Agency

The Future 100: Trends and Change to Watch in 2021 highlights emerging consumer behaviors with 100 trend predictions from Wunderman Thompson Intelligence. Trends span culture, tech and innovation, travel and hospitality, brands and marketing, food and drink, beauty, retail, health, work and finance

Diversity is more important now than ever. Organizations need to ensure that they are recruiting a diverseworkforce, and have the DEI strategies to empower diverse voices and inspire retention.

Cross media planning offers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the range of media and datasets available to marketers. This is why a seasoned professional like Kevin O’Reilly (pictured below), Senior Vice President of Product, Data and Monetization for a4 Advertising, is the go-to person to help optimize advertising messages in the planning stage through sales enablement across cable, OTT and digital.

Last year around this time, I published “The State of the Union – Privacy Law’s Impact on the Sample Industry” sharing my views on how privacy legislation impacted the sample industry in 2019. Since then, the world has radically changed.  A worldwide pandemic sparked a global health crisis. Social and political unrest upended the status-quo, and Joe Biden was elected the 46th President of the United States. The election was so bitterly contested that it resulted in a violent attack by extremists on the U.S. Capitol. Many are wondering how we can collectively move forward.  By Art Padilla is a Director of Panels at ThinkNow.

Today’s crises, like the deaths that fuel the calls for racial equity, are not new; however, the responses to the crises are unprecedented. People in more than 4,200 cities and towns around the world have staged protests.  Fifteen to 25-plus million people in America have participated in them, and not just people from Black communities.  Over half of protestors (54 percent) are white, marking a notable difference from racial protests of the past.  By contrast, the US civil rights movement had hundreds of thousands of protesters. In addition, the largest group taking to the streets represents America’s newest generations, with the majority of protesters under the age of 35.

2020 was a year of historic growth for the U.S. consumer technology industry with sales up 17% (through Dec. 26, 2020)1 and according to The NPD Group’s latest Future of Tech2 forecast this momentum will continue into the first quarter of 2021. In Q1 2021, NPD expects 12% consumer tech sales growth versus Q1 2020. But even with a strong start to the year, comparisons to the monumental growth seen in the latter part of 2020 will result in a -2% decline year-over-year in 2021, as sales reach nearly $110 billion. NPD expects to see an additional year-over-year -2% decline in sales in 2022, followed by flat sales in 2023.

Well, here we are again. It’s a new year, full of hope, aspirations and ambitions — even if a quick look outside as we emerge from our duvets seems to confirm that things are still horrible, a pandemic is still raging, democracy is still under threat, and the old issues of 2020 have not mysteriously disappeared.

Our Friends at ThinkNow posed the following:  ”Acculturation has long been used in media research among Hispanics respondents but it is time to revisit it use. Acculturation assumes a linear progression towards American culture.  American culture becomes increasingly shaped by diverse audiences”.  We asked our readers at HispanicAd and the results are in.

Building a multicultural plan that genuinely integrates the creative and the media disciplines is one of the biggest challenges in today’s multicultural space.  By Isaac Mizrahi – Co-President of ALMA

The world feels like a very different place to the end of the previous decade. For brands, the volatile times mean a greater need for emotional intelligence; listening and understanding how their consumers feel and helping people navigate the new world through their products, services and actions.

There are positive signs of recovery in the global advertising industry, with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) reporting rising optimism and a resumption of deferred campaigns. But with actual ad spend still far lower than expected this year, marketers have had to do more with less, which means a greater reliance on effective measurement.

There is arguably no more compelling—or obvious—opportunity in the realm of human capital than the untapped talent of the Hispanic community in the United States.

After a year of unprecedented disaster and turbulence – the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis, the global outcry over systemic racism and political instability – the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals an epidemic of misinformation and widespread mistrust of societal institutions and leaders around the world. Adding to this is a failing trust ecosystem unable to confront the rampant infodemic, leaving the four institutions – business, government, NGOs and media – in an environment of information bankruptcy and a mandate to rebuild trust and chart a new path forward.

Roughly four-in-ten Americans have experienced online harassment, with half of this group citing politics as the reason they think they were targeted. Growing shares face more severe online abuse such as sexual harassment or stalking

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.

To better organize for a postpandemic future, leaders should embrace nine imperatives that collectively explain “who we are” as an organization, “how we operate,” and “how we grow.”

The Hispanic audience is diverse and nuanced in their language use, preferences, and media use. As the population grows, so does the importance of advertisers understanding Hispanic media behavior.

The proliferation and rising popularity of a myriad of digital channels over the past decade has made the measurement of media effectiveness increasingly complex.

The acceleration of key disruptive forces in retail is causing the rapid transformation of the industry. KPMG’s new report, “Revive to Survive,” outlines three disruptive forces shaping retail’s future, and makes five bold predictions on the future of the industry.  

The threat of Covid, social distancing and ‘cancel culture’ has prompted reflection, deleting what’s unnecessary, and changing the status quo from consumers shifting values, lifestyle and priorities to companies permanently going to flexible work schedules, more equitable D&I practices, and re-focusing on key growth areas, led by Multicultural and Digital marketing. My prediction for 2021 is that companies finally do Multicultural marketing right, and allocate the commensurate fair share of budget, resources and attention to this business imperative.  By Liz Castells-Heard, CEO & Chief Strategy Officer, INFUSION