2. 10 TRENDS FOR 2013
• We have been producing trends for clients for the past few years
• Nothing changes on New Year’s Day; all of these trends are already happening, but
will grow significantly over the next 12 months, having a greater impact than in the
previous twelve
• We highlight what the trends are, why they are growing, key illustrative examples, and
implications for brands, rooted in what we have observed this year
• These are trends, not ‘the trends’. There are lots of things happening, and we hope
we have chosen some the most interesting
3. 10 TRENDS FOR 2013
1. Makers
2. Online to Offline
3. Work-arounds
4. Paid
5. Digital Scarcity
6. Chinese Influence
7. Acquisitions
8. Targeting
9. New Currencies
10.The Wow Factor
4. MAKERS
• People and brands are extending the DIY ethos of user generated content and
starting to make real, physical things. Leading to a rise of user generated content as
physical things
• This is driven by the falling cost of technology like 3D printers, and the rose of crowd-
funding sites
5. MAKERS
• 3D printing, where physical objects are printed or cut out are falling in price, which
will make them more viable for businesses or shared spaces like studios to buy
• (The Pirate Bay now even has a special download category, physables, which are
patterns to use on 3D printers)
• Although music, films and art make up over 2/3 of the successful projects on the
crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, more people are raising money for physical
products, like the Pebble ePaper watch, the Ubi voice controlled computer, or
Projecteo, a projector for Instagram pictures
• Marketplaces like Etsy are also making it easier to for people to design and sell their
own goods to a global audience
6. MAKERS
• Brands are also starting to let their
customers make products relating to their
brands, by working with the new creator
communities
• Disney let visitors to their Parks create a
Disney Princess with their own face on the
doll
• Domino’s Pizza set a challenge to the Forge
open source car creator community to
create the perfect pizza delivery vehicle –
and hope to build it next year
• The ‘Quirky’ community crowdsourced 15
iPhone 5 accessories and put them on sale
on Fab.com within a week of the new phone
being released
7. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Get involved!
• What products are there, outside of your normal activities, that would appeal to your
customers or users?
• Is there a maker community with a strong affinity with your brand that you could
involve?
8. ONLINE TO OFFLINE
• Digital only companies are establishing physical presences, or building real
experiences
• Online brands know that if they take their knowledge of online into the physical world
they can gain even more market share
9. ONLINE TO OFFLINE
• Amazon, the biggest online retailer is starting
to same day delivery (order in the morning
and receive in the evening), and have
‘Lockers’ in public places where goods can be
delivered to
• Brands are offering real experiences to make
the virtual real - Nissan Gran Turismo trained
some online gamers to be racing drivers at Le
Mans
• Google’s new mobile game is a physical
game. You play Ingress by walking around
getting physical cues from your surroundings
on your phone
10. ONLINE TO OFFLINE
• We’re also seeing more seamless integration
between online data and traditional media
• The TV ads for Halo 4 put gamers’ names &
pictures from a Facebook app directly onto
TV
• Gambling ads can give live odds within a TV
ad at half-time in a game
• We’re also seeing more brands measure
offline results from digital campaigns – for
example the sales uplift in-store from a
search campaign
11. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Think about areas where you are currently online only, but could benefit from a real
world presence
• This could be anything from seasonal pop-up shops to photo opportunities in high
traffic areas
• Think about data or information that could be used in near-real time in traditional
communication
• Design measurement frameworks to let you track online activity to offline
12. WORK-AROUNDS
• People and companies are developing work-arounds for technology that
doesn’t work as well as it should
• This can be seen in anything from mobile payment systems to sharing on
Instagram, as people use their ingenuity to work around legal restrictions, or
just service deficiencies
13. WORK-AROUNDS
• There are lots of work-arounds with mobile
payments
• Google wallet started off as a way of paying with
an Android phone with its own NFC chip, but
Google are now producing a full physical card
• The Paypal mobile payment system works on any
phone, using either QR codes or payment codes,
and they are introducing it to retail chains
• Square’s Wallet is a mobile app that contains all
of your cards and loyalty cards by also bypasses
NFC
• Even through there are now over 100m phones
with NFC chips in circulation (& all major
manufacturers apart from Apple sell at least one),
operators are experimenting with NFC chips built
into the SIM card
14. WORK-AROUNDS
• There are lots of other examples of work-
arounds where the technology isn’t good
enough or widespread enough, or simply
won’t let you do things
• Instagram won’t let you share other
people’s photos (but you can do it by
taking screen shots & re-uploading)
• Apple wanted to take a large cut in digital
subscriptions from the FT in the Apple App
Store (so the FT made HTML5 app that
would work on all devices to get around it)
• IFTTT – IF This Then That - is a site that
lets you do your own work-arounds by
linking different technologies beyond what
the originators intended – for example
automatically save all your Instagram
pictures to Dropbox (or to put your
Instagram pics onto Twitter)
15. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Finding popular work-arounds can be great inspiration for either adapting your
business or creating a new business
• Are there awkward things that everyone does with your product that you can
simplify?
