Alexa, Twenty Seventeen.

What an exhilarating year 2016 turned out to be. (Really trying to be positive here).

While I typically use this end of the year look ahead as a kind of predictor, I think it is safe to say after the 2016 elections, predictions are pretty much dead. We seem to be detached from what people really think and need to get our collective fingers back onto the pulse of society.

If we learned anything after this election year it is that there are a lot of people living outside of culture’s cozy little bubble.

So in 2017 let’s all make it a point (myself included) to employ a bit of empathy and recognize that we are living in a world divided, and that there are many point of views out there. Agree with them or not, they do exist.

Like 2016, if nothing else, there is the unexpected. Who knows what this giant four year maniacal tweet storm has in store for us.

Oh and the black beetle pic on the top of the article, you know, because memes and internets. ;-)

Now let’s get this started.

Internet.bot

Dot who? Dot what? Dot BOT!

2017 will be the year that websites become a thing of the past.

The only problem is that the past tends to linger well into the future, so while websites won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, those of us who choose to run at a little bit of a faster pace will likely be forgoing websites in order to be assisted by tiny little robots working tirelessly to bring us everything the interwebs have to offer.

These Bots will help us with hailing a car, finding a date, restaurant recommendations, the perfect brown shoes to wear with ripped jeans, maintaining mental focus, health and wellness advice and so much more.

Bots will only become smarter and more connected, and they live right where we spend most of our time, our messenger apps.

Bots will assist us in ways we have never imagined. They will serve us dutifully by curating the internet for us in an entirely hyper personal way and more likely than not on our mobile devices so they will be there whenever we need them.

So marketing people, the thing about Bots is that aside from powerful connections to data and services they require a detailed personality that embodies the functions they were created for.

That is the part that will take some time to figure out and carefully craft. So if you were planning on signing up for a CSS class in 2017 scrap that and go take anthropology, creative writing and psychology instead. Bots might actually help us get back to refocusing on people.

The Outline

Journalism has taken a beating over the last decade. The internet has had zero mercy on the centuries old art of reporting and in 2017 we will see that sacred cow served up well done with a side of fries.

In late 2016 The Outline went ahead and combined everything we love about the internet into some kind of wonderful format that can only be explained as awesome.

The Outline is like having your news delivered by a 14 year old Snapchat celebrity hacking into your Facebook timeline using Messenger filters and hashtags to imprint an ephemeral headline into your subconscious so that the next time you Instagram something you are instantaneously communicating the story’s salient point.

Joshua Topolsky, the brains behind The Outline, is fast becoming our generation’s William Randolph Hearst.

Joshua is a journalistic visionary who is experimenting with an age old medium in ways that mirror the emotive and visual communication habits of the social zeitgeist.

Want to stay plugged in and be able to coherently text with your 15 year old nephew?

In 2017 add The Outline as a news source to your daily reading. It’s totally lit af.

Snap!

Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon but it is aging and the sprite and springy Snap! is poised to own a new generation of social networkers who crave a more creative and nonlinear experience when sharing and consuming themselves and the world around them.

Early 2017 will see Snap! go public at what I predict will be a valuation of about $30 BILLION DOLLARS! Yep I said $30 Billion dollars.

Snapchat is like MTV on social steroids. It has completely redefined the western world’s version of mobile internet culture that no other company has been able to natively articulate. It is a thing unto itself and we can’t get enough of and it and it is only getting bigger and better by the day.

In 2017 Snap! will start to make its way east (Asia not Maine) where both social software and hardware (like Spectacles) will emerge as low cost, fashion forward and readily usable social wearables that make Snapchatting even more fun than it already is.

All of that digital culture will boomerang back our way with a force unlike anything we have seen and Snap! will evolve from a social platform to become a culture platform. And as we all know, culture likes to eat.

Oh and those ad dollars, Snap! will print them in bulk. The very nature of the platform lends itself to advertisers who want to reach audiences outside of those standardized digital formats that annoy the heck out of people.

Snap! as a company is poised to ascend into the ranks of the elite ad platforms and likely will dethrone one or two in its ascension.

So yea, buy that stock.

Secret Agents

First off I have to credit Josh Wolf from my team at VML for coming up with the cool name Agents.

Now what the heck are agents?

Agents are invisible Apps.

Let’s admit it, Apps have become quite cumbersome. They are clunky, bulky pieces of software that clutter up our precious little devices with messy interfaces and data sucking services.

If you own an app you know how hard it was to make and how costly and frustrating it is to update or simply keep relevant in a sea of sameness.

Apps pretty much suck.

But Bots, so easy to create, and can do almost anything we need them to through a streamlined, human centric, mobile interface (chat).

Bots can get us what we need simply by speaking or typing, so why in the world would we want to keep wading through cumbersome apps upon apps upon apps on our devices?

2017 will be the year that Apps will start to fade into the background as (secret) Agents.

Agents that are discreetly utilizing all of the myriad of sensors and data we never even touch.

All these Bots want to do is to better service us.

We should not need to see or open Apps anymore, imagine not having to learn yet another interface, bother going through another 5 minute set up screen, authenticating our lives over and over again and get caught up in endless updates and in app purchases.

Apps could be quietly tucked away and summoned as needed through our trusty Bot friends who will make those apps work hard.

We will be able to buy these Agents through our trusty Bots so that our Bots may access them and learn to combine all of our services on their own based on our behaviors. It will be the Bots that recommend these Agents.

Less icons, more attention, your welcome.

Blockchain Contributionship

I always get super nerdy about halfway through my articles. I can’t help it, its who I am.

So what exactly is Blockchain Contributionship?

Well, I made it up. But it is a thing, just not officially. Yet. Until maybe right now.

Lets start with what is Blockchain?

