Our response to JWT's look ahead at 2011
Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 2:46PM JWT, the fourth largest ad agency in the world, and part of marketing legend Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP empire, have just published their annual prediction of global trends to watch in 2011, which you can take a peek at in the slide show above. It's a heterogeneous bunch of predictions, ranging from sport, fashion and music to healthcare and civic infrastructure; communications tech gets a major look-in, as you might expect. Being an agency, JWT are arguably apt to present the coming year in terms of opportunity, so the list errs on the side of a certain kind of cheery optimism. (I've just finished reading Paulo Bagacilupi's masterly and Hugo-winning post-oil dystopian SF thriller The Windup Girl, so of all the 2010-in-review/year-ahead pieces I've read/heard, the architecture and networks theorist Kazys Varnelis' rather pessimistic end of the next big thing sat with my mood rather more easily. Happy New Year!)
But for all that, this is an intelligent and, I think, important list to peruse. Of the 100, a few struck me as being relevant or interesting (or even contentious) to us here at Unthinkable.
25. Digital downtime
Maybe this is a bit of a personal one, but I'm certainly finding that I want specific points in my day when I'm uninterrupted by mail, text, calls or even the need to "look it up" - and I'm sensing that a lot of us are going to be looking to this as a device for dealing with overload, and perhaps for help with regaining some of the attention span we all seem to have been losing. One friend has gone as far as disabling email on his iPhone, and while most of us might not go that far, there's definitely something in the air on this one.
18. Children's eBooks and 87. Tablets for tots
Matthew and Justin are the Unthinkables with young children, so I think I should leave any in-depth commentary on the implication of these to them. But it's clear to me that there's a huge opportunity here for the creation of intelligent, intuitive apps and services to help with children's learning - and specifically with an increasingly self-directed learning.
33. Facebook alternatives, 43. Ignorance is bliss and 82. Social network surveillance
Funnily enough, only yesterday, Sarah commented that I rather live my life in public, in response to my blogging about discovering the flamenco star Estrella Morente. Well, yes, to some extent this is true, but I would argue there's something very different about sharing our tastes, either consciously or else through our online activity (say, through scrobbling or buying from Amazon), and living every aspect of our lives in public. I rather suspect that as generation Facebook enters the workplace (or tries to), or starts up families or what have you, they're going to start wishing some of of their life hadn't been committed to the permanence of digital memory. (For more on this, see Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's important, but sadly rather overlooked Delete).
14. Breaking the book and 42. Longform content
On the surface, almost contradictory: on one hand the eBook reader allows the proliferation of short written formats such as the pamphlet (whose economics have presented publishers with a headache in the age of the paperback); on the other the tablet enables more longform journalism to be read. Yet these are, I think, both part of something larger - let's call it the death of the format.
And this isn't confined to the book. The great film critic David Thomson once remarked that a film doesn't have to be two hours long (or thereabouts): it can be a three minute Tom and Jerry short or Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire. It's just that the mechanics of print distribution to cinemas made it so. Ditto music: much as I love the album as a musical format (it is, after all, what I grew up with) I recognise it for the technological historical accident it is (the format wars, by the way, are brilliantly documented in Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever).
We should be living in a golden age of content experimentation as digital doesn't need format. And yet, and yet... In the legal online content realm at least, the economics still seem aligned to pre-digital format distribution. For non-format works of art and journalism to thrive, we need, as ever, new financial models to make sense of them.
93. Transmedia producers and 100. YouTube the broadcaster
Put it another way: more content in more places on more platforms and more devices, with - and here's the ever-so-slight snag - less money to go round. Now I'm a huge fan of specific craft skills honed over years to the point of bordering-on-art; I don't want to see those skills pass. But we have to be realistic about the future for at least mainstream media production - and that future is surely a multi-skilled, cross-disciplinary one.
15. Brigadeiro, 13. Brazil as e-Leader, 60. Neymar, and 66. Pedro Lorenço
OK, not strictly relevant to our day-to-day work, but we love Brazil here so we couldn't let this go without passing comment. From sport to tech (Brazilian twitter penetration, at 23%, is the highest in the world!), food to fashion, Brazil is the BRIC for us. Surely only a matter of time before the UC São Paulo office opens?
Oh, and as to this: 92. Tintin the Movie - as realised in 3D by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
2011