• Or things that people like your customers do that you could offer as a simplified
service?
16. PAID
• There has never been more online piracy than there is now, but at the same time
people are getting more willing to pay for some things
• This is down to the ease of payment, understanding why the payment is needed, and
being able to see where the payment is going
17. PAID
• Again Kickstarter is a great example of this. It’s very
simple to make a payment, there are no ‘free options’, so
no freeloaders. You need to pay even to express your
support for a campaign, while projects are encouraged to
both explain very clearly their ‘journey’ and why they
want the money
• People funding through Kickstarter know that the
payment is going directly to the projects (with a small
deduction), and the people seeking funding often try to
get closer to their funders at the higher payment levels –
gigs in people’s houses, or allowing people to be involved
in development decisions for example
• Comedian Louis CK managed to sell an album to over
200,000 at $5 a download, by telling people why he
deserved the money, and how hard he worked
18. PAID
• A statue of Robocop in Detroit was funded (to over
$100,000) because people thought it was a great idea
• Facebook has launched a new gifts service in the US,
where people pay to have physical gifts delivered to their
friends. Once credits are set up, paying for items is very
easy
• There is even a sign that newspaper paywalls may be
working. The New York Times now has over 450,000
digital subscribers, and gets more revenue from
subscriptions than advertising
• Charities are also getting good at taking payment.
Charity Water shows how its donations are spent with use
of photos and GPS
19. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Consider whether you are giving something away that you could sell – digital does not
have to mean free
• Provenance and understanding of why payment is needed is vital – and so corporate
social responsibility becomes more important than ever
20. DIGITAL SCARCITY
• One of the features of digital media is that things don’t run out – a store can’t run
out of eBooks for example
• However scarcity (or artificial scarcity) can create demand & push up prices so
businesses are starting to find ways to build it in
21. DIGITAL SCARCITY
• Brands can create scarcity by doing things for a limited
time. Ebay created an online pop-up shop for Henry
Holland to run only during London Fashion Week
• Sites like Fab.com run sales over very limited periods (&
even the concept of ‘Black Friday’ online, where the
stores were open on Thanksgiving Day anyway is
artificial)
• JK Rowling’s site Pottermore was originally launched to
only 1m members despite there being much higher
demand
• Some celebrities (like Justin Bieber and members of One
Direction) have special ‘secret’ accounts on Twitter &
Instagram for super fans in addition to their verified
accounts
22. DIGITAL SCARCITY
• Sites are pushing scarcity by developing their own
ad formats that only they can sell, which also blur
the boundaries between what is an ad and what is
content
• Sites doing this include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr
and YouTube – and many magazines sell out of ad
inventory for their iPad editions by deliberately
limiting the number of ads and advertisers per
issue
• However this can lead to silo-ed measurement,
where it’s hard for advertisers to see the
performance of media in relation to the whole
media buy
23. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• It’s an opportunity – and a threat
• It’s an opportunity to make your content seem more desirable by limiting access to it
(assuming that it’s desirable in the first place), and also to try to identify your most
valuable customers and reward them with some kind of access
• It’s also an opportunity to achieve real stand out on sites where ad formats are
specifically designed to reflect the feel and content, but it’s a threat in that it can
lead to higher media costs, and more silo-ed tracking
24. CHINESE INFLUENCE
• China’s power & influence in the digital economy is increasing and will soon start to
be very noticeable
• The Chinese became the largest nation online three years ago, and since they block
many Western services, domestic companies have been able to grow without
competition from Silicon Valley
• Now they are starting to lead and set trends, especially in mobile, messaging and
ecommerce
25. CHINESE INFLUENCE
• China is a leader in mobile internet access. In the third quarter this year 60 million
smartphones were sold in China, compared to 20 million PCs
• This is reflected in it’s media channels - Social media firm Tencent has nearly 800
million active users of it’s instant messaging service; it’s also well diversified, with
less than 10% of revenues coming from advertising
• Its mobile app Weixin (WeChat) has over 200 million users less than two years since
launch (100m in the past 6 months), and looks set to go global
• Meanwhile Baidu reports that 25% of searches now relate to location, so presumably
from mobile devices
26. CHINESE INFLUENCE
• eCommerce is also starting to out-pace the West – Singles Day (11th November, or
11.11) generated an online spend of $3 billion, compared to just $1.4 billion in the
US on Cyber Monday
• China also leads in mobile TV viewing, with 45 million viewers, as at June 2012,
nearly half of whom pay
• Not surprisingly, Chinese companies are seeing Western investment, including UUCun
(mobile advertising) and Transmension (putting mobile and other games onto TV
platforms)
27. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Keep up to date with what is happening in China
• Look on China as an innovation leader in human behaviour in technology usage,
