The 14 Things Every LinkedIn Article Will Be About In 2016

As you probably know, LinkedIn is the dreariest, most humorless repository of business commentary mankind has ever produced.

It is a venue for people without the slightest talent for business writing to shoot their mouths off and be taken seriously by other dimwits who are either looking for work or looking for something to do when they ought to be looking for work.

To start the year off right, and as a service to my readers, I'm going to summarize for you everything that will appear in LinkedIn in 2016.

This way you can use the time you might otherwise waste on LinkedIn to do something useful, like polish your guns or make rice pudding.

Here are the 14 things that every article in LinkedIn will be about this year:

1. What Is Your Brand Story?

2. Why Marketing To Millennials Is Different.

3. Why Marketing To Millennials Is Not Different.

4. 2016: The Year Of Mobile.

5. 2016: The Year Of Content.

6. 2016: The Year Of Native.

7. Unlocking The Authentic Purpose In Your Brand.

8. Don't Be Afraid Of Change. Embrace it!

9. Greatness Requires Passion.

10. You Need Leadership. Leadership Needs You!

11. Managing Is About Listening.

12. Social Media Is About Listening.

13. Marketing Is About Listening.

14. Every Fucking Thing In The Whole Fucking World Is About Listening.

 Okay, now let's see those guns sparkle.

Advertising And Espionage

Apparently espionage and advertising have a lot in common.

During the holidays I re-read Smiley's People (for the third time). George Smiley, the British spymaster, is one of my fictional heroes.

Here is an excerpt that is so apropos to our industry, it almost made me choke on my vodka martini.

"All his professional life, it seemed to Smiley, he had listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine...

He had watched Whitehall skirts go up and come down, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He has been the witness, or victim -- or even reluctant prophet -- of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now...integration. Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea: 'Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!' Each had gone out with a whimper, leaving behind it the familiar...muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator."

Substitute Madison Avenue for Whitehall, and  conversations, engagement, co-creation, and interactivity for lateralism, parallelism, separatism, and integration. And what have you got?

The dreary self-deception of the advertising industry.

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.