Five things that keep planners up at night

1. ‘Losing My Edge’ by LCD Soundsystem

The pace of change within the industry will leave planners unable to keep up. Powered by tech capability we are seeing faster than ever developments in how consumers watch, listen, create and buy. For example, the rapid shift to e-commerce over the pandemic and platforms growing faster than ever before. It took Facebook eight years to get to a billion users, while more recently TikTok only took two-and-a-half years to reach the same user milestone, and let’s not even talk about the metaverse. The job of the planner is still the same, but the amount of media opportunities they need to juggle has vastly increased, and the common question is, “How do we not lose our edge, when the edge is constantly moving?”

Platform user size over time.

2. ‘Let It Go’ by Idina Menzel from Disney’s Frozen

How do we let go of control at the same time as building our brands? Over the past few years, we have seen the rise of creator-led content on platforms such as TikTok. In fact, there are now 50m people globally who consider themselves content creators. And in the UK since 2020 over 8m new content creators joined the creator economy, meaning now ¼ of the UK population consider themselves content creators, that’s 16.5m people! With so many people - or so much user-created content in the media space, how do we build brands and distinctive memory structures in spaces where content authenticity is so vital without seeming inauthentic?

3. ‘Stereotypes’ by Blur

Are we too reliant upon stereotypes within the industry? Stereotypes exist for a reason, to help us characterise and classify, but how do we avoid blunt stereotyping and misunderstanding what actually unifies people? This great piece of research from BBH shows that people who floss have more cohesion as a group than Gen Z, or millennials, for example. So how do we go beyond stereotypes and understand what drives cohesion in modern Britain.

Teeth flossing cohesion.

4. ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ by The Buggles

Another fear is whether personalisation at scale will kill the ability of brands to build themselves in culture? We all know the power of building our brands in culture. And if you want to do that you need to build common knowledge of the brand. So it’s not just enough for you to think your brand is cool, you need to know that everyone else does too. And to build common knowledge we need communications that acts at that mass, unifying level. Not hyper-targeting, individual comms. So personalisation has its role, but not at the expense of also driving common knowledge.

5. ‘Right Here Right Now’ by Fat Boy Slim

After two years of global change under the COVID-19 pandemic, where we have scarcely had a period of stability that lasted more than two weeks, have we become too focused upon the short term? We didn’t know what was going to happen next week, never mind next year. So of course we became more short-term focused. What now keeps us up is how we balance the short and the long term as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

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