Some Dots That Surfaced: what if we didn't think about trends?

Here we are.

Year is almost over.

Resolutions will soon be made.

The year will change.

And we’ll need to think about “what’s next?”

Because a new year means new trends.

I’m about halfway through the JWT Future 100 deck.

I’ve also read a few articles with titles like “What We Got Right This Year & What Next Year Has In Store” and “The Growing Importance of Voice Within The Multi-Omni Channeled Xennial World of Visual Communications.”

What if we didn’t call them trends? What if we called them problems?

There I was on Twitter Wednesday and I spotted something.

The good people of Group Think shared a presentation on Problems.

I read the presentation and thought about the words and points on the slides.

This thinking then mixed with the thinking I’ve been trying to do on trends.

Then it mixed with my cynicism and I thought: there’s a healthy amount of cynicism in our industry, right? So fair to say people are looking at trends in the same manner I am, yes?

Glad we’re all on the same page.

What I’m saying is, at times, trends are a joke. A reason for an eye roll. The cause of the acronym “gtfo” to be typed in emails. An over hyped bastardization of the English language. (Just me?)

George Lois has a fun quote about trends in his book, Damn Good Advice (for people with talent):

“A trend is always a trap.”

It’s something to marinate on.

So while letting that happen why not think about problems?

Like the fact clients have been told for years that attention spans are decreasing, and gold fish analogies, and make things a snack, and miniature moments, and blah, blah, blah, but things like this are happening.

Or that people hate ads, don’t want to see an ad, will do anything to get away from ads, ads definitely cannot be a form of entertainment and joy for people to subconsciously associate things like reason to buy, but:

Or think about the fact that in a state of short term-ism we cannot forget about Millennials or whatever we call the ones younger than them because thinking about them makes us cool and makes the brand cool and being cool is how we feel good so let’s not even think about those poor old saps that used cassettes and VCRs and how they’re adapting and using and always using the “digital things” because, you know:

Enjoy the trends.

Until next week,

Kyle