2015 – the year of what no one saw coming

It’s the time of year for us planners. Silly season. Trends time. It’s the time when we all read the 1439 reports from 1438 different sources confidently predicting everything that is going to blow our minds and shake our worlds in 2015.

From nVision to Mintel, Trendspotting to PSFK, we will be reading lots of made-up compound nouns (Bleisure, Imagineering and the like – oh, how I used to love Faith Popcorn back in the day). We will be hearing all about the people, the brands and the trends that will be changing everything we are doing and the way that we are doing it. All very interesting, all very time consuming and (dare I say it) pretty much a total and utter waste of time.

Cast your mind back to January 2014 and the last time all these trends were being reported. How many of the properly seismic things that happened in 2014 were predicted in these reports in January 2014? How many of them predicted that Zuckerberg would splurge 10% of his wealth buying a company with less than forty employees for $19bn? How many of those trend reports predicted the Ice Bucket challenge and the rise of the selfless selfie? I get that things like Ebola and #Bringbackourgirls came out of the blue, but the massive rise of ISIS and UKIP (not connected, obviously) should have been pretty trackable, right? Did you get any of them in January? Nope, me neither.

And this brings to me to my main point. I reckon 2015 is going to be a bit like 2014.
Loads of people will confidently make loads of predictions and then we will all get blindsided by a thousand things we never saw coming.

Yeah, the centre of economic gravity will keep shifting geographically eastwards. OK, the US will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer. Yes, yes, digital ad revenue will overtake print ad revenue for the first time. Wearables, talking cars, the continuing reverse of the population pyramid – blah blah. What does all this mean for our day-to-day jobs? I’m not sure if I’m brutally honest – and neither are you.

I’ve been around the industry now for around twenty years. The main thing I’ve noticed about trend watching is that the only thing we ever confidently get right about the future is that we never see what’s coming. We consistently and hilariously predictably fail to spot what is going to change the face of our industry. From the rise of the web, SMS to WAP to Facebook to Snapchat to... we never saw any of them. Some of us just caught up quicker.

So what’s my advice for 2015? It’s simple really.

• Let’s all keep trying to make more iconic work that goes beyond category and impacts on culture.
• Let’s all keep approaching every project like it was the only thing we would get remembered for in our career.
• Let’s all keep encouraging brave clients to take the right risks.

We never see what’s coming. So it’s best just to brace yourself as best you can for a change that we know will hit us soon enough. As my old Akela used to say – in between the swearing and slightly sinister threats – be prepared.

Let’s leave the predicting to Mystic Meg.

Happy New Year.

Read more from Kevin in our Clubhouse.