Saying human behavior has changed with the COVID-19 pandemic is an understatement. There are countless examples of emerging behaviors and attitudes—some of which will end when this is all over and others that will sustain over the long-haul. One of the more interesting behavior changes have to do with the apps we’re using to communicate.
Read MoreCommunity is no longer where you live but where you spend your time online, in many ways at least. Monoculture is declining and fragmentation is the norm. That fragmentation has put a massive value on consolidation or anything that resembles it.
Read MoreBroad reach and attention is an endangered species. 2019 and 2020 are welcoming new ad-free services like Disney+, Peacock and HBO Max, and the first casualty of the streaming wars will likely be the ability for advertisers to reach large audiences at relatively low costs.
Media fragmentation is nothing new. The industry’s been dealing with it for more than a decade, but now traditional mass reach mainstays like the television are becoming fragmented themselves as consumers sequester themselves with content that appeals to their niche interests in environments that are becoming less ad friendly or are even ad-free.
There’s bound to be a reckoning in which advertisers realize reach isn’t what it used to be. It’s less efficient. It’s less achievable. It’s less possible.
Read MoreThis week we got even more evidence of how much the social (and digital for that matter) landscape is changing. eMarketer released their predictions for time spent by users across Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The findings aren’t all that surprising given the latest trends, but the implications could be interesting.
Read More2019 is already off to rough start when it comes to trust. Users found out a bug in FaceTime could let others eavesdrop on their conversations and even allow third parties to activate their cameras without permission. Facebook and Google faced record fines for privacy violations. Mark Zuckerberg took to the Wall Street Journal to pen an op-ed defending his company’s privacy practices.
It’s no wonder that 1 in 5 people believe “the system” is working for them, and 73% worry misinformation is being used as a weapon, according to Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer. People have naturally grown more skeptical of the world around them, and organizations that have asked for their information have abused it.
Read MoreFacebook is losing the battle for young adults. Instead, Snapchat and Instagram are seeing upticks in their numbers of younger users at the expense of Facebook, and we may be seeing the signs of a generation that will never embrace Facebook, at least not to the point of older generations. It’s on this trend that Snapchat is hanging its hopes. It may not be the massive platform of the modern age in terms of user numbers, but when it comes to the younger demographic, it holds a lot of power.
What about this larger trend? A generation that never uses Facebook would be almost unfathomable in today’s marketing landscape that’s dominated by the likes of Google and Facebook, but that may be the future.
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