Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Trends for 2012 - The Audit


I thought it would be useful to look back at my trends deck from last year (12 Trends for 2012) to see how I did.  What I got right, & what I got wrong.

Mobile Commerce - 
Yes - lots of us are spending more through mobile.  For example eBay and Paypal reported record levels of sales through mobile in the run up to Christmas this year, mobile accounts for 18% of Domino's online pizza sales in the UK, and 20% of Orbitz hotel bookings...  & there are lots more stats like this (assuming that mobile includes tablets)

Mobile Payments - 
Yes & No.  Mobile is a both a huge influencer on retail sales in store, and retailers like Starbucks are seeing lots of mobile payments (over 2 million a week currently).  But...  While more handsets have NFC (over a million Android devices per week) and nine of the ten top handset manufacturers make at least one handset with NFC, crucially Apple doesn't yet.  There are different standards of payment, and lots of other things holding NFC back.  What's interesting is that Square, which is very anti-NFC now has over 1 million merchants using its technology in the US and is processing over ten billion dollars a year has achieved this without any NFC capability.  Oh - and Square didn't launch anywhere outside the US this year.

Mobile + TV - 
Yes - Mobile & TV are interacting very well, especially when it's Twitter on the mobile.  This chart shows the Tweets per minute during the last episode of The X-Factor in the UK, and SecondSync now produces a leaderboard of the most Tweeted about TV shows in the UK.  In the US half of all mobile owners use their phones when they're watching TV, while Shazam was used by nearly half of the advertisers at this year's Super Bowl, and is releasing lots of data on the effectiveness of ads that use its technology

Connected TV - 
Yes & No.  As with mobile payments the issue is getting hardware into circulation.  However there are lots of interesting things happening, for example The TV App Agency is making lots of TV apps for brands.  TV is also becoming a connected device through other devices, for example in the US Xbox households spend an average of 84 hours a month with online services, and one fast-growing company in China, Transmension puts mobile and online games onto TV.  It was the partial failure of these trends that led me to put 'Work-arounds' into the 2013 trends - lots of work-arounds are emerging to allow people to do connected things on their TVs before they have a fully connected set.

Mobile in China, India & Africa - 
Yes.  For example in China the mobile messaging service Weixin (WeChat) now has more than 200 million users, 3G subscriber levels grew over 800% in India, an Indian company has developed at $40 tablet to revolutionise internet access, in Nigeria over 80% of Facebook users access over mobile, and mobile banking is becoming essential.

Mobile's Threat to Other Services - 
Yes.  Mobile has continued to kill off or damage other services.  For example texting is now in decline in the US while WhatsApp is delivering 10 billion messages a day.

Ecosystems & Walled Gardens - 
Yes.  The recent changes that make it harder to see Instagram pics in Twitter, the removal of Google Maps from the iPhone (& it's reinstatement) are just two examples of this.

Real Time Bidding & Automation -
Yes.  DSPs are growing, and now that Facebook has launched its own exchange the available impressions have increased as much as fourfold.

Education Enabled - 
Yes.  Coursera now has 1.6 million enrolled students, other companies are getting into education (for example the publisher Pearson has launched a degree course), and the retailer Target is helping kids get education in the US.

Hijacks & Guerrilla Marketing
Yes.  Lots.  From the inevitable Olympics ones that managed to dance around legal restrictions to the very recent hijacking of Starbucks' #SpreadTheCheer, to brands hijacking their own customers sarcastic comments...

'eBay' for Services - 
Yes.  Zaarly have gone from strength to strength, adding a Zaarly button to other sites so that you can find someone to cook a recipe for you, for example, Pepsi used TaskRabbit in a campaign, letting their customers win an extra hour by finding someone to do tasks for them, Roamler has launched in the UK and is using people for several tasks, and other competitors are launching.

Simplicity -
Yes - Clearly its not everywhere, but examples include the Dollar Shave Club, campaigns like Bacon Barter (can you travel across the country paying only with bacon?), VW's Beetle-shaped shark cage for Shark Week,  and there's now even a Brand Simplicity Index.

So that's ten and two halves out of 12, which I think is very good.  Yes, you can argue that I pick quite easy targets, but I think I did well in highlighting some themes that would be important.

See the full deck here.

& now see this year's trends here.

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