters and ideas as I was looking for all the holes of where it wasn't technically possible or the lack of insight of the idea.

After being made aware of this I have really started to train myself to try and find the good in an idea, virtually ever idea has at least a kernel of goodness that you can bounce off. This has also made me be more proactive in thinking about digital ideas outside of work too, so hopefully like Zac Martin I can start moving fast and breaking things.