particularly mobile. What works in China today may be popular in the West soon
• Monitor what services are available within technologies like WeChat – they may soon
emerge elsewhere
28. ACQUISITIONS
• A scary statistic: four billion dollar software companies are created every year in
Silicon Valley
• Many companies are created with the aim going public, but since the recent IPOs of
companies like Zynga, Pandora and Facebook many of these companies will be put
off from taking this route (& find it hard to get underwritten) so there is likely to be a
wave of large acquisitions
29. ACQUISITIONS
• Many of the new companies are more single purpose &
specialised than previous companies
• For example Facebook wanted to cover all of the most
used parts of the web (mail, pictures, video, instant
messaging), but Pinterest does just one thing very well
• Specialist single aim companies seen often as ‘better’
at particular service than generalists, so can be targets
for takeover
30. ACQUISITIONS
• Many companies from a few years ago left it too late to
be bought – Digg was rumoured to be worth $200m in
2008; in 2012 it sold for under $20m
• Google tried to buy Groupon for (a reported) $6 billion –
now Groupon is missing revenue targets and investors
are unhappy
• The dream for many start-ups could now be to ‘do an
Instagram’ rather than to float – get an exit without
having to struggle for monetisation
31. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Lots of the start-ups from the past few years are likely to become part of bigger
companies, specifically the big 5 of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft
• These companies will see their technological footprint grow; decide whose side(s) you
want to be on
32. TARGETING
• There are now lots of new targeting options from individual sites like Facebook
and Twitter, and ad exchanges, based either on real data or assumptions
• Sites with lots of data on consumers are getting better at processing it and
selling on it, but advertising has to work harder
33. TARGETING
• Facebook and Twitter both introduced lots of new
targeting options in 2012, and will introduce more as they
push for more monetisation
• This is part of a move in planning from proxy-based (e.g.
demographics), to cookie based, to self-declared data
• Akamai & Quantcast are now offering targeting across
networks based on audience characteristics inferred from
very high sample sizes
• Lots of online display advertising is now created
dynamically – the audience attributes determine the
message, the images and the colour of the ad from a
range of options
• Even direct mail is changing – retailers can now work out
so much about us from what we regularly buy, and put the
right vouchers and offers into mail shots
34. TARGETING
• Facebook is going to have a great year, based on its new
powers of targeting
• It can already target across its site on declared and
demographic data, as sold on its ad exchange
• It can also tracking events (e.g. purchases) on third party
sites back to the ads it shows, and can target on email
addresses, for example to allow online retailers to advertise
to its subscribers when they log in to Facebook.
• It is likely to start to monetise Instagram (which also has
lots of user data)
35. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Get to know your audience and try to find characteristics that define them
• Think about new ways of targeting, based on habits, preferences, what else they buy,
where they go, and more
36. NEW CURRENCIES
• People are now leveraging their social influence as a currency
• Measurement helps brands to understand the benefit of personal endorsement, so
there will be more ways to encourage this by giving people with influence incentives
to try goods
37. NEW CURRENCIES
• Amazon offer free product through their Vine
programme to valued reviewers, on the understanding
that they will write an honest review (positive or
negative)
• Services like Klout, Peer Index and Kred allow brands
to assess audience value through influence & more
• Kellogg’s let customers pay with a tweet – one tweet
about the product got a box of their new Special K
Cracker Crisps
• But… Trust is an essential part of any social currency,
so over-use will lead to expectation by the influencers
and the benefit will be lost
38. NEW CURRENCIES
• Mobile credit is also emerging as a new currency
• In Zimbabwe mobile credit is being given by YoTime
instead of change for small amounts, as it is easier than
printing currency
• British virtual mobile operator GiffGaff rewards its users
with free credit when they recruit new customers
39. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Understand your audience, and the influence they have over others
• Is it worth rewarding the ones who recommend you? Will they do it more often, or
will it devalue your brand?
• Can you reward your most passionate fans on other ways if not with your own
products?
40. THE WOW FACTOR
• Brands will do more and more breathtaking things
41. THE WOW FACTOR
• Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos jump was a genuinely breathtaking piece of
marketing that was watched like on YouTube by 8 million people. The highlights have
been viewed 30 million times
42. THE WOW FACTOR
• Microsoft is working in a real time voice translation
• It will translate voice in (very near) real time – it’s been demonstrated with
English and Mandarin
43. THE WOW FACTOR
• But other ‘wows’ are lower tech, for example the
Popinator voice controlled pop-corn machine,
made by snacks company Popcorn Indiana
• Which leads us back to ‘Makers’
44. IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS
• Be original, unusual, and unique
• Budgets don’t have to be enormous, but do or make things that really capture the
imagination
