I've referenced it a few times here and there, but here's my ✨ Trend of 2023: ✨

The Year of the Splinter

;or, The Age of Unbundling

There is blood in the water basically everywhere. The tech titans are suddenly mortal. Animal spirits are running rampant. Entertainment consumption is changing and the strike in Hollywood is messing with a different supply chain. Consumers had savings thanks to Covid stimulus. But then it turned out Covid's longest lasting symptom was supply chain shenanigans, which caused inflation. We're heading toward a recession, or we aren't. Speaking of Covid, the pandemic is "over" but the "new normal" has yet to settle in. We're basically at the center of a Venn diagram of a bunch of overlapping liminal spaces.

Because of this, the playing field is more level than it has been for a while. Add in a generational shift caused by the inevitability of aging, and everything is up for grabs.

The Duopoly is Dead

Google and Meta’s stranglehold on the digital advertising ecosystem has been broken. Not only that, both tech giants have each entered their own existential crisis. One thanks to ChatGPT and its accompanying AI snowball, the other to privacy and its fallout (respectively). (Let’s be real, Google is probably kicking the crisis can down the road on the privacy front. How big a deal that becomes may hinge on how it handles its current crisis.)

A chart showing Meta & Google's declining share of digital ad spend since 2016, as e-commerce and streaming have emerged as attractive channels for advertisers. — via Axios

Where will all those dollars flow (assuming they aren’t just removed from budgets)? Will 2023 be the year of retail media?

Amazon is on a trend line that will see it overtake Meta for share of spend according to some forecasts (though I think this forecast is wildly underestimating a post-AI Microsoft).

A survey of marketers' platform plans from last holiday season ranked the platforms like so:

TikTok
Instagram
Google & Influencers
Other social platforms like Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube
Facebook

But TikTok still hasn't overtaken Meta platforms for ad dollars.

Things are getting interesting in channel land. Actual budget decisions might need to be made.

Search Shards

I think we're at the beginning of the end of Google's stranglehold on search, and it'll take monolithic search as a whole with it.

People are tired of 10 blue links for every search so they're turning to other platforms or specialized, niche engines. AI-powered chat will take some use cases, niche knowledge graphs others. Social search should improve. And one day we'll have personal AI agents that go searching for us—search will just be AIs talking to each other and delivering us an answer (plenty of dystopic sci-fi material there).

Search is now a feature, not a platform. The tools that enable search as a feature are constantly improving.

The most recent development is the DOJ antitrust case against Google. We'll learn some new things and other things will become more common knowledge to the general populous. I think Google's days as a top tech dawg might be numbered.

Social's Siren Song

TikTok shook up the social standbys and That Twitter Thing™ kicked off the clone wars. But that's not the real story, usage is changing.

Posting is now largely done by "creators" and engagement is sharing posts with friends via private messaging channels. No one talks about the social graph anymore, they talk about their discovery engines.

I don't know if large public social networks as a class are done—a failed experiment—or just permanent public posting on them. Either way, it's a time of flux for the social network idea. And maybe time for the rebirth of blogging?

Societal Lockstep

This specific splinter bundles up many others.

It started with social media echo amplification and accelerated during the Trump campaign. It intensified under Covid, as different regions and groups experienced/approached it differently. It then continued through the inflationary rollercoaster and the recession-like-but-not-quite phase we're in now.

The monoculture is dead and the internet allows sub-cultures and splinters to grow larger than ever before via connection at scale.

Society more resembles an aspen stand or mushroom colony now. We are all connected and impact each other, but do so as a network. There is no societal organism, there are organisms in society.

On a global scale, the internet is splintering. This instance is the digital manifestation of various idealogical standoffs.

The West v China on political grounds: democracy v authoritarianism (a tension that certainly isn't limited to the Cold War Pt. II).

But within The West there are divides, like America v EU.

Digitally speaking, the US appears to be placing companies first (perhaps to the detriment of people), while the EU is placing people first (perhaps to the detriment of companies).

Is the "World Wide Web" dying as a true global network?

Metatrend: Splinter & Sow

I'm thinking more and more of this phase as the composting of the modern internet. Things are breaking down, it all smells a bit weird, but it's creating a rich soil for something new to grow.

As marketers, the best way to handle this splintering is to stay flexible and experiment widely. Now is not the time to get dogmatic about tactics, but to develop strong strategic chops that can be applied across channels and platforms, regardless of which ones they might be.

In Conclusion

In 2023, the future will start to appear. The current crop of tech giants are faltering and a new generation of youths are stepping into the cultural crosshairs (does that mean us millennials can finally take a breather?). The next wave of go to ad platforms (types/formats) and must have marketing tactics may start to coalesce (the true gift of BFCM for marketers).

The timing is right, it might just come down to how the market fares. I don’t think The Metaverse™ and VR are those things yet, nor will one calendar year change that dramatically. AR on the other hand…