The Most Overhyped, And Overlooked Trends Of 2020

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM MARKETING BREW'S YEAR IN REVIEW, AND WHAT THEY MISSED

Every year pretty much every marketing platform, newsletter, and publisher puts out a trend-predictions piece for the year ahead. This year, the team at Marketing Brew did things a bit differently, and instead of pretending that they are the oracle of what's to come, they polled their readers about the trends that they've been noticing.

It's a clever twist on a very competitive content format, so rather than spending my energy annoyed that I didn't think of it first, I thought that I'd break down their results here and offer my own perspective:

The first category was 2020 trends that the industry had overlooked:

1. MICRO-INFLUENCERS

I had to double check that they had correctly categorized this one. Overlooked? It felt like every day in 2020 there was another "thought-leader" blogging or podcasting about how this was the year of the micro-influencer. Whether it was over, or under appreciated, the whole concept is flawed.

Micro-influencers are defined as people who have between 10,000-100,000 followers on any given channel. That over-simplification has little or nothing to do with actual influence, and whether macro or micro, the idea that we can predict the way we'll be able to influence a target audience based on an abstract metric is absurd.

I'm sure that I'll rant about this one again soon, so I'll summarize by saying that influence is not a tactic; it is the entire purpose of marketing. Influence existed long before the Internet, and it's only a lack of understanding of how people are influenced that has caused us to dumb down the concept to imagine that it could be quantified by points on a scoreboard.

One positive that we can take away from this "trend" is that budgets may shift towards community leaders and other taste-makers in the topics that actually matter to advertisers.

2. DEATH OF THE THIRD-PARTY COOKIE

This one they got right, and the shift is going to be awesome.

The Third-Party Cookie was a godsend to digital advertisers. It made it dead-simple for anyone with a basic understanding of tracking and funnels to get their brand message in front of an audience as many times as necessary in order to market them into submission.

So why is its demise a good thing? Just because it worked doesn't mean that it was good for everyone. The Third-Party Cookie was more effective the more sophisticated you were, and it caused some legitimate causes for concern about data privacy.

Without the ability to track individual users across the Internet, we're going to have to shift to more contextual advertising. In short, that means we'll be buying more ads based on the content of a page and fewer that follow individuals around wherever they go.

That means more opportunity for creativity, as the ads can be aware of the things happening around them, and less brand risk since there will be fewer ways that our ads could accidentally end up next to hate-speech, or other content that we'd rather not support.

3. MARKETING MOVING IN-HOUSE

Say it louder, for the people in the back.

This has been our sermon for the past 6+ years. It's not that we don't like agencies and outsourced creatives – in fact, we're some of the biggest fans of great agency creative.

What's changed, and what the marketplace is finally responding to, is the way that marketing departments were originally set up in the post-industrial revolution to simply buy ads to move product. There were no websites to manage, no two-way communication, and no content marketing to create.

Today, marketing has massively grown in scope and influence, and depending on how strictly you define it, you'd be hard pressed to find a corner of the organization that isn't impacted or supported by marketing.

Agencies thrive when they're briefed by a team that knows where it's going and why it's headed there. Brands require much more attention, care, and insight than any agency can reasonably provide.

Was it overlooked last year? Perhaps, but the shift is inevitable, and the only question that remains is how many of us will recognize it, and create the conditions for our organizations to thrive.

Note: This is exactly the problem that Junction exists to solve. If you're seeing the need to build your team's capacity, especially as it relates to digital marketing, hit Reply – we'd love to start a conversation.

Here's what they say our industry overhyped in 2020:

1. TIKTOK

When Google bought YouTube for $1.5 Billion in 2006, then-CEO Eric Schmidt was asked whether that was the right price for the platform. "Absolutely not," he said.

He went on to explain that they had either massively over-paid, or under-paid for the new media platform, but they wouldn't know which for about 10 years.

That's where we are with TikTok. I don't think that it will take 10 years to know which direction it goes, but TikTok is either a whole new paradigm of social content and sharing, or it's a fun feature that will be replicated. At this point, I think it's far too early to know which is the right answer.

2. ADVERTISERS BOYCOTTING PLATFORMS

This one hets a hard-disagree from me. The #StopHateForProfit movement may not have bankrupted Facebook this year, but it is precisely those types of movements that shape behaviour, and therefore the direction that markets take.

If brands are going to act like they have personalities and if they're going to claim to have a mission and a purpose, then they must also recognize that they are massively influential participants in this society.

When organizations see that Facebook, Google, or others are causing division, that they are complicit in stoking violence, racism, and the destruction of democracy, the people who write the biggest cheques to those platforms carry an obligation to call them out.

Systems don't change overnight, and Facebook reported record profits last year, but to say that the thousands of brands that raised the issue and our collective consciousness about the shortcomings of big tech were "overhyped" is to miss the point.

3. INSTAGRAM REMOVING LIKES

I'm already bored of this one, so I guess they got it right. In the end, they didn't even fully go through with it.

Here's hoping that we have much more interesting topics to talk about in 2021.

To see the original report, and to make your own mind up about where you agree/disagree, check out the link below:

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Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting