Back, warming up the engines, and already speeding into 2024. After a wonderful break with family, friends, beach, and afternoon naps, here we are!
Following what the entire internet is doing - especially on Linkedin - I want to start the year with an exercise on what I imagine are the main trends in the world of content this year. Along with that, I think it's important to always adopt a posture of being on the stage and not just as someone in the audience watching the band pass by, paraphrasing the Brazilian singer Chico Buarque.
I'll give you three insights, which in times of constant changes, growing uncertainties, and increasingly VUCA environments (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous), seem like a good number.
1. Yes, AI is coming in full force (and it doesn't care if you like it or not)
It's almost becoming a cliché to talk about AI. Robots here, ChatGPT there, but the truth is that everything suggests this is a one-way path, and artificial intelligences will be increasingly present in our lives. Whether to optimize and streamline things, facilitate processes, but also, as predicted by the IMF, to leave many people without jobs and income.
I want to share some data I read today on Ai.drop, a very cool news source worth following (https://www.aidrop.news/). They showed that a recent PwC survey "revealed that 46% of CEOs expect AI to increase their companies' productivity next year. The same survey identified that 25% of them plan to reduce the number of employees because of AI." Furthermore, on Ai.drop, "between Sep '22 and Aug '23, the top 50 AI tools generated 24 billion visits, with an average monthly growth of 236.3 million visits or a rate of 10.7x. ChatGPT alone accounted for 14 billion visits, or 60% of all traffic. Going further, 63% of these accesses came from mobile, and men were responsible for the majority (69.5%).
When we talk about content and the craft around it, there are already many tools that can speed up the work in many areas: administration, design, marketing, review, translation, etc., etc. Tools that have the ability to greatly speed up the work. I suggest you take a look at these two companies: Nuanxed and Shimmr.
That's the cool part of the story :)
Of course, there's the other discussion about machines doing the work of humans. I am on the team that believes that machines and humans can enhance and multiply stories and not subtract jobs. As Larissa Caldin, from Primavera Editorial, said in a panel we shared at the last Flip (Brazilian Book Festival) "bad texts will indeed be affected by AI, but they would have been bad texts anyway." In other words, what is good remains good, what touches people will continue to touch. But AI can indeed be a tool to enhance the distribution and access to content. I respect those who have a more apocalyptic view on this topic... I reserve my more pessimistic views for AI interference in other areas - such as political campaigns with deep fakes, for example - and maintain a positive mindset on this topic. 🙂
2. Hyper-personalization is the key to engagement
It's been a few years since we left the time when there was the "X of the year." This X could be a book, a movie, an album. The internet has enabled and intensified niches, microcosms, bubbles. Again, for better or for worse. But it is a fact that different groups will consider different books as the book of the year. We have moved from an era of unanimity to a time of segmentation and community. We join with those who have similar tastes to ours and shape our content consumption from there. My Netflix is different from yours, my Spotify too, my Skeelo too. Each has its own world, and the more you consume your world, the more each of these apps knows what world it is and helps you more and more to receive (incredibly) faithful recommendations to the type of content that interests you. Sounds like magic!
So I believe a lot in the intensification of personalization in content consumption, more and more. Look at the metadata there!
3. TikTokization of content consumption. Fragmentation is the key
TikTok is not just about dancing... this should be the mantra of everyone working in marketing and content on this planet, in case someone still hasn't understood how much the app is shaping the way many people - almost the entire Generation Z - consume content.
Major players like HBO, for example, are re-releasing entire series fragmented into short videos on the app. In their case, as reported by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo, the network premiered an official profile of the series last Sunday (7) on the platform, and since then has been posting a series of videos that summarize the episodes of the six seasons of the program in 25 seconds. The project is called "Sopranos in :25" and encompasses all 86 chapters of Tony Soprano's story.
This topic fascinates me; I've been talking about it since 2016. At that time, almost 8 years ago, we did an experiment of sending daily stories via WhatsApp.
Another very interesting example that was done a few years ago is from the NYPL (New York Public Library), which turned literary classics into Instagram stories. You can check it out on their profile.
In other words, it's not about the size of the story, it's about how you deliver it to a world where thousands of companies are competing for attention all the time, every day, from billions of people.
Of course, many other things can cross our path this year and beyond. But I believe these are three trends that have been growing in recent years and played an important role in content consumption in 2023, whatever the format.
Let's keep talking throughout the year to see how much this gains more strength or if at some point, I'll have to come back here to say that someone somewhere in the world has invented something that will override all we're talking about here.
Bring on 2024!