Blockchain empowers things like user validation, proof of things, digital contracts, etc… Blockchain was first conceptualized by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and implemented the following year as a core component of the digital currency bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions.

But in 2017 Blockchain will start to emerge as a method for how we will manage and record all of our personal data and access with security and transparency across all our digital touch points.

Our current ability to track personal data and personal metrics becomes quite compromised at scale. Just ask Hillary Clinton and anyone else who is normal and uses digital methods of communication to transact business and manage their lives.

Blockchain solves all of that.

Now I chose the word Contributionship because of the Philadelphia Contributionship which is the oldest property insurance company in the United States organized by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 and the thinking behind it was absolutely brilliant.

You can go Google that and read it for yourself.

If good ol’ Ben Franklin was alive today he would have employed Blockchain technology to enable his peer to peer insurance startup (The Philadelphia Contributionship) that protected buildings and houses from fires by securely collecting monies from its members, tracking all transactions, fulfilling contracts and payouts as well as transference of policies.

Think about what today’s entrepreneurs could do with the kind of infrastructure Blockchain Contributionship offers.

BC can virtually disrupt almost any business model or even better offer current business models a much more radical simplification and security that will ensure that they stick around for the next 100 years. Like Ben’s did. It is still around.

Real News

2017 will not be the year that fake news goes away, as a matter of fact I think it will get worse before it gets any better.

Algorithms are likely not the answer and cognitive bias will proliferate as long as social networks remain “social” and circles of friends continue to feed each other the news they want to read rather than get a wider variety of opinions and angles to formulate views.

What I believe we will experience in the coming year is the birth of a new kind of news organization that is able to create content that is undeniably real.

Atomized news organizations, not unlike the AP, that will look much less like the New York Times and much more like an API where journalistic content is fed onto platforms in a way that confirms its validity and allows the content to stand out from the fake news shared by us humans.

Because government certainly is not the answer, especially the one on its way in.

Perhaps social networks like Facebook will employ some kind of fact checking feature, which I don’t think will happen this year. Browsers like Chrome already have plugins that claim to filter out the fake news but those sound like they are just as fake.

In 2017 Fake News will continue to be a problem until something shockingly drastic happens because of it.

Like “Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel” http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/world/asia/pakistan-israel-khawaja-asif-fake-news-nuclear.html — which is very real and very scary.

.Comversations

I wrote about Bots earlier so I won’t belabor the topic, my evangelism over the course of the past year has probably lost me some friends and followers.

But I do want to talk about conversational user interfaces.

Websites have always been glorified clickable brochures and catalogs.

I don’t like catalogs or brochures, I find them restrictive and do not like to be forced to peruse a potential purchase in that format.

The promise of the internet has always been closer to human interaction than the oppressive menu driven print like interface we have had to deal with until now.

See 2001: A Space Odyssey circa 1968.

Conversational UI will finally allow us to browse the way we intuitively want to browse the web.

We should not have to have to rely on cumbersome menus and sub menus and sub sub menus and sub sub sub… you get it.

Especially on our mobile devices, having to be served up tiny thumbnail images that need to be pinched and zoomed on a slow website or app that only wastes time and in turn reduces the value of acquiring the object we are looking for.

Conversing is a great native discovery engine.

When we are able to simply talk about what we are looking for we emote more than just a key word.

We have the ability to teach these Bots how to deliver a variety of different items that we might like to look at that a website might not have grouped together as a search result.

Conversational UIs free us up from even having to look at the things we are buying, we already know what they look like and simply need to re-order them, like paper towels, does a web designer really need to spend time making a web page dedicated to a paper towel?

The Amazon Echo and similar services will continue to push the boundaries of the Conversational UI paradigm in 2017 and I expect many brands to hop on the band wagon as a primary means to sell their wares as well as seeing new brands emerge that only use conversation as a means to engage customers.

Any salesperson worth anything will tell you that direct interaction with a buyer at the point of sale is what closes a deal. Not a dozen form fields surveying you about the product before you even get your hands on it.

Mixed Reality

Let’s face it, Virtual Reality makes us look stupid.

When using VR we are often immersed in some amazing world and completely lose our composure in the real world, we end up looking like fools with giant computers strapped to our faces.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=ZUZkB8kC8Ec

As much as I think VR is super cool, and I have seen some amazing experiences that have sufficiently tickled my brain, I still don’t think that VR is something that will expand beyond private use.

We are social creatures and we crave shared experiences.

Mixed Reality like 3D projection mapping, Magic Leap (projecting images onto your eyeballs), Microsoft’s Hololens and other experiences that allow us to share what we see and interact with with others will deliver the promise of a world augmented by technology.

VR will likely remain something people do in the privacy of their own rubber room.

As marketers we should probably pay more attention to Mixed Reality experiences and keep our customers in a world where they can eventually take out their wallet rather than make them look foolish and dizzy for 15 minutes and then expect them to transact with us in the end.

The world we currently live in is still pretty amazing, even with a little augmentation.

Conclusion

So that is my look ahead, there are probably a million more things I would like to talk about, like autonomous vehicles, fintech, cyber crime, AI, IOT, Smart Everything, space travel, drones, robots, digital transformation, cyber security, fashionable wearables and self organizing ecosystems that connect all of these things.

But I wanted to keep my topics focused on what I think will really help us to collectively push the boundaries of creativity and how we will engage our audiences.

2017 will be an exciting year because of the tension that is so much uncertainty yet there is so much to look forward to as well.

I hope that in 2017 we continue to innovate by combining our abilities to apply great ideas to the amazing technological breakthroughs that will be readily available to us to play with and to share those ideas with the world.

I look forward to a 2017 that comes together through the power of positivity and innovation in the face of divisiveness.

I wish you all an amazing New Year with much success and an abundance of creativity and inspiration.