• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, January 22, 2019

In the past 12 months, what have your Media insiders been talking about? I wondered that myself, so I did a tally. I grouped all last year’s columns into 10 broad categories. Here, roughly speaking, are the topics we've covered in 2018:

Disruption in Our Biz

At a whopping 63 columns, this was by far the most popular topic, accounting for a full 25% of all the Media Insider columns written last year. Authorship was pretty much split among all the insiders, including yours truly.

Editorial angles included disruption in TV ad buying, the future of the ad holding company and agencies, marketer distrust of their agencies, the rise of digital “frenemies” and the very nature of the relationship between advertisers and their market. We may have taken different approaches, but we all had this viewpoint in common with Stephen Stills when he wrote this song lyric for Buffalo Springfield: “Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

How Technology is Changing Us

The second most popular topic looked at disruption of a different sort: how tech is rewiring humans. This, of course, is my favorite topic, but I wasn’t alone. 37 columns were written on this issue, making up 15% of all the Media Insiders last year. The vast majority of these were cautionary in tone, worrying that tech may be leading us down a dystopian path.

Politically Charged Tech

The third most popular theme? No real surprise here. It was about the overlap of tech -- especially social media -- and politics. We collectively penned 34 columns on this topic, making up 13% of the total editorial calendar. The interesting aspect of this -- for me, anyway -- was the question of whether the relationship was simply correlational or causal. Did tech take us to where we are today? Or was it simply the channel we used to bitch about it?

Privacy and Data Concerns

Coming in as a close contender for the top three spots was the whole personal privacy mess, featuring the long-running Facebook debacle. The various security breaches, exposes of Russian hacking, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s consistently abysmal behavior were on our collective minds, generating 30 columns making up 12% of all Media Insider content. Facebook may have been the poster child of this particular theme, but the question of data privacy goes beyond that to a much more fundamental question: Who should own our data?

Marketing Strategy and Execution

Rounding out the top five was probably the most helpful topic of the bunch: How the hell should you market anyway? In 2018, 27 columns were written on the topic, representing 11% of all columns which ran. A hat tip to fellow Insider Cory Treffiletti here, who wrote most of those.

New Consumer Tech

As you can see, the top five topics were mostly negative in nature, mainly concerned with worrying about what was happening. The next two topics were a little more starry-eyed, starting with dreaming about a richer tech future. Eighteen times in 2018 we wrote about new consumer tech (making up 7% of all columns), including voice-enabled, AR, VR and AI. While we sometimes hit a negative note, most of the time we adopted a “Gee Whiz” enthusiasm about what this new tech could bring.

New MarTech

The number seven theme had us putting on our marketer’s hat and enthusing about how tech will improve marketing. We wrote about this 13 times, representing 5% of the content. Again, while we realize that this is one of the contributing factors to disruption in our business, we remained overwhelming positive about the possibilities. We also saw consolidation of this market in our collective crystal balls.

A Glimpse Inside Our Personal Worlds

Tied for the 7^th spot -- with 13 columns -- was a bit of a catchall category I called personal insights. The topics were varied, but they all touched on who we were as humans and how we saw the world. Often we used our own experiences as our narrative devices.

The Evolution of Entertainment and Content Publishing

The Insiders occasionally mused -- 11 times last year, to be exact -- about how the very notion of entertainment and content publishing was changing. Again, we were monitoring another disruptive trend. How we are reinventing the way we consume video -- thanks to streaming and binge-watching -- was the most popular topic in this category, but we also wondered about the future of the printed word as well.

The New Definition of Branding

Finally, we wondered what will become of the notion of branding in an increasingly polarized, digitally mediated market place. This was our topic for seven columns last year, making up 3% of the total Insider pie. We saw the continuing rise of brand activists, slacktivists and overtly political brand messaging. In short, we saw branding mirror what was happening in the real world.

As a sample of where our heads are at, there were no real surprises when I tallied up the numbers. This showed that we Insiders, just like everyone else, are trying to make sense of an increasingly nonsensical world and industry. We feel the earth moving under our feet, often in seismic jolts. We worry about the future. We remain cautiously optimistic about the promise of technology in general. We get mad when corporations behave badly. And we use our own lives to help frame our perspective of the world where we live and work.

It will be interesting to see what we write about in 2019.