I read 205 trend reports so you don't have to

Empathy, imagination and crisis are big words for the year – and things are about to get very conversational for all of us

Jan 05, 2024

Welcome to Making Sense of Things, a newsletter where I get to the bottom of the weird shit happening in the worlds of branding, business, creativity and culture at large.

Our very first (bumper) issue is dedicated to something close to my heart: trend reports.

Despite black swan events reminding us that the future is terrifying and unpredictable, we can’t resist the allure of fads and what they might reveal about the next 12 months.

And, as evidenced by this mega-folder of 200+ of them, all kinds of businesses are hooked on trend reports – think tanks, crypto platforms, creative agencies of all kinds, apps, tech companies, banks, food brands, drinks conglomerates and plenty more.

Why? Maybe there’s catharsis in summing up the world’s weirdness in a tidy little document that promises to explain all. Maybe it’s part of the primal urge to fill the vast, dark chasm of the modern internet with content. Possibly they’re quite fun to write.

Anyway, on Saturday morning I cracked my knuckles, turned my heated blanket up to 6 and read all 205. And in between the dubious AI imagery and atrocious jargon (scroll to the bottom for highlights), there was some genuinely interesting information - including the fact that ‘polycrisis’ seems to be THE word for 2024.

Here’s what I learnt:

AI is coming for every part of our lives, but it’s not all bad

Almost every single report mentioned it, explaining ways it could impact areas including but not limited to: the supply chain, healthcare, data analysis, video games, trend forecasting, content creation, admin, teaching, care of older people, travel planning, travel booking, influencing, therapy and mentoring.

And that might be a good thing. AI is likely to be a huge help for analysing health data and diagnosing patients faster.

It could also become the copilot we didn’t know we needed, taking care of the most boring, admin-heavy parts of our lives.

So far, organisations have barely begun linking AI tools up with their data, and once they do, senior staff will spend far less time on finance and regulation and far more on strategy and planning.

On that note, 2B Ahead’s report says the CEO is ‘the least replaceable’ person in a business, but that directors of finance and HR are much more at risk
AI is also going to generate a Noah’s Ark-level deluge of content – Juan Isaza’s report suggested around 90% of all online content will be made by AI by 2025.

In fact, the next big job for marketing and sales will be breaking through the AI gatekeepers that are likely to filter information and requests in the future.

But technology, AI and humans have to be integrated carefully; if things go wrong, it’ll be us that takes the blame and not the machines, says Microsoft.

We lost faith in crypto, web3 and NFTs

Things have been bumpy for crypto, but the evangelists still believe. Despite that, your average person is likely still struggling to follow it - maybe because it involves terms like ‘proto-danksharding’.

A lot of people involved in crypto have gone to, or could be going to, jail, as per Messari’s report: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, Terra’s Do Kwon, 3AC’s Su Zhu, the Tornado Cash founders, DCG’s Barry Silbert, Gemini’s Winklevoss twins, and Binance’s CZ.

And crypto is still struggling to win over gamers - Coinbase’s report notes that “users have broadly spurned existing web3 ‘play-to-earn’ models” and that, in fact, games like Axie Infinity may have inadvertently created greater scepticism.
Most trend reports were silent about NFTs, although, as Outlier Ventures’ report points out, 2023 saw a record number of NFT-related patent applications.
The most damning statement is from the BBC’s Research and Development team, which notes that interviews for its Projections foresight report didn’t include much discussion at all of crypto, blockchain or web3 - apart from interviewees specialising in those technologies.
And, according to the BBC: “None of our interviewees were particularly excited about the metaverse”.

Social media is a capitalist behemoth

Born Social’s report says it’s the number one form of media for 16-44-year-olds around the globe. It’s bigger than TV, bigger than search and set to be the largest media channel globally in Q4 of 2024.

Its brief flirtation with ‘reality’ seems to be over. Bompass & Parr’s Future of Food says BeReal’s users more than halved in 6 months from 15 million in October 2022, to less than 6 million in March 2023.

It’s now entering its shopping era, with TikTok and Snapchat both launching ecommerce. The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital’s report says people are buying jeans, sweatshirts, haircare and skincare on TikTok Shop in the US – and more than half of these people are under 35.
Expect the live shopping formats that are popular in Asia to make their way to Europe and the US. According to Acxiom, L’Oreal has already hosted 50 livestream shopping experiences across five countries.

Brands are entering into new kinds of relationships with influencers - less one-off, transactional partnerships and more long term collaborations that see influencers become co-creators and consultants with real access to communities.
Different kinds of influencers are springing up, notably the ‘employee influencer’ – as per Ogilvy's report which describes them as ‘a huge untapped marketing resource’ – and the digital opinion leader or DOL, being used by life science and medical tech companies, according to Marian Salzman.
According to Kantar, 59% of marketers globally say they’re going to increase spend on influencers in 2024.

