The tree is lit in Rockefeller Center, great gifts have been on sale for months… and the "season of sharing” seems to be upon us.  

Sharing you say? Yes, while the holiday season seems to create a frenzy among our families and friends, it has a similar affect on our industry’s beloved pundits. Unlike saving a few dollars on a new Playstation4, these annual predictions are the gifts that keep on giving… at least through next December.

I don’t know about you, but I relish the many varied views of the coming year in both business and digital. It’s a chance to reflect on which technologies have caught fire, and which have failed; which consumer trends have peaked, and which are just getting started. Of course, it’s also a chance to evaluate last year’s predictions and their predictors.

So, here are this year’s batch of 10 hand-selected predictions I’ve culled from a variety of sources. See if you agree them. Think about which you might add to (or subtract from) the list, then for all Maxus readers to this blog, be sure to share your views with your teams and clients. It’s why we’re here.

Enjoy…
(…and don’t miss the Robot Dance Instructors at the bottom!)

1. ‘Responsiveness’ Will Rule (eMarketer)

• In a world where literally everything is becoming digital, marketers face the challenge of being present and relevant across an ever-expanding array of devices, interfaces and touchpoints. In short, marketers who are responsive will succeed in 2015.
• By this, we aren’t talking about the narrow definition of real-time marketing—being the first brand to respond to a breaking news story with a clever tweet.  Rather, we’re talking about the underlying precepts of real-time marketing and responsive design—being fast, flexible, fluid and contextual—and applying it to everything that marketers do. In 2015, be responsive or be obsolete.

2. Digital Marketing Divide (Forbes)

• The gap between digital leaders and digital laggards will widen in 2015.  The trouble with digitization is that it does not slow down. Even worse for those expecting to catch their breath, it unexpectedly moves by leaps and bounds. The companies that haven’t grasped what it can do for their business and what it’s doing to their competitive environment or the companies that are slow to experiment and innovate, are doomed to lose more ground in 2015.
• Every aspect of the digitization of everything, from mobile solutions to privacy and security, is a source for competitive differentiation by the companies that get it. Forrester: “2015 will serve as an inflection point where companies that successfully harness digital technology to advantageously serve customers will create clear competitive separation from those that do not.”

3. Mobile Search Will Surpass Desktop (eMarketer)

• 2015 will see mobile search reach the tipping point—the stage at which the majority of spend, organic traffic and paid clicks comes from smartphones and tablets, surpassing traditional desktop/laptop search activity.  For marketers, there is an important caveat: Return on investment (ROI) has not reached a similar tipping point. ROI on mobile search is improving, but it will continue to trail desktop search ROI next year—and further into the future, until mobile performance measurement, particularly in relation to the impact on sales in physical stores, gets more precise.

4. Privacy trading (The Guardian)

• A generation of people today have no concept of privacy. Their love of self-expression, the need for free online products and the desire to connect with each other have proven far more seductive than the idea of maintaining privacy. In a time when credit card information, GPS signals, Fitbit data and cookies collect and share anonymous data continuously, it is a battle that few can fight.  We face a choice. We can either collectively fight to maintain the little secrecy we have or flip our thinking and focus on what we get in return. From smart cities and automated personal assistants such as Siri to crowdsourced medical research, 2015 will be the year we shift focus from fighting for privacy to leveraging what we get in return.

5. Omnichannel Advertising (ClickZ)

• You know the term from online retail, but an omnichannel mindset is as critical to advertising as it is to site design. Customers expect a unified cross-channel experience, and ads that don't react to that will fall flat. Among marketers' go-to tactics will be programmatic personalization, such that consumers receive customized, relevant content wherever they go and brands can better optimize their ad spend.

6. Anticipatory computing (The Guardian)

• In the world of the internet of things, aided by more powerful computing, data from more sensors and a tighter mesh of connectivity, we will see a rise in products and services that make predictions offering us a more customised personal service. From context aware apps such as Humin that sense your needs to predictive products like Nest that work around your behaviour, 2015 will see the arrival of advertising as key contextual nudges that add value before we even know what we want. 

• Essentially, 2015 will show a move from re-targeting to pre-targeting. Said another way, from targeting where you ARE, to where you're GOING TO BE.

7. Marketing Memes (ClickZ)

• Memes are a constant in social media. But this year's #Bendgate – along with #BreakTheInternet and #AlexFromTarget – reminded brands that when done right, memes can spell big exposure (pardon the pun, Kim).

8. The Internet of Things Will Become a Thing (eMarketer)

• The internet of things (IoT) has been a topic of debate among technologists for years, but the term is only just making its way into the mainstream. In fact, a May 2014 survey conducted by Edelman Berland for GE found that 44% of business executives worldwide had never heard of the internet of things. That will change in 2015. For marketers, the potential of the internet of things is twofold:
• The first opportunity is the sheer mass of new, connected products and services to be sold to both consumers and enterprises.
• The second lies in the data to be harvested from all the new, connected objects and the ways people interact with them. The opportunity is not about new screens, it’s about the massive insights to be gleaned. The challenge, as with omnichannel marketing, will be to link the data effectively.

9. Cross-Device Targeting at Scale (eMarketer)

• Consumer behavior today is all about multiscreen multitasking. Marketer behavior, up until now, not so much.
• In 2015, we will see cross-device targeting at scale. It won’t be perfect, but Facebook—with the relaunch of Atlas, which the social network acquired from Microsoft in February 2013—has shown it can work. That will push other publishers to come up with other viable solutions enabling advertisers to buy audiences, not channels, more seamlessly. Advances in user identification, retargeting and the use of location data will boost marketer confidence and spending.
• Still, progress on the cross-device front will continue to be uneven. Our ability to reach and target consumers will outpace our ability to measure and attribute their actions—yet another example of marketers playing catch-up with their audiences.

10. Digital disappointment (The Guardian)

• Moore’s law and venture capital money have led to exponential rises in what is possible with technology and what should be free. The only aspect growing faster than what can actually be done is our expectations. From screens that are not touchscreen to apps that don’t automatically tell us when our flights are running late, 2015 will be a time of digital frustration and disappointment for the most spoiled generation ever.

Just for fun, here are some 2015 predictions made at least 10 years ago:
    1.    By 2015, teleportation methods are being developed (yes, "beaming”)
    2.    Given growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the highest earning celebrity is synthetic
    3.    With AI scaling, Robots replace dance tutors
    4.    Biomedical warfare scales — and mutant insects are now used for attack purposes
    5.    "Kitchen rage” caused by electronic gadgets — enough said.

Whatever happens, here’s hoping we all have a prosperous and thrilling 2015!

Jonathan Adams (or JA) is Chief Digital Officer for Maxus North America