Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Good riddance, 2016. For many of us, it was 12 long months full of bad news, fake news and surreal news, the most controversial election anyone can remember, plus too many other highlights and lowlights to mention.

This very December, we've seen the many shades of orange upstaged by Pantone's Greenery, and we all know the color of the year is not a nod to hope about the climate or to anyone's envy of the Western world.

Luckily, I can find solace in an area where my company definitely isn't green: spotting trends for the year ahead. Here at Havas PR, we devote the end of each year to spotting trends on the rise, and it's always interesting to look both ahead and back at the predictions that have proven out recently—more stringent legislation around brain damage suffered by football players (forecast in 2010); the universal brain-health movement (2009); and "Local is the new global" (2007).

Here are a few of the trends we believe will directly impact marketers and advertisers in 2017 taken from our more in-depth report, "Blowback to the Future: The Trends That Will Shape 2017":...

Futurist and business consultant Amy Webb says that by asking the right questions, just about anyone can do what she does: separate real trends from hype and glean the paths that technologies will take.

In her recently released book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Webb shares some of her methods for analyzing the impact of innovations. She spoke to MIT Technology Review’s executive editor, Brian Bergstein, in an interview that Insider Premium subscribers can listen to here. Highlights condensed for clarity follow.

Now, Los Angeles-based advertising agency Ignited has considered 100 trend reports and identified 15 key trends for 2015 from the most relevant end-of-year predictions.

"Upon sifting through all of these trends, we narrowed it down to the ones that we think will have the biggest impact on our business in the near future," says Frank Striefler, SVP planning & strategy, Ignited....