TEN DIGITAL TRENDS FOR 2020 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU 4 BY MALLORIE RODAK SOUND TEST: WHY PODCASTS ARE RIPE FOR EXPERIMENTATION 12 BY PATRICK O’NEILL AND KYLE DAVIS THE MARKETPLACE ABHORS A VACUUM 18 BY SARAH WALKER-HALL AND KELLY PILAND TIPTOEING THROUGH THE POLITICAL TIDAL WAVE 22 BY LUKE DAMOMMIO COLLAB FATIGUE IS COMING – HERE’S WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT 31 BY TREY GREEN AND HELINA SEYOUM BLURRING LINES: CONTENT AND COMMERCE CONVERGE 36 BY LAKEN FACCIO A NEW SOCIAL ORDER 42 BY AUBRI ELLIOTT DEEPFAKES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE MURKY 46 BY JAYR SOTELO UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX: GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK’S 49 MOVE TOWARD AUTOMATION BY CONOR MACDOWELL AND ANN PETER THE ANTI-AESTHETIC 54 BY LAUREN KAINDL BY BENNIE REED, COREY AUSTIN, AND CORY O’BRIEN TEN DIGITAL TRENDS 2020 “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” – The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway As you read our Ten Digital Trends for 2020, pay attention to the language. You will undoubtedly notice words like culture, responsibility, authenticity, sincerity, and influence splashed throughout these pages. This may be jarring if you are familiar with our nine previous annual projections. You would likely have expected to be inundated with figures about adoption, growth, social, mobile, or any number of breakthroughs in new technology, platforms, or user behavior. It is no accident that the most influential factors in digital for 2020 are as much about cultural reaction as technological advancements. As digital has become more pervasive and intrinsically influential in American life, it has rightly been scrutinized to a greater extent than ever before. The debate about digital has shifted from the realm of “what is possible?” toward “what is right?” Technological breakthroughs are still just as common, but they are shifting from novelty to reality – change happens slowly, then all at once. The expansion of machine learning into ever more significant functions will continue, along with questions about bias and shifting patterns of work as artificial intelligence and machine learning augment job roles. Privacy, accountability, and responsibility will continue to dominate conversation in governments and boardrooms alike. Consumer control and expectations for products, services, and platforms will continue to rise, and experimentation at the edge of these experiences will continue to accelerate. Apart from the inevitable disruption that this ongoing shift will bring to the core of their businesses, brands need to have a clear understanding of how these themes will influence opportunities across all touchpoints and audiences to appropriately plan their digital investments. One factor will have the most immediate impact on brands’ prospects for taking advantage of digital in 2020: attention. From the collapse of the attention economy making it far more difficult to captivate audiences at scale to paying deep enough attention to the shifts major 2 communications platforms are making behind the scenes, attention will define the brand landscape in 2020. 1 To stay ahead, dive into analysis of how to engineer attention amid an overwhelmed and distracted population, find new audiences by experimenting within the second podcast boom, build strong and differentiated brand narratives with a shelf-out e-commerce strategy, or discover how brands can safely navigate the fraught waters of the 2020 election cycle. While planning investments for 2020, pay attention to the underlying platform strategies from the duopoly as they shift to less transparent campaign tools, attempt to satisfy greater scrutiny by building a more nuanced one-to-one-focused social ecosystem, and rise to the enormous challenge posed by deepfakes. As always, the thinking in this year’s report is fueled by a wide range of digital experts – digital strategists, brand planners, media planners, creatives, and brand managers. “We hope these trends will be insightful and instructive as you plan your brand-building strategies for 2020 and beyond. Let’s go have fun.” – Stan Richards, Brand Creative Leader 3 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU 1 Tsundoku (Japanese: ) is a Japanese slang term that originated in the Meiji era (1868-1912). It’s the idea of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. The piling of unread books. MALLORIE RODAK Brand Planning Director Source: thedailystar.net These days, your pile of unread books may be only a couple of titles deep. But turn your attention from your bookshelf to your laptop, phone, or TV. Consider your unread emails, bookmarked articles, social media notifications, podcast queue, Steam library, Hulu watchlist, Spotify playlists, and, if you’re over 40, your DVR. The tsundoku of today isn’t made up of paper and ink but bytes and code. When memes joke about the stress of your never-ending Netflix queue, your overwhelming amount of notifications, or your RAM-defying number of unread Chrome tabs, it’s easy to see that we are living in the age of multimedia tsundoku. 