Adweek’s Top Ten Trends of 2007

Adweek has a very interesting list of 2007 business/marketing trends. The list includes convergent web “spinoffs” from/to television; “all us, all the time” – a world where everybody publishes and everybody’s a celebrity for fifteen microseconds; moving from PC to mobile – the phone as Internet device (though I’m skeptical that anyone’s thinking of leaving the PC behind); authenticity in marketing; the death of privacy in a world where all data about everybody is (potentially) everywhere; green capitalism, where oil company cadets don green uniforms and everybody “gets” the environment, even those who don’t; gaming gets social as more people move, if not permanently, into virtual worlds; BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are becoming significant economic centers (and, though they don’t mention it, economies become increasingly global-not-local)… and the two other trends I want to quote in full. These two are the most relevant to Polycot’s clients and friends:

DATA IS KING “Content” is no longer the be-all, end-all in the digital age. The growing number of social networks and marketers interested in targeted, relevant messages has given rise to a new proclamation: data rules. Google built its business on this premise, and Facebook’s $15 billion valuation was due to the plethora of information it has on its 58 million users. On the media-buying side, we’ve moved from mass media to precision media. Marketers now equate consumer knowledge with “insights” that can help hawk their wares and justify the huge bucks they’re shelling out for media time. The Nielsen Television Index more than doubled its data output to clients this year (with the addition of average-commercial-minute ratings for live audiences, among other numbers), and companies including TiVo and TNS introduced services that measure audiences for commercials and programs down to the second. Number crunchers, your day has come.

OPEN BEATS CLOSED When it comes to digital media, the new prevailing wisdom is open networks beat closed systems. The most successful companies of the age—think Google, Facebook and MySpace—are platforms that allow others to build on them. Facebook in late May opened its site to outside developers, letting them not only build applications on the site, but also make money from them without giving a cut to Facebook. What’s in it for the site? An army of developers dreaming up ideas it never would on its own. Thanks in part to a flood of apps that let users do everything from throw virtual sheep at each other to share movie and book recommendations, Facebook’s user base has grown by 50 percent since it opened up, according to Nielsen Online. Now the Internet open-beats-closed ethos is moving into new areas like telecom. Within days of iPhone’s introduction, it had been hacked by users to allow them to add features they wanted and the service provider of their choosing. After Google announced plans for an open mobile operating system, Verizon said it would begin to open up to outside developers. That’s good news for consumers, but it will challenge incumbents whose business models are based on exerting tight control.