Twitter Bankrupt or Sold, Upfronts Shrink, Metaverse Flops, Blockchain Use Expands, More ‘Thought Leaders’. Five Marketing Predictions for 2023
Advertisers love predictions. Although difficult to pin down, our mutual obsession with seeing around the marketing corner makes predictions a relevant exercise.
In that holiday spirit of seeking thought leadership relevancy, here’s five predictions for the future-forward marketer in 2023.
Prediction 1: Twitter Goes Bankrupt or Sold for Parts
Twitter was already the social platform delivering the least ROAS for marketers. Even before Elon’s takeover, Twitter was $220 million in the red on $5 billion dollars in revenue. Elon’s takeover, loose moderation, and staff firings have seen over 50% of advertisers cancel media spend on the platform. That’s a current burn rate of more than a billion dollars every year.
Elon bought an unprofitable tech company at double the share price right before a tech recession. There is no genius plan, despite what Musk’s sycophants may claim. He bought it because the board forced him to in a Delaware court.
Expect the company to try to renegotiate its debt obligations with creditors, sell to private equity investors or file for bankruptcy. Expect Elon to blame it on the new incoming CEO, a soon to be well paid scapegoat.
Prediction 2: Upfronts Take a Backstage
For those unfamiliar, upfronts are an annual ritual in which star-studded presentations and lavish parties are thrown by media companies to coax advertisers to give them money. Billions of advertising dollars are committed in the Springs each year following the presentation-party train.
Paramount announced this week that it will be foregoing its upfront presentation. Expect other networks to follow suit. COVID accelerated the upfront demise but the root cause is automation. Media Buys were traditionally done in person, in contractual handshake deals. As TV moves to streaming, more and more inventory is simply bought digitally in programmatic transactions. That is to say, instead of committing big spends upfront, media buyers will simply login to dashboards and buy inventory on the fly.
Media companies will still roll out late-night host cameos and finger food for big spenders, but the glitz and glam of traditional upfront season will fade. It was fun while it lasted.
Prediction 3: Metaverse Flops. Meta Takes a Big Loss.
The Metaverse never existed. We explained marketer’s over-obsession with Metaverses in a previous post, but as a construct digital communities exist in disparate platforms, video games, and forums. There is no singular metaverse to rule them all.
Meta should have stuck to what it’s good at, acquiring innovation or ripping off competitor products (see Whatsapp, Instagram stories, Facebook Dating, Facebook Marketplace, etc). Zuckerberg hasn’t built anything original ever. Good operators they are. Innovators they are not.
Expect Meta’s multi-billion dollar investment in the metaverse to flop. Brands similarly investing in overhyped Metaverses, building million dollar digital experiences for nonexistent users, will also flop.
Prediction 4: Blockchain Tech Finds New Applications
On a more positive front, blockchain tech is only now coming on line in new, exciting and applicable ways. This technology uses multiple computer’s processing power to log and track things in a decentralized manner.
Several promising innovations and blockchain applications will emerge in 2023. The more boring the more profitable here. Think music and rights royalty tracking, contract management, supply chain management, SAAS ownership, fusing financial systems, distributing cloud based systems, and more.
The skeptics on blockchain, crypto, and web3 are overblown. Thousands of over-hyped companies died in the 2001 dotcom bubble when their business models were found lacking. The same happened in 2022 for Web3. Our experience consulting with several Web3 companies have given us an optimistic and bullish outlook for the future.
Prediction 5: More ‘Thought Leaders’
There’s no shortage of thought leadership out there. We have spawned an industry of self-promotional guruism that promises to unlock the secrets to romance, fitness, marketing, investing, and self-actualization… for a small fee.
There’s reasons to be skeptical. The vast majority of thought leadership is profit motivated self-interest. A self-made crypto millionaire selling investment courses for $49.99 should be a red flag. The fact the name of his firm is named Hustler University should be a second.
When someone asks us to make them thought leaders, what they mean is ‘make me sound smart’. The proliferation of contributor sections in trade publications, speaker conferences, and social media platforms will demand more thought leadership. Marketer’s desperate need for relevancy make this prediction a smart bet.