• The impact of digital technology and social media
• The end of the baby boomer era
• An explosive and confusing proliferation of choice for the consumer
• The changing attitude of society to environmental dangers
• Increased accountability expectations from our society
• An increasing emphasis on place of origin
• An huge increase of awareness

Health on the go

Next year will see a surge of interest in DIY health fixes from time-pressed consumers. New apps and devices are already actively targeting consumers keen to monitor and manage their wellbeing. Apple’s App Store offers 9,000 mobile health apps, including nearly 1,500 cardio fitness apps, more than 1,300 diet apps, 1,000 stress and relaxation apps, and over 650 women’s health apps. By mid 2012, this number is expected reach 13,000. DIY health innovations include Jawbone’s “Up”, a wristband that tracks a user’s moving, eating and sleeping patterns. “The Play It Down” app enables users to test their hearing, while Withings’ blood pressure monitor plugs into an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and takes the user’s blood pressure after which data can be sent directly to a doctor or published confidentially on the Web. US automotive giant Ford is tapping into this trend by providing mobile apps to keep track of chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hay fever. (Source: Trendwatching.com)
Digital wallets
Contactless payment devices such as near-field communication (NFC) and QR codes will enter the mainstream in 2012.  When used in smartphones, they encourage customers to merge their wallet with their mobile phones. Surveys suggest consumers are ready to embrace this trend. Two-thirds of UK shoppers say cash is inconvenient and more than half of Canadians said they would be happy to never see a dollar bill again, according to 2011 surveys by Barclays and PayPal. According to Juniper Research, 300 million devices will be on offer to allow consumers to “tap and pay” through NFC by 2014. It is estimated the value of contactless payments and ticketing using NFC will reach $113bn (£72.4bn) per year by 2016 around the world. (Source: Stylus.com)

Welcome to the cloud
Businesses will invest large amounts of money in cloud computing and mobile technology this year. According to the report: IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020, 2012 will see more money spent on mobiles and tablets than PCs and 80 per cent of commercial applications are set to be on cloud platforms. “The UK is underinvested in IT – spending never really recovered from the Millennium Bug that never was – and with advertising and consumer spending rapidly moving online and kit becoming out of date, some rise there is likely,” points out chief executive of the Centre for Economic and Social Research, Douglas McWilliams. (Source: IDC.com, Insight.com)

Increased focus on baby boomers 
As people live and work longer more marketing will be targeted at the over-55s interested in maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle. This will lead to the creation of more products that are tailored to their specific needs and the market for functional ingredients ¬– think Omega 3 and probiotics – will continue to expand. This year could also see more websites targeted at baby boomers. More and people within this demographic are now using the internet to find information, products and services. There is an opportunity for website designs that cater for different attitudes and aptitude, taking into account reduced levels of vision, hearing and cognition. (Source: Leatherheadfoodresearch.com, www.ehow.com)

Screening
In 2012, if it is not on screen, it’s not worth seeing. Touchscreens and tablets have made it much more convenient for consumers to view online while they are on the move. UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has tapped into this trend by partnering with television provider Sky, allowing shoppers to watch sports events while they shop using in-cart iPad docks and speakers. In 2012, video consumption will soar as brands increasingly use this channel to engage with customers. Video brochures, video newsletters, and regular video communications will become standard features on websites. According to Cisco, 80 per cent of all internet traffic will be driven by video by 2015. (Source: Trendwatching.com, Milwardbrown)

Playfulness 
In a bid to escape from the grim news about the economy, consumers will become more responsive to entertainment and escapism. Big brands will become more playful, using gamification and other “funware” that use points, puzzles and level progression to attract and engage customers. Social tools and technologies that enable people to interact with TV programmes will explode in 2012. Viewers will be able to interact with TV and producers will draw on this data for creative inspiration. Services such as Bluefin Labs and GetGlue indicate traditional TV ratings may be bolstered by “social ratings” as advertisers start to take into account how a show is travelling beyond the TV audience. (Source: Milward Brown)

Sustainability
This will continue to be a buzzword for many companies in 2012 as they strive to create ethical businesses. Increased focus will be placed on initiatives such as packaging reduction, ethical sourcing policies and the reduction of food miles. M&C Saatchi’s chief strategy officer Richard Storey explains that brands will have to be wary of green washing claims: “There is a lot of cynicism and apathy creeping in among consumers about this topic so where strides are being made is where brands are highly specific. You will see fewer brands making general bland claims about their environmental efforts and offering more detail about specific initiatives, ” he says.The latest green trend has seen brands helping consumers recycle by taking back old items from customers, and doing something constructive with them. Expect to see more brands adopt a grown up approach in their marketing by advocating sustainable initiatives and ditching old choices of cute and comforting creative. For example, SCA has relaunched its brand Velvet Tissue in a £10.5m campaign that has dropped its “baby MD” character to focus on its “three trees” sustainability initiative, which pledges to plant three new trees for every one it uses in the production of its products. (Source: Trendwatching.com, www.sca.com)

Talking at Twitter’s unfinished new headquarters building in San Francisco, founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo explained that the changes are meant to make Twitter more accessible to everybody.

