Five big things in media

We at Essential were having an internal discussion yesterday, over what we think the five major things to happen to media and communications will be over the next 12 months within the UK.

We all know that trends are notoriously difficult to discern and predict, since they are gradual rather than binary. Something like Digital Switchover might be the exception to the rule (when implemented correctly), but generally these things tend to sneak up on you.

Take the “Year of Mobile” as an example. Although Mary Meeker’s definition of a mainstream inflexion point as being 20% penetration (slide 8 of her latest trends report) would suggest 2010 is the Year of Mobile, I’ve noticed a large shift from people saying “Next year is the Year of Mobile” to “Last year was the Year of Mobile”.

So with that in mind, I spent five minutes thinking about various issues and came up with the following five trends

• Location-based information gains traction among a niche – through tools such as Foursquare Layers
• Narrowing distinction between broadcast and web-based offerings – Youtube Leanback, Project Canvas and multi-platform media players from the likes of BBC and Sky blur the boundaries between delivery mechanisms
• Persistence of the blockbuster – despite media fragmentation, the social aspects of media and entertainment mean blockbusters are becoming even bigger to compensate – whether The Lost Symbol, Avatar, X Factor or Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
• Decline of critic proof content – This will be a gradual affair, but eventually rotten offerings will become more visible earlier due to social media. For instance, Sex & The City 2 did considerably worse at the box office than its predecessor
• PR becoming more proactive – Twitterstorms are showing the dangers of trying to sweep things under the carpet. Ask Trafigura or BP

The big caveat is that this took me five minutes. It was therefore things from the top of my mind, and is probably a bit skewed towards recent announcements (Foursquare Layers and Youtube Leanback having been announced within the past week).

If I’d spent a bit longer, I’d have probably mentioned privacy/personal data – though reading Scott’s post earlier, it would seem that this isn’t such an issue for the general public.

As a quick thought exercise, I’m fairly satisfied with what I came up with, though they are so amorphous and vague that it might be difficult to say whether these trends have progressed at all. Nevertheless, I’ll revisit these in 12 months to see if any movement has been made

sk

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barkbud/4165385634/

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