Russell's got a post up "The future of brands and planning". I'm going to write up my response and my predictions.
Gemma's question: What do you think Planning will look like in ten years and how will Planners have to adapt?
Obviously most things will be the same. In any forecasting project it’s always good to start by making it clear that most things will be the same. Look at any 10 year time-span and most things are mostly the same before and after.
Most things WILL be the same. I saw the movie "The Queen" on Saturday, set in August 1997 and noticed:
The laptops looked really old fashioned
The Queen's mobile phone was one of those clunky old big ones
The Times was still a broadsheet
That's it. Everything else would have looked just fine yesterday. Diana's final outfit, ALL the cars, all the clothes - especially Tony Blair's football shirt, well maybe it would have been red and white - the hair styles, the OTT tabloid headlines, the cordless phones, the kids toys, the IKEA shelves, even the messages and flowers look the same every July 1st and Aug 31st on the gates of Kensington Palace.
But here are some predictions for you, in and out of planning:
The Superbowl and Coronation Street will still be on and they’ll still be punctuated by ads. Most of those ads will still be no good. But slightly more of them will be good than now.
Only people aged 50+ will watch televisions. Everyone else will watch things in their own time, in their own way, on computer.
Seth Godin will be publishing books on an hourly basis.
They will not be printed on paper.
Traditional quantitative research agencies will have almost entirely disappeared (though a couple will be preserved at the National Museum of Redundant Services). The sheer amount of opinion generated by whatever the blogosphere becomes will make asking people new questions pointless. The companies who mine, analyse and package that opinion will replace old school quant and everyone will hate them as much as they hate Millward Brown now.
One hopes all market research will undergo a stupendous change and will get very expensive due to conducting fieldwork ethically, experienced researchers running groups in locations that the respondents are comfortable in, analysing the findings comprehensively, running workshops instead of debriefs, hiring good writers to write up the findings, hiring good art directors to create the presentation materials.
Quantitative research will never go away Russell, businesses will always want numbers to quote. Anyway, quantitative research, when done well, is as easy to comprehend as a cookery programme.
Also, I'm not so sure that opinions will be that easy to find online. My 14 year old nephew just deleted his MySpace account, too mainstream I guess.
MRI and neural imaging will be banned for market research purposes when a petfood ad makes someone’s brain explode.
Can't come soon enough.
Planning departments will dump their econometricians when it’s discovered that econometrics is simply a vast con perpetrated by a cabal of disgruntled mathematicians and that statistical science is more akin to astrology than astronomy. Lots of planners sigh with relief and admit they’d never really understood statistical significance anyway.
Statistical significance just tells you how trustworthy your quantitative data is. Maybe in ten years there will be a kitemark for trustworthiness. Just to make it easier for the math-phobic.
Global warming and rising ocean levels will mean that the Cannes ad festival is relocated to Bucharest. The winning ad in 2016 is a visual joke about someone falling over that no-one remembers ever seeing before.
Hasn't this happened already?
DDB will have created a computer model of Paul Feldwick’s brain which is issued to all their planners on a memory card which goes in their phone. They will simply wave their phone over any product or brand and a genius strategy will be SMS’d to the giant simulation of Trevor Beattie running in the creative department.
Now you're just being silly. Paul Feldwick is a one off, just like Churchill and Marilyn Monroe. No computer model is capable of such brilliance.
I'll never forget Paul saying about advertising effectiveness research models "Everything works sometimes." Dumbfounding, really.
Naked Inside will be named ‘Contagion Number One’ by the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta.
I googled this and got something about cigarettes, also the Goo Goo Dolls. Still not sure.
As Sky/Fox/Star exceeded 100% household penetration on earth News Corp executives will announce their corporate space programme (re-using abandoned Pendolino rockets from the bankrupt Virgin Galactic). Their first move will be to target planets newly discovered around Cassiopeia and to use football as a ‘galactic battering ram’. The first game scheduled for transmission to the entire galaxy is a Carling Cup clash between Nottingham Forest and Portsmouth.
In ten years I still won't understand or care about English sports.
The IPA Effective Awards committee will finally admit that they can’t prove whether advertising works and attempt to prove something simpler. They’ll start with the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.
Why not start this year?
Neil French will start his own country.
Only women who "suckle something" will be allowed to live there.
Maurice Saatchi will be made United Nations Branding Tzar. His taskforce will go through the dictionary and issue every registered brand in the world with their own word, seemingly at random. This will be the only word each brand will be allowed to use in communications. An unofficial One Word Equity Market will be established where brands secretly trade words, Marks and Spencer will desperately try and offload ‘putrid’ but will find no takers.
Oh no! You don't think the United Nations will still be going do you? Arrrgggghhh.
Planners will be banned from blogging as the amount of content they generate exceeds the world’s storage capacity.
I'm an optimist. Storage capacity will keep up.
My predictions:
1. Market research will get better. The people who do it will know their stuff and love it. Market researchers will become "cool" (well, geeks did!).
2. Everyone will have wireless access to googley type info in their pockets and will be able to confront fraudsters with authoritative articles that refute them.
3. The world will have undergone a renaissance in authoritative information sources.
4. Love will become an important attribute for brands and people will take extra effort to hunt down the brands they love. Plus guys won't mind saying it more.
5. Someone will figure out how to measure how much advertising moves people - a tear count?
6. People will go to the cinema just to watch ads. They're all so good these days (well except the Renault Clio one, that's just bizarre and everyone talked over it) maybe have special nights at the IMAX theatre.
7. Advertising will finally figure out how to advertise persuasively to senior citizens (demographics will force this one to happen).
8. Planners, media people and creative people will be aged 21 to 101 with a pretty equal age spread. Account handlers will still burn out at 40.
9. Account planners will be required to learn how to do stand up comedy. One will break out and become a sensation at Edinburgh, then tv then the movies.
10.Russell Davies will have written his eleventh best selling book, entitled "Confessions of an Account Planner".
