I hope you had a wonderful holiday and are off to a great start to 2024. I had a fantastic break (thanks for asking!) but now my brain feels like an old hard drive in the middle of a cold reboot. Please excuse any typos. My last newsletter of 2023 included a list of the trend decks I found most useful. For this newsletter, I’ve included a few more – some looking forward, and others looking back.
Looking Forward
I love this use case for ChatGPT – uploading a bunch of trend decks and prompting ChatGPT to synthesize the predictions. Here are a few other trends I found interesting, synthesized the old-fashioned way:
Clothing: We’ll be wearing more New Balance shoes and some very roomy pants from Faces of Another. And if you’re Gen-Z - look froward to the Lazy Lux look. Reminds me of George Costanza ensconced in velvet.
Food: We’ll be eating more pistachios and breadfruit as we enter “the year of soup”. AI will also be used more to provide more personalized meal recommendations, and design new product like Coca-Cola’s Y300.
Drink: We’ll be drinking spirits from Asia, whiskies from around the world, and even more cocktails infused with coffee – beyond the espresso martini. Sales of no and low-alcohol beer, cider, wines, and spirits were up 23% in 2023 and are expected to grow. (Pro Tip: Bellwoods makes an NA IPA that’s great).
Travel: We’ll be planning more trips that follow our interests in live music and popular TV / film locations. Many Canadians will also be seeking ‘analog adventures’ – packing Polaroid cameras and vinyl records (as if overhead carry-on room wasn’t limited enough!)
Looking BackwarD
Google, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube all released reports on the most popular searches and content on their platforms in 2023. Here are a few more ‘in-the-weeds’ reports on how we spent our time online last year:
iPhone Apps: The most popular iPhone apps in the U.S. were a bit of a surprise to me: Top Free =Temu (Retail), Top Paid Paid=Shadowrocket (VPN), Top free Game: MONOPOLY GO! Interesting to see how the lists differ between iPhone (more utilities) and iPad (more streaming).
Wikipedia Pages: While the most read page on the platform was predictably ChatGPT, the 3rd was 2023 Cricket World Cup, and the 4th was Indian Premier League. A good reminder that it’s a global platform.
Netflix Viewing: Netflix responded to pressure to be more transparent about viewership and published its first Engagement Report. Chart toppers include The Night Agent, Ginny & Georgia, and a bunch of others I haven’t watched or heard of.
Best Memes: This is a fun scroll through 2023 via the most popular memes that graced our social feeds. The smirk / shrug Kevin James meme still gets me.
Useful Reads
The End of the ‘Digital Agency’?: WSJ article that explores how generalist digital agencies are struggling in the face of automation, in-house models, and specialized freelancers. Should agencies and marketers drop the whole ‘digital’ term? I rambled on about this back in 2019.
Martech for 2024: No one writes about martech in a more clear or useful way than Scott Brinker. His new report is a great resource for any “non-techie” marketer trying to better understand recent trends in marketing technology.
Reclaim Your Brain: Timely initiative from the Guardian on helping people to reduce excessive screen time. I just signed up for this email-based coaching program as this is on my New Year Resolution list.
The School of Good Services: A fantastic presentation by Lou Downe on the importance of great service design. I love her framing of bad services as ‘nouns’ and good services as ‘verbs’; “when we think about services as verbs, they get bigger”.