Brands and ad agencies will have to work hard

Out of home is having an interesting time thanks to Jacquemus’ big handbags and Maybelline’s giant mascara wands – which have spawned a new genre of ‘fake OOH’.
TV is losing prestige, with ROKU’s report saying linear TV fell behind 50% of total viewing in the US for the first time in 2023.
Brands are having to think more about how films and ads might be shared out of context. Creative directors will be kept up at night asking themselves: Will it meme?
Banner ads definitely won’t meme. Econsultancy’s report suggests that people don't particularly care about them anymore, and that email remains number one for driving sales. But, according to Klaviyo, you only have 5-7 seconds to get attention with that email before they scroll onto the next one.
Brands are going to have to work harder on their apps as well. The Cory Doctorow-coined term ‘enshittification’ is rapidly gaining currency, and according to Ezra Eeman, app designs are often indistinguishable across brands – a sentiment that’s particularly prevalent among 18-24-year-olds.

We know about the shrinkflation, and we’re pissed

Turns out those higher subscription prices and smaller chocolate bars didn’t go unnoticed after all. According to Accenture, 37% of people worldwide think companies are prioritising higher profits over better customer experience. There’s a lack of trust across all sectors.
The NielsenIQ report notes that people want more transparency and integrity. French supermarket Carrefour is now adding orange shelf stickers next to products with weight decreases and price increases. Expect more retailers to follow suit.
And consumers are happy to be fickle. House Captain’s report says the pandemic created “unprecedented channel switching and brand loyalty disruption”.
No business can sit on their laurels either. GS1 says over 50% of the Fortune500 companies of the year 2000 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or ceased to exist.

Health is becoming super personalised, and weight loss drugs could change everything

Wearables are advancing quickly when it comes to tracking nutrition and body function, and companies like Zoe want to give people super-bespoke health advice.

People want more customised treatments and care, and real estate investors know that too - PWC’s Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe report says medical offices and clinics are big topics of interest for them.

We might not have fully grasped what a huge impact Ozempic and other weight loss injections like Mounjaro and Wegovy are going to have. Nourish’s report suggests the ‘Ozempic effect’ could even end year-on-year growth in calories consumed.

According to The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital, one dataset showed around 300k claims for GLP-1 prescriptions in the US in October 2023 alone.
Another good stat from the same report says that 33% of US consumers, given the choice, say they’d like to live forever. The rest, on average, say 103.

People are desperate for escapism and imagination

Alongside the almost ubiquitous use of the word ‘polycrisis’, dozens of reports discussed the world’s dire need for imaginative solutions, and joy.
Unsurprisingly, people aren't happy. According to Ipsos, 70% said 2023 was a bad year for their country.
Ipsos’s What The Future Conflict report says 74% of people are worried about a person, organisation or country hacking into public, private or personal information. 75% are worried about biological, chemical or nuclear attack.
And Nexxworks imagines a future where binge watching or doom scrolling could be swapped for hours spent chatting with AI, or AI posing as favourite characters or celebs.
On that note, AI therapists are hugely on the rise, as are AI mentors, a la Meeno.
For more evidence of our dire need for escapism, TV shows are becoming massive drivers of travel decisions. Skyscanner says searches for UK to Paris trips were up 60% within a week of the season 3 release of Emily in Paris.

Shopping is going to be prolific and invasive

According to Havas Media Network, retailers will be harnessing facial recognition, sentiment analysis and natural language processing to tailor recommendations and create ‘personalised interactions’.
Shein is operating on an insane level. As noted by Juan Isaza, some people estimate it can offer more than one million different kinds of products per year.
The flipside to that is that resale is only growing - Nexxworks says H&M will sell second-hand goods from its London flagship, and Zara will launch a secondhand platform in Germany.
Nexxworks’ report also says the global resale market is expected to reach $64 billion by 2025, with the luxury segment growing especially fast.
But while people care about sustainability, it’s complicated. According to The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital, people want to spend more on sustainable goods, but 40% of Gen Z bought something from Shein or Temu in the last year. Ultimately, says the report, people still want ‘a lot of fun, cheap stuff’.

Conversational models will be everywhere - and they might kill search

Microsoft thinks that digital knowledge is now moving from static documents to dialogue. Rather than referring to a Word file, companies might access organisation-wide information via a chatbot.
Brands love the idea of conversational commerce. Havas reports that Airbnb has acquired an AI startup that will deliver ‘the Ultimate Travel Agent’, and Acxiom says Expedia is also looking at conversational trip planning.
Booking.com’s report says 48% of us would now trust AI to plan a trip.
Search engines as we know them might be in their death throes. Dept’s report says ‘zero-click’ searches are massively up, and taking up an ever-larger share of search behaviour.
Fewer of us want to scroll down a page of search results, and more of us are using voice search, chatbots, TikTok, Bing Chat, or Google’s Search Generate Experience.
Accenture says 39% of people aged 18 - 34 are excited about conversational answers over standard internet searches.