4 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU STANDING OUT AMONG THE ZETTABYTES When you consider that 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years, the staggering reality of our modern-day multimedia tsundoku begins to set in. The number of books published worldwide has sextupled in the past 30 years, with more than three million new titles annually. The number of original scripted TV shows and movies has gone up by a factor of six since the 1980s in the U.S. alone. Half a billion photos are posted each day on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. One million hours of video are uploaded daily to YouTube. Tens of millions of songs are available to stream, along with hundreds of thousands of podcasts and video games. How have we responded to this exponential growth of content? On one hand, it’s our natural tendency to try and meet the demand, which is why our time spent on the Internet has grown globally to more than six and half hours a day on average, or more than 100 days of online time a year. To extend that average across all 4.4 billion Internet users, humanity will spend a collective total of more than 1.2 billion years online in 2019. Source: hubspot.com During those six and a half hours each day, we try and maximize our time engaging with content. Skim reading is the new normal. Podcasting is becoming podfasting (listening to podcasts at an accelerated speed), and podfasting has become the “gateway drug” to all types of sped-up media consumption. Podfasting, or whatever fasting, gives me an opportunity to…set my anxieties aside and indulge in my wildest fantasy: to manipulate time, indefinitely, whenever the temptation strikes. So that I can read more books, watch more movies, blow through more TV shows, and listen to more podcasts – while still having time to hit the gym, hang out with friends, get enough sleep, and, you know, show up for my job every day. – Lindsey Lanquist But on the other hand, in a content-rich, time-poor age, we are overwhelmed by the rate of consumption relative to the time we have available. The concept of timeboxing, or assigning scheduled time to a certain task, has leapt from the handbooks of Agile planning to self-help articles on time management. Some people are timeboxing the amount of their day that they consume content to limit their exposure. Brands are even timeboxing content by providing estimates of how long it will take to read their story or watch their video. 5 STANDING OUT IN THE AGE OF MULTIMEDIA TSUNDOKU It’s no surprise that in 2020, the sum of human attention is simply not sufficient to consume the content that’s being created. Mark Shaefer coined this epoch content shock, where “exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect with our limited human capacity to consume it.” As an advertiser, it all sounds fairly depressing. The battle for attention continues to grow harder with more content, more channels of exposure, more publishers, and shorter attention spans. Content creators are “the speed daters of storytelling,” continually challenged to break through with “snackable content” in shorter amounts of time. When short becomes not short enough, and content becomes too much to take it all in, how can brands stand out in 2020? In this age of multimedia tsundoku, how can we avoid gathering dust on the proverbial bookshelf of the Internet? “ARCHITECTS OF FAMILIAR SURPRISES” Unfortunately, there is no formula for success for breaking out on the Internet. But according to Derek Thompson, author of Hit Makers, there are some fundamental elements involved in making a hit. It starts with a central thesis: We, as consumers, are simultaneously neophobic (dislike anything too unfamiliar) and neophilic (love trying new things). Throughout time, we’ve been programmed to fear the unfamiliar as an evolutionary response to stay alive. In all organisms, exposure to a novel stimulus initially elicits fear and avoidance. The more that we’re exposed to a novel stimulus, the less we fear and avoid it. This is known as the mere exposure effect. Does the mere exposure effect mean the answer is spending more money on more advertising to expose more people to our message more often? That’s not a sustainable solution, and in some studies, higher levels of exposure have proven damaging to company reputation. It means we, as consumers, like the familiar because it’s easier and faster to process. Have you ever heard someone say “this is hurting my brain?” There’s a psychological principle behind that feeling called perceptual fluency, or the ease with which a stimulus can be processed.