2022, what a decade it's been.
Looking back at my first year writing this newsletter
Hi friends.
Sorry I haven’t written in a while, work has been intense and I decided last minute to take Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA in Brand Management, which just wrapped up. Highly recommend it if you’re serious about doing Marketing and Brand Management right.
As 2022 comes to a close I want to look back at the trends in Marketing and Advertising I’ve spent time observing and experimenting with and take stock of how skeptical and optimistic we should be about them. Our industry is particularly riddled with hype addiction, only second to technology as the two overlap significantly, and I’m a firm believer that those who are good at their jobs are able to look beyond and see what’s truly important and valuable for brands. Some will call this cynicism, I think that’s a cop out, it’s skepticism and it should be something we all deploy more of, it’s the only way to find the things that are really worth being optimistic and excited about.
The snake oil salesmen abound, we need more skeptical optimists to push back on their cons and protect budgets from being set on fire on harebrained schemes. I’ll mostly focus on technology related trends as those are often the ones where budgets are wasted in the name of innovation and being culturally relevant.
We’ll start with a big one, the single biggest hype train I’ve ever seen in my 15 year career in Advertising:
The METAVERSE is everything, and nothing.
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
No Marketing blog can call itself such without using incorrectly attributed quotes like this one from William Blake.
I cannot remember a single buzz word in my entire career that has simultaneously generated more hype wile also having less meaning than “The Metaverse”.
We’ve had some real bangers in the last 15 years but at the very least most of the time we all sort of agreed on what their definition was. The Metaverse is the buzzword of the decade, probably the century, so far, in that it seems to have transcended the nature of words to have a widely agreed definition. Past over-hyped Marketing trends all had somewhat of a clear meaning, things like 5G, Beacons, Chatbots, and QR codes (they came back!) are all real technologies whose applications to Marketing were either exaggerated at the time or simply much further away in the future than we were led to believe.
Then came The Metaverse. What does this word mean? Whatever you want it to.
I’ve seen it used in at least 10 different, very different, ways. Facebook renamed their entire company after it, seemingly indicating that The Metaverse is the internet but in Virtual Reality. Many now refer to Roblox and Fortnite as “Metaverses” (there’s more than one?), others say Snapchat is the Metaverse because of their AR applications (probably the most “correct” definition). The more philosophical definition, which I think is actually the only interesting one but also least practical, is that The Metaverse will be the world we live in, one where the boundaries between physical and digital are finally removed. I tried my best to cut through the bullshit in one of my earlier posts:
The craziest thing is that for the best part of 2022 everyone in our industry has gone Metaverse mad, using the term with a serious face, knowing deep down that nobody agrees on what it actually means, if anything. We now have Metaverse agencies, Chief Metaverse Officers, Metaverse Awards, Metaverse sections of industry publications, and more. Ask any of them to clearly articulate what The Metaverse is, see if any of the answers describe the same thing.
So yes, I’m an VERY skeptical of “The Metaverse”. I’m skeptical because it’s the culmination of years of trend hype cycles severing the remaining tethers our industry had with reality. A word that has no meaning and yet we all keep using it, a better satire of our industry could not be written by the best screenwriters.
Yet, there are plenty of things being incorrectly labelled “Metaverses” (the plural is somehow more offensive) that brands should be very optimistic and excited about exploring and testing out:
Gaming
Platforms like Roblox and Fortnite have now for years offered a completely new way to merge gaming and entertainment, allowing for brands to find interesting ways to show up. There are still plenty of things to figure out: ethics of advertising on platforms with so many young users, creating branded experiences consumers actually want to interact with, and more.
AR
After gaming, my personal favorite and one I think will increasingly have an impact on society and present ways for brands to do interesting things. Overlaying the digital onto the physical has now been happening for years, through Smartphones, and while fun, is still quite limited. Hardware is the key here and once we figure out what the next iteration is (smart glasses make sense on paper but they’re not there yet) that will make AR a lot more user friendly I think we’ll see some serious innovation.
