“You can’t just keep doing what works one time.  Everything about you is changing.
To succeed, stay out in front of the change.”

Sam Walton

I grew up in the same town in New Zealand as Peter Jackson - the now extremely famous Sir Peter Jackson who directed and produced The Lord Of The Rings blockbuster film series.

Before Peter Jackson was famous, as a young child I remember hearing regular reports about an eccentric, barefoot film maker, who’d visit our local cemetery regularly at night to make gory short films with slapstick dark humor. I remember my Dad telling me "what a nut that guy must be."

Ha. Some nut.
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Fast forward to today. Peter has won three Academy Awards, and one Golden Globe. His production company and special effects studio employs 1550+ people in New Zealand and is widely considered the best in the world. Peter has worked with Steven Spielberg and a list of who's who in Hollywood.

Tech billionaire Sean Parker who cofounded the file-sharing service Napster and is a former president of Facebook, has just been approved to purchase 1/3 of Peter’s VFX (visual special effects) company.

Why would someone like Sean Parker, who has identified and capitalized on two of the biggest tech and marketing trends in history, want to invest many millions of dollars in Peter’s VFX company?

Because, according to Sean, there is huge, unmet demand for high-quality animated content.

Which neatly brings me to my 5 Top Marketing Predictions & Emerging Trends for next year:

1. There will be a HUGE increase in the amount of video content being consumed - particularly animated video content that can effectively blur the lines between entertainment and sales. In particular “explainer videos.” Our agency started creating explainer videos seven years ago for our clients, (it began with Microsoft). Since then explainer videos have remained a staple of every marketing engine we’ve built for our private clients - for good reason. They convert like crazy.
   Other popular videos in marketing were going to see en masse next year are animated video sales letters - one of my favorite sales formats.

2. There will be a fall/cataclysmic break up of the big social media giants including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube (you’ll note that three of these four platforms are owned by Facebook). You can see this trend already happening following the outrageous censorship (supposedly fact checking) on each of these platforms. Not to mention the FTC have just filed a massive antitrust lawsuit against Facebook.
   Watch this space - but know that if your company is heavily reliant on generating new leads from Facebook, Instagram, You Tube or Twitter - I hope your team is crazily working on plan B (see number 3 below).

3. Conversely, as people leave the big platforms, they’ll continue to flood into more highly fragmented social media channels - like Discord, Parler, Rumble, Triller, Valence …
   Next year you’ll need to stay even closer with your customers to find out where they’re hanging out so you can stay visible, relevant and sell to them in a way that makes sense.

4. Mistrust of big tech, including Google will continue to grow, as will the need for honest, transparent marketing. Consumers will flock to those businesses who embrace trust-based marketing which will become the holy grail in new client acquisition.

5. 2021 will see the rise of the “subsong” - a new kind of advertising that blurs the lines once again between entertainment and marketing. And it’s all thanks to the meteoric growth of TikTok. This year, the app has been installed over 66 million times with 40% of their user growth added in 2020. Where a single used to be an ad or a trailer for an album, the subsong - 30 seconds of song and often hilarious dance moves, is going to be parlayed into mainstream marketing in a big way.

Yes I predict next year is going to be another year of huge change but the untapped opportunities will be enormous for those companies who get on the front foot and take bold action.

Are any of these marketing trends a golden opportunity for your company?

Very, very likely.