Alistair Beattie Waves Goodbye to 2016

Holistic diversity 

As our industry continues to address much-needed improvements in gender and ethnic diversity, there’s another group we’d be wise to consider – the disaffected middle class. Even as we seek to correct bias against gender and race, we’re still mainly just speaking to a young, university-educated urban population. If nothing else, 2016 has shown us how disconnected this cohort can be from the grassroots “silent” majority that have produced political results that were neither predicted by the polls or the media. Meanwhile in the UK, the growing ageing society is categorised as JAMS (“just about managing”) with a cultural and political agenda that is very different from that of young people living in the capital. Perhaps 2017 will see brands and agencies start a new discourse around diversity that allows us to reconnect fully with people of all gender, ethnicity, age, and political views.

Brand coherence 

If a brand is a sum of everything it does and says, then agencies are increasingly asked by their clients to think about the whole brand experience. Communication is part of a bigger picture. The ongoing transformation of many client businesses means bringing some previously separate worlds of brand, advertising, social, PR commerce, e-commerce and direct marketing together, as they’re increasingly linked by the user journey across a lot of channels.  The disciple of brand consistency – which majored in design and tonality – is now being expanded with a sense of coherence. 2017 will be the year of brand coherence; a more flexible mandate that includes a greater sense of how a brand “feels”. It demands that a brand lives up to promises in every aspect of their interaction with consumers and, crucially, in their operations too.

Bots good and bad 

The ebb and flow of social commentary runs faster and deeper than ever before. But the human contributions are being slowly overwhelmed by bots. While some bots answer basic questions and give customer service, they can also be used to spam and harass people. It was reported by Twitter back in 2014 that approximately 8,5% or 24 million user accounts were in fact not human. More recently it was reported that Twitterbots were Tweeting pro-Trump at a rate of 7:1, with bots making up at least 15% of accounts discussing the election. In 2016 advertisers were wary of impressions served to bots but in 2017 they will increasingly come to use them. Utilising bots to promote goods and services will rapidly become normalised, for better or for worse. 

Outsourcing critical thinking 

Stephen Colbert coined “truthiness” in 2005 to describe an intuitive sense of correctness unburdened by evidence, logic or facts. In the decade that followed the nature of truth in popular discourse has become entangled with the rise of social networks as a principle source of news and information. 2016 will be remembered as the year “post-truth” entered the dictionary. A year in which both Facebook, Google, Twitter et al were accused of allowing fake news to propagate throughout their systems. The outcry was understandable – these networks cannot claim to be solely technology companies; they are publishers and should take more responsibility for the consequences of their algorithms. Google and Facebook have both made commitments to banning fake news sites from their display advertising networks. 2017 will not stop the flow of fake news, but I can only hope that algorithms will be reprogrammed to look for the truth.