Welcome 2009 - The ABCs of the New Marketing, Media and Research Universe

I gave a presentation to a consultancy the other day and they had a particular interest in my musings on the subject of "what's next".

With 2009 around the corner, I thought I'd get a jumpstart on the New Year's eve pundits and postulate what fromative changes are happening that will profoundly affect the way we do business.

Although the list of 26 below doesn't validate the lively and enagaging discussion, here is our take on the 26 alphabetized marketing, media, digital, culture and research trends driving our industry for your consumption (with due credit to Dr. Seuss):

Attention overload – sophisticated filtering

Brand community-building – private networks of fans, influencers & evangelists

Customer experience focus – marketing is what we do

Democratized advertising – you determine and grade your ads

Free agent agency/enterprise – hire the best freelancers

Generation Y impacts – the Net generation grows up

Humanization of the Brand – more blogs, more connections, better stories

Influencers – harnessing the 1% rule

Joint Ventures – accelerated cooperation between companies

Karma Capitalism – links to cause marketing

Local – marketing is local

Mobile Marketing/Media – the new search is mobile

Networking integration – one stop socializing

Online spending  - catches up with how we surf, blends with TV

Psychographic targeting/profiling – away from demography

Quasi-profile – a networking profile for personal, social and professional life

Reputation management – personal and corporate indices

Semantic web – everything piece of tech is smart and talking to each other

Transparency/authenticity – search for genuine stuff

Uber Connectedness – 24 hours on

Visual – sea change - camera phones, file saving technology and editing

Word of Mouth – the #1 influence continues to grow

XX – Women Rule

You Do It – Marketing/Selling for the masses

Zopa – Peer to peer lending, elimination of transaction fees and threats to established -opolies