Make trend season your own

It's trend report season. I hope you find what you're looking for.

One of my most vivid memories of middle school is how excited I felt about taking board games into the classroom at the end of term, as schoolwork wound down and our teachers looked for other ways to keep us all entertained. It was always a high point of the year, and looking back, it's clear that teachers understood that our childish brains needed a break - particularly at the end of the long Autumn term.

I'm reminded of that time as I've been playing many rounds of Ivy's "First Sounds Lotto" game this week while she's been recovering from her latest illness (temperature, cough, snotty nose - the usual thing at this time of year).

Ivy is a kind, compassionate, empathetic child who gets excited about other people finding sounds for their boards. She's not just focused on what she needs. But we all have an innate 'me agenda', and Ivy is no different. If she's not collected a sound in the first few rounds, she'll make sure we know about it. She cares about what's happening to everyone else but ultimately cares about her own board, about what's happening in her world.

Sometimes we all need a dollop of this selfishness, to think “what does this mean for me?” I think it’s a particularly acute need at this time of year. Hopefully, your December is rolling to a benign conclusion, and you’re not working on a launch or (god forbid) a pitch. I hope you’re able to pause, take a breath and think about how you plan to approach 2024. A fresh new year stretching out ahead of us all, full of opportunity and exciting unknowns.

It’s a mode of thinking that anyone publishing a trend report hopes to capitalise on. Every brand and agency that has painstakingly come up with a selection of trends for 2024 and had them beautifully designed and laid out hopes you’ll find something inspiring within their pages.

The challenge of course, is that while a new year feels fresh and different, in reality what we can expect is more of the same. In many parts of our world, change happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. Ofcom's recently published Online Nation report showed that YouTube and Facebook remain the UK's most popular social media platforms (over 90% of the population). People still love TikTok; it's not just a pandemic thing - 18-24-year-olds spend an average of 55 minutes on it daily. That audience also still loves Snapchat, spending 58 minutes with that app. Like much of our media and entertainment consumption, these trends are unlikely to change drastically.

But of course, that’s not the point of a trend report. A trend report aims to give us the fresh kick of thinking we're looking for at this time of year. In many ways, we’re like the secretive folks working at "seasoning houses" that develop new crisp flavours, as outlined in this fascinating long-ish read in The Guardian. We want something that feels fresh, new and different - but also reflects existing tastes so we can be reasonably confident that it won't be a massive failure. However, unlike developing new crisp flavours, most agencies and brands producing trend reports don't have the time or the budget to rigorously test and refine their ideas. They need 4-5 trends, and they need to be submitted to the designer mocking up the PDF so the whole thing can go live before the end of the year.

So, most trend reports focus on repackaging much of what we already see, hear and know into a slightly different format. Coming up with a catchy, arresting name - Accenture Song talks about "Meh-diocrity" this year, which I quite like. Grouping different existing trends to create meta-categories of activity. Or, not even worrying about repackaging existing trends and having the confidence to say, "This may sound boring, but this is what's happening in our world right now". That's what you can see taking a cursory browse through this Google Drive of over 160 PDF trend reports (plus a whole bunch more links to explore).

It feels new, it feels different and exciting - and as a result it plays into our state of mind, into our ‘me agenda’ of looking to start 2024 as we mean to go on. It doesn’t matter if it’s not new, or if some agency is still predicting AR and VR to go mainstream after nearly 10 years of trying to make them happen.

What we could do this year, that we haven’t been able to before, is to discover just how similar all these trend reports really are. This LinkedIn post provides some detailed instructions on how to use a generative AI tool to provide you with a summary of your chosen selection of PDFs.

I'd wager that a high percentage of trends are the same across all these reports, just described in slightly different ways. And that's not a bad thing - making up trends and outlandish predictions, like coming up with a crazy crisp flavour, will inevitably make you look foolish. Knowing the top ten most common trends would also help to ask an AI¥ another, just as important question - find me the topics that only came up once or twice in these reports. Where are the unusual edge cases that will give me that feeling of looking at the world slightly differently than I have before?

Those articles and reports are harder to find, but they're the ones I find the most valuable. Like this slightly mysterious PDF called "Live Players" from the Substack

8Ball

(thanks to the inimitable Matt Muir and his Web Curios for turning me onto this). It doesn't offer "Ten trends you should be aware of" or "Five predictions for 2024". It's a slightly different look at where we are RIGHT NOW, in terms of our culture. It's highly stylised and it's very much a singular and opinionated take on our world; you can see the 'me agenda' writ large all over it. But it's no less thought-provoking for that.

It's given me exactly what I'm looking for at this time of year, playing into my desire to find something new and a bit different as I continue my extended period away from the world of work. It's just the right balance of appealing to what's happening in my world, chiming with my worldview while also offering that fresh take that makes it feel exciting.

It's the kind of report that can be a touchstone throughout 2024, regularly hitting that bookmark when tackling a fresh brief focused on changing hearts and minds. Like any endeavour or game, you need your starting point, a platform to build from.

When we're playing First Sounds Lotto, Ivy often picks the board with the elephant and the drum. I have my go-to sources saved in Chrome and Notion. I'm sure you've got your own approach. And I hope that this trend season, you find something fresh that appeals to you.