20-Trendy-3: The Year of the Splinter 🐀
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
Kyle Mensing
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.)
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
- Google & Influencers
- Other social platforms like Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube
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.
Kyle Mensing
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.
Kyle MensingThe 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…
Who knew?!
Intrusive ads that disrupt consumers’ browsing experiences or shopping journeys risk lower engagement and, crucially, lost conversion and sales opportunities
Most ads are interruptions, but they don’t have to be bad ones.
Steal This: Easy VIP Experience
This is a third hand anecdote, but the idea is brilliant.
There is a doctor's office at Johns Hopkins that is very difficult to get an appointment at, but if you call to schedule one you're offered one the same day.
I don't know the exact wording, but the gist of the communication isn't "we're booked up for 3 months, but how does your calendar look on this day you can't possibly have thought about yet." The experience is "we can see you now."
Think about how different those two feel to the customer.
One makes them feel like an inconvenience. Like they're bothering you by trying to schedule an appointment.
The other makes them feel important. Like they know people. Like they have connections and are getting special treatment.
How can Johns Hopkins do this?
They have data. Only 4% of people take the same day appointment.
Sometimes asking a question where you know the answer is "no" is worth it.
This isn’t surprising:
November is when that spend really starts to play out, though, with 53% of respondents saying that’s when they’ll exhaust most of their holiday budget.
That spend is likely from ecommerce brands or retailers that make their quarter during Black Friday. For those brands, December is about riding the fumes and saving cash for a post-Christmas push.
Ad spend can be a leading economic indicator, so this is good news:
Concerns about a recession or inflation seem to be fading among the marketers surveyed, with 86% saying they plan to spend at least as much on holiday ads this year as they did last.
Google is going Apple and hiding IP addresses.
The feature is called IP Protection (formerly Gnatcatcher, which sounds cooler, tbh), and it will limit IP tracking by third parties.
This “could mean that the IP address is not the viable post-cookie alternative some thought it might be.”
I don’t know why it was ever considered a viable alternative in the current privacy environment. Part of the reason GA4 dropped IP addresses was to conform with privacy regulations.
3rd party IP access is going the way of 3rd party cookies, not replacing them.
Sephora with a timely example of the good and bad of sales.
First the good, they’ve created routines and anticipations around their sales because they only do 2 a year. Constant sales can devalue brand perception. This approach maintains luxury standing while making the sale feel like a treat for customers vs. a money grab.
The bad, you gotta be prepared. General infrastructure stability seems like an internet-wide issue right now, but if you know this is one of your biggest moments you need to provide a good experience. It’s TSwift Ticketmaster all over again.
The unbundling and splintering continues as BuzzFeed (the darling of modern media brands) looks to sell off prior acquisitions (at a loss) to help pay down debt.
The reality is, BuzzFeed as a public media company has failed and the dismantling has begun.
Beware building a brand on someone else’s platform and algorithms.
Big G runs on ads and AI and is still working to combine those 2 to create the future of Google Search.
In its earnings call for the third quarter of 2023, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company plans to experiment with a native ad format suitable for its Search Generative Experience (SGE) that is “customized to every step of the search journey.”
via TechCrunch
Happy Halloween! It’s now shopping season…
It’s time to talk turkey because brands are gearing up for BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday). But don’t about treat yo self and Q5 (which is a dumb name).
According to TikTok, Q5 (“the small but mighty post-holiday shopping period between Christmas and mid-January”) means:
More shopping: 79% of TikTok users are likely to continue shopping in Q5.
I have one client where we plan for a big BFCM and Q5 with minimal activity in between. Don’t sleep on it. And don’t underestimate the allure of self-gifting.
