5 Questions For The New Year

Here are five questions about the ad industry in the upcoming year that inquiring minds are asking.

1. What does the ad industry need to do in 2016?
To maintain its credibility and high esteem, the ad industry needs to develop compelling new banalities. "Conversations" and "engagement" and "ecosystems" were great in their day, but I think we can do better. We need to learn to utilize data driven insights to develop new platitudes we can use to hide the fact that we don't know what the fuck we're talking about.

2. What advertising breakthroughs do you foresee in the new year?
The big breakthroughs in 2016 will come in the area of dead things. Traditionally, we have waited several years before we declared certain advertising modes dead. It took 60 years for us to decide TV was dead, but the QR code got itself dead in about 3 weeks. I'm hoping that 2016 will be the year we can declare things dead before they arrive. For example, I just made up a word: Cloudsourcing. I have no idea what it means, but it sounds exactly like the kind of insufferable bullshit a CMO could really get behind. So let's declare it dead before someone decides it's a good idea. Cloudsourcing is dead!

3. Where do you see marketing going this year?
That's easy. To a conference in Las Vegas.

4.  How will technology change everything in 2016?
The big trend in technology will be the introduction of a whole new generation of "things that all do the same thing." Right now our connected devices all do the same things -- we can watch TV on our tablets, send emails from our watches, make phone calls from our PCs, surf the web on our TVs. Nonetheless, we have to have one of each device because Apple says so. In 2016 this trend will expand into our household appliances. We will have "The internet of things that all do the same thing." We will have espresso machines that can iron our underwear and blenders that can barbecue a chicken. We will be talking into our toilets and shitting in our toasters.

5. What is the biggest threat to world peace and civil order in 2016?
The return of the infographic.