Their three goals:

• Expose the “universe within every tweet.” Tweets aren’t just 140 characters — there’s also context like retweets and replies, and embedded content like videos, images, and songs. Today, accessing this material still feels like opening a “side drawer,” said Costolo.

• Make Twitter less obscure to use. Today, the @ and # symbols are too obscure — people don’t know what they mean. This contributes to a lot of people visiting Twitter but not really participating actively. The redesign surfaces these symbols and makes them the gateway to find out more information about people and topics on the surface.

• Share it with everybody. The world has 7 billion people. Most of those people are “not yet on Twitter,” said Costolo. The redesign will roll out to mobile devices simultaneously, and is streamlined to load up to 500% faster.

The trick is doing this without adding too much complexity. As Dorsey put it, “simplification is the key here.”

Here are elements:

• Personal profile pages. Every Twitter user will get a new profile page that contains everything about them — all their tweets, followers, favorites, images they’ve uploaded, and so on.  “Tell more compelling story for you.”

• New home timeline. The new timeline page will embed everything about a particular tweet right in the tweet — retweets, favorites, and added content. Twitter will also put an embed code into every tweet, so Web sites can take entire tweets and put them on Web pages, just as they do with You Tube videos and other content.

• #Discover. A new # option at the top of the page will take you to a list of interesting stories related to people you’re following, or people Twitter thinks you might be interested in. (although the relevance algorithm isn’t that great yet )

• @ names are now the shortcut to people. A new @Connect item at the top of the Twitter home page will let you see everything that is happening related to your username — all retweets, direct messages, and so on.

Pinterest is growing for a variety of reasons. It enables users to clip things they like. It emphasizes pictures over text, which are more visually appealing and easier to digest. Signing up is easy. Pinterest has crafted a fun, whimsical, artistic image. In particular, it has struck a chord with female users, an attractive demographic. Pinterest has added to the lexicon of “like” or “retweeting” or “reblogging” or “upvoting” with the ability to “pin” content and then “repin” it across the site and other networks.

what exactly is Pinterest? It’s a site about discovery and data. On the front-end, users can discover things that they like and organize things they like. On the back-end, it’s a data company, where the company can capture rich metadata around each image.

The single most important aspect of the site is that it has deeply tapped into an important shift in consumer and purchasing behaviour. As we make a decision to search for or buy something online, we are trained to go to Google (or Amazon), search by keyword, and sort through results to eventually make a transaction. In return for that sorting, Google charges for advertising, but in order for it to work, we users have to signal our intent: “Red Nike running shoes.” But, how did I decide to want these red running shoes in the first place? While Google makes money at the bottom of this decision funnel, the top of the funnel is where “discovery” happens. It’s much wider at the top of the funnel, and harder to pin down where the thoughts originate.

A site like Pinterest could help bring some of that discovery online. For the red running shoes, instead of researching them myself, I may instead elect to browse the pinboards of Pinterest users who are dedicated runners. I could find shoes on a friend’s board and may have reasonable confidence that this pair could suit me, too. In this manner, I may elect to buy the shoes right after seeing my friend’s board on Pinterest and get to a transaction faster.

If Pinterest can (1) get its users to take pictures of things in the real world with its mobile app and post them online with data and (2) leverage image-tagging tools such as stipple and help bypass intent-based search on just a small fraction of online transactions, it could be a huge cultural and financial success.

There is too much information online, too many pages filled with stock images and no context. Search engines provide significant utility, but we still have to exert energy to find what we need after results are algorithmically surfaced. The new crop of social media companies help discovery come online and threaten traditional search. With these new tools, users are able to clip and collect the bits of the web that they are most interested in and, in the process, disregard the rest as noise.

Sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instapaper, snip.it Clipboard and Curisma, among others, all allow their users to decide what aspects of the web (text, media, etc.) are worth saving and sharing, instead of browsing the web from Google, or even Facebook for that matter. Because many of these networks have asymmetric follow/follower models, and because users can “tune” whom they are following, users’ feeds could increase in relevance as items are retweeted or repinned. These networks allow for self-expression, and in doing so, re-sort and re-shape the web we see, and that is a very big shift away from traditional search toward social discovery.

This is a great article from PW and Peerindex. A couple of omissions from the top 10 tips in my opinion –  suggesting Tweetdeck is one and more emphasis on providing valuable content is another. I think @lorenzproperty  are a great one to follow. Our client Tony Lorenz has always got an opinion worth listening to.

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