VR
Still too early, still too early, maybe forever early. I do think though that there’s a place for VR in our world, just not at the $10B scale Meta thinks there is in the near future (Zuck himself admitted he over-estimated and over-invested). Maybe one day, maybe never, but applications and uses will continue to slowly emerge that are worth at the very least paying attention to and testing out for brands. VR seems to be the one technology we can’t get right but still won’t give up on. Most likely it’ll get better but remain relatively niche, while the real innovation will be when Mixed Reality becomes a thing.
NFTs and WEB3, the bubble burst. Good.
Unlike The Metaverse, this is a bubble that has certainly burst, and for the better. I didn’t write much about it but I have spent money and time with NFTs and have come to a few conclusions:
A lot of it was a ponzi scheme type gold rush, if you got in early, you made bank, if you got in late, you’re now left holding worthless (for now maybe) digital assets
Some of it was built with good intentions but that’s not enough to build a business or a community. Many well-intentioned people learnt the hard way how difficult it is to build something people want to come back to again and again.
It was way too early for most brands to play in this still very young and volatile space, a lot of money was wasted and reputations tarnished as a result.
Ultimately, I do believe there is huge potential in digital assets, they’re already here and selling for billions of dollars each year. What I don’t know and am not very optimistic about at the moment is whether blockchain is the right technology to power them. In some ways it makes perfect sense, it’s built to clearly define ownership and transaction history, in others it doesn’t at all, transactions are expensive, user experience is clunky and confusing and scams seem a lot easier to perpetrate. The likes of Fortnite and Roblox make billions of dollars in revenue each year selling digital assets without using the blockchain and they don’t seem interested in adopting it any time soon. The association with Crypto and the massive scandals that have rocked isn’t helping the Web3 cause either…
Web3 proponents latched onto interesting human/consumer behaviors that will shape things to come and for that I think they deserve credit. Jury is still out, and frankly right now a guilty verdict seems more likely, on whether they picked the wrong technology to build the future on. Tokens, digital assets and identity are going to be a big part of how the internet evolves, and brands will need to figure out how to play in this space in meaningful ways. I think we’ve learnt some important lessons in 2022, sometimes it’s best to wait and see how a hugely hyped technology fares before jumping in, especially when a lot of money is changing hands, people got really hurt by putting their savings into Crypto and NFTs.
Some say that this bubble bursting is akin to the dot.com one that enabled the internet as we know it to then take shape. I will keep watching this space to see if that’s true, we’ll know soon enough if Web3 is for real.
If you can’t beat AI, join it.
I flirted with the idea of having ChatGPT write this section but that’s been over done already and I missed the 15 minute window when it was still cool. Instead, you’ll have to read my poorly constructed sentences.
AI is finally here in meaningful ways and it’s truly only the beginning. I don’t think AI will replace us, well not all of us, but it will significantly impact the way we work and create. When image generating AI was bursting onto the scene I wrote about it here:
Now ChatGPT and text generating AI is the flavor of the month, and I have to admit, it’s really good. No it will not replace copywriters, good ones at least, but it will become an important tool for us all. I played around with it a lot the last couple of weeks, it is years ahead of any shitty chatbot I’ve had the misfortune of chatting with when needing support from a brand. There are a few uses I can think of in the short/medium term that are worth being optimistic about for brands:
Customer support - replacing shitty chatbots and creating more natural interactions with customers. That said, in the name of everything that is holy, I urge all businesses to keep humans available to chat if the AI can’t figure out the answer. I will never not shout “Representative” at an automated phone line, I WILL find the human eventually.
Data mining - As someone smarter than me once said, we’re data rich and insight poor. Brands have way too much data, and instead of making us smarter and better it has caused us to chase the wrong “insights” and turn what’s measurable into what matters. I can see a really powerful application of AI in sifting through data, making much faster connections and giving us actionable analysis. AI should be able to take a data dump and turn it into a beautiful summary tab in a matter of seconds, imagine the time saved!
Doing the “busy work” - regardless of what your role is at a brand or an agency, we are all drowning in busy work that typically holds us back from doing what we’re best at, thinking and solving problems. Whether it’s as a super assistant I can ask to find me a slide from a deck that I vaguely remember but have no idea where it’s saved, or as a shortcut to creating quick mock-ups for a creative concept, I believe the most powerful use of AI in the short term will be to finally free us from busy work. Instead of 37 emails to figure out the right time to schedule a call, AI will do it, instead of an hour googling competitor ads for a presentation, AI will do it. This is what I dream of at night.