Brain-tech interfaces are getting pretty scary

Harvard Business Review thinks workplaces are heading towards brain monitoring - ostensibly to track and protect employees from burnout. This raises huge questions around people’s “right to mental privacy”.
HBR points out that this is actually already in use; thousands of companies around the world already offer something called SmartCap – a hard hat or cap that can track workers’ fatigue level via brain wave data.
What might this mean for the corporate world? HBR imagines a situation where your glasses vibrate to let you know your attention is flagging, or deliver a pass-ag reminder that maybe you need a break, or a guided meditation.

Technology is taking a lot out of us, and the planet

According to OMG Futures, the average citizen gets nearly 50 notifications a day on their phone, which amounts to nearly 20,000 a year.
DCDX says Gen Z is spending over 7 hours a day on mobile screens.
Montecarlo Data’s report highlights that global data output will top 175 zettabytes (that’s one sextillion bytes) per year by 2025 – which is enough to stream Netflix continuously for over 19 million years.
And our dependence on tech has a major cost. The same report noted that cloud infrastructure spending rose to $21.5 billion in Q1 of 2023, and many companies are seeing cloud spend grow up to 30% per year.
That cost goes beyond money. Dept reports that researchers estimate Microsoft may have consumed 700,000 litres of drinkable water to power the servers for training GPT-3.
And around 1 to 5% of global electricity use is taken up by data centres, currently, according to LinkedIn’s online report.
The same piece says that AI accounts for 10 to 15% of Google’s annual electricity use, while their data centres use around twice as much electricity as San Francisco.

We’re all sleep deprived

Sleep was, weirdly, a huge topic across many different kinds of trend reports. Nexxworks says that the phrase ‘I am tired’ is at its most Googled point in the history of Google Trends.
LinkedIn also noted the growing ‘sleep economy’, citing one report that says sleep deprivation in the UK could cost the country’s GDP £47 billion by 2030.
Hilton and Skyscanner’s reports both say that sleep is a huge topic for travellers, with Booking.com saying that 58% want 2024 travel to focus SOLELY on uninterrupted shut-eye.
That could mean beds start getting smart – think sound and electromagnetic waves to chill us out, sensors that adjust mattress temp and AI saving sleep preferences for when guests return.

The remote work dream is faltering

It’s no surprise that many major companies want remote work to end. According to BDO, 90% of companies are looking to have workers back in the office by the end of 2024.
Business meetings are also back, according to Accor; people are attending trade shows and conferences and meeting in-person at almost the same levels as pre-Covid.
New forms of transport could also change the balance says Accor’s report, which highlights the arrival of supersonic jets that will reduce travel times – London to New York could be just 3.5 hours. The C-Suite will go mad for this.
Although fully remote seems to be fading, hybrid is the choice for many companies. PWC’s Emerging Trends report says investors are falling out of love with office buildings, with office sale transactions down more than twice as much as other major property types in the US and Canada.
According to the same report, suggestions that we simply convert office space may not be realistic. In many cases the most viable and economic option is to demolish and start over.

We just want some empathy from our CEOs

Along with with ‘polycrisis’ and ‘imagination’, ‘empathy’ was a real buzzword in this year’s reports. CEOs value it, but not many seem to practise it.
Octanner’s report says that in a survey of 150 CEOs, 80% said empathy was key to success. However it also notes that employees aren’t seeing this reflected and often feel frustrated by ‘warm and fuzzy’ empathy initiatives that don’t really do much.
According to Korn Ferry, an early 2023 survey of 3,000 HR professionals found that 32% didn’t find their CEO to be empathetic – up 16 points on 2022.

In more positive news, women’s sport is booming

IMG’S report was full of stats about its growing popularity, for example: 12.6 million people watched the NCAA Women’s Basketball Final – making it the most watched women’s college basketball game.
Business is getting in on the act. Mercury 13 is a multi-club ownership that wants to buy controlling stakes in professional women’s teams in Europe and Latin America.
And Monarch Collective has an investment fund exclusively dedicated to women’s sports.
Consumers are happy about this. Women’s sport is moving to prime time programming, and people want to support brands that in turn support women’s sport.
Deloitte predicts that in 2024, revenue generated by women’s elite sports will surpass $1 billion for the first time.

Lastly, there were some other interesting titbits

Pinterest says aquamarine makeup, 70s weddings and jazz are all back.
Bompass & Parr says we love chicken so much that it’s becoming a geological phenomenon as deposits of bones are becoming future types of rock.
The same report says that 4% of the world’s cheese, more than 886,000 tonnes, is stolen.
Staying in the food world, Waitrose says what people really want is to stay in and eat pie. Although canned water and hard seltzers are also very popular.

GLOSSARY OF JARGON FOR 2024

Tomorrowing your business
Multi-crisis environment
Perma-bullish
Polycrisis
Neo-syndicalism
Delirium indulgence
Complementarity
Moral crumple zones
Crypto winter
Unlearning
Hortifuturism
Aimagination
Texodus
Carcass time
Premiumisation
Iconicity
Metafantasy
Streamflation
Ultra-telepresence
Technosolutionism