It is most likely that the universe and its trends don’t really care that the calendar digits have flipped over. That being the case, here are some wider trends that I believe we saw starting in 2016 and will go into 2017 and beyond.

Inter-agency collaboration making for better marketing, and also making marketing better

With the rising importance of interconnected media on the one hand, and budget pressures on the other, clients are expecting agencies to work together.

At WPP it’s called ‘horizontality’. Ad agencies join forces with their clients’ technology partners and digital agencies. Media agencies, using their scale, have tried to make the most of this trend by building in-house planning, creative and digital capabilities. However, more often than not they find themselves as the hubs of cross-agency collaboration. In a few cases large integrated marketing and PR agencies, are heading that way too.

As they go through those changes, all agencies also need to collaborate with growing in-house teams of tech people, designers and content people – partly due to clients looking for agile and efficient ways to respond to the market. I wonder if agencies have done enough to put in place cost-effective, agile response mechanisms.

An unexpected but positive side effect to this trend is a return to radical simplicity in brand strategy. The basic principles of most brand platforms and frameworks are the same, but agencies working to differentiate themselves give rise to superficial differences with models evolving into increasingly questionable metaphors. Onions, Temples, Keys, Keyholes, Bulbs, Fish, you name it. Worse yet, they are often clumped together, forming chimera-like creatures combining the ugliest, most scrupulous aspects of both marketing and organisational politics.

A method-salad starting point doesn’t allow agencies to stay focused and work in concert. As agencies and clients both now have to keep multiple teams on the same page, they are forced to go back to the fundamental elements that everyone can agree on and understand. This creates a natural distillation process that is very healthy for brands as well as for marketing as a discipline.

Social media is finally maturing

After a period of social media overhype, that work is being refocused around pragmatic goals and accountable measurements. As social media becomes more ubiquitous, the market stops seeing it as an end-all-be-all shiny-new solution that you either buy into or no. Continue reading →