Tobias Zehnder
Co-Founder / Partner
The pace of innovation in our industry is incredibly fast, as one milestone chases the next. Take, for example, 2015: the rise of live streaming apps for mobile devices (Periscope, Meerkat), the Apple Watch taking wearables mainstream, Facebook posting a billion active users per day for the first time, Instagram launching ads … the list goes on. Even established channels such as AdWords, display marketing and YouTube are developing rapidly.
Digital Marketing Trends 2016
To be successful marketers, we need to know how and in what direction user focus is shifting and understand how we can transform technological progress into added value for our clients. And therein lies the challenge: if everything is in motion, how do we know where we should focus our attention? The science fiction author William Gibson put it nicely, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." In short, to know which trends are going mainstream, I need to know where to look.
Which is exactly how Harper Reed, CIO of the 2012 Obama campaign, explained the secret of their success. When I asked him why the campaign was able to get its digital marketing strategy right back in 2012, setting new standards that apply even today, his answer was surprisingly simple: at that point, the team was not working under the impression that they were doing something new. They were simply inspired by the best companies and case studies and were able to further develop and apply these insights in the political sphere.
So in this spirit, I would like to stay clear of oracles and instead present nine trends that will make a lasting impression on digital marketing in 2016. Because the time has come for trends to become mainstream.
To the future and beyond!