AI, like all technology before it, will need to be managed and wielded in ways that don’t indiscriminately eliminate jobs or make our lives worse. It’s up to us how we let it impact how we work, and the quality of the work we do. There is a very real and very scary scenario in which AI Ad agencies pop up that promise to churn out mediocre but very cheap and very fast work that “hacks the SEO algorithms and grows your ROAS by 547% in just 4 weeks!” (I bet you someone out there is already building one to become the next Gary V). AI or not, our industry needs to get serious about what good work looks like before it’s too late (some say it already is), if we’re going to be lazy and careless then we deserve to be replaced by AI.
Social is dead. Long live Social.
I think we’re at the end of the “look at me, my life is amazing, you should feel like shit about yours” era of Social Media. Good riddance.
Social Media as we’ve know it in the 2010s has been declining in usage with younger consumers and while it’s still huge in terms of numbers I believe its decline is permanent. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram will continue to be massive but will also continue to lose against TikTok and whoever else comes next. Text based platforms like Twitter never got to the same scale and young people want sound, sight and motion. Add to that the current chaos the bird app is in and the rushed platforms trying to replace it, I think we’ll never see this type of Social ever achieve the same relevancy again. It’s possible that smaller networks become the norm, although monetization without data mining to power advertising will be very problematic. This is the key point for brands and advertisers, what will the next era of Social mean for us? TikTok is less Social and more TV from an advertiser’s perspective, it’s a mass reach channel, not an engagement driver like Instagram has become. Is it maybe a good thing that the era of “brands need to behave like humans” is possibly over? I tend to think so. As always, a great source of insight into this space is Casey Newton and his newsletter Platformer, this post specifically:
This transition phases will likely last a couple more years in which things will become clearer, if I were a brand who already invests heavily in Social I would start/continue/increase testing newer platforms to figure out the next thing to bank on.
What will 2023 look like?
I don’t know! Neither does anyone else, we really should stop making predictions, humans are absolutely terrible at it. What I will do is tell you what I hope we as an industry focus on:
Going back to basics: we know the way advertising works, how brands are built, and the ways consumers behave, it’s not that complicated, but it’s really hard to do right. Step back from the tactical hell we’ve been in the past 10 years, look at the big picture again and let’s build some cool shit people will at the very least notice and maybe, just maybe, have fun with.
Taking more responsibility: money is power, and advertisers have a lot of it. I’m not going to go on an ethics crusade, but I think we all know that if Social Media and the Internet turned out to be a bit of a mess (understatement of the decade) it’s also because of us. I hope we can all be more deliberate on who we spend our ad dollars with and do more to influence how they shape their platforms to be net positives for society.
Know what you’re really buying: We’ve been throwing budgets at whoever promises us a quick return, blinded by the promise of attribution that we now know to be incredibly flawed. There’s a lot of money to be made in making things more complicated than they need to be, it’s a good time to rethink how many middle men and ad/martech partners you really need to work with.
Be more customer oriented: first it was Millennials, now it’s Gen Z. I get it, youth is sexy and attractive, we all want to be cool in the eyes of consumers. Truth is though, while you do need to future proof your business, most of your revenue will not come from 20 year olds with very little disposable income. Unless your brand truly serves young consumers, please don’t forget the consumers it really does serve. Don’t chase the hype unless your brand is built for it (most aren’t, and that’s OK). At the same time, stop judging ideas and opportunities based on whether you would enjoy them, good Marketers judge ideas based on what their target audience will think and do. Next time someone sells you a Metaverse idea for $1M ask yourself whether any consumer will actually care, not whether you’ll get a headline in AdWeek.
I’ve really enjoyed writing in 2022 and want to do a lot more of it in 2023, hoping I’m playing a small part in bringing more good sense to Marketing. Meeting and interacting with a lot of other smart people in our industry has made me smarter and better at my job, thank you if you’ve been one of those, and if we haven’t interacted yet, please find me on the interwebs and let’s chat (I’ve sadly decided to abandon Twitter until a new ownership comes in):
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