2022 Digital Forecasting

 We’re a month into a new year, so it’s time to dig into the age-old practice of trying to figure out what the rest of the year has in store for us. With major upheavals taking place in the digital and social media spaces, our digital predictions for the new year are designed to help you and your business feel better prepared to face the year ahead.

Let’s  cut to the chase—here’s what you need to know.

1. Digital is going to get more expensive. 

Digital spaces are growing at an exponential rate. Globally, social media audiences gained 424 million new users last year and that user base is expecting to increase annually by about 10 percent.

As these websites and social media platforms gain visitors, their advertising will scale, too—meaning more competition for media messages for audiences across the board. Digital ad real estate is big business, comprising roughly $84.2B of Facebook's revenue just in 2020, and there’s more and more competition to reach key audiences. That’s likely going to get worse in 2022, as the U.S. heads into what will likely be an aggressive mid-term election cycle.

If you are planning your social budget for the year, keep all this in mind. Your budget may need to expand to help your dollar go further or start planning for strategic advertisement run times when the digital climate is a bit less turbulent.

Even beyond the more traditional digital spends, we’re seeing emerging tech costs rise, too. Big brands and digital influencers are pioneering things like the metaverse and NFTs and finding new ways to monetize digital content and, for the interim, adding some speculative value to their digital marketing endeavors.

NFTs are a multibillion-dollar industry now with the Bored Ape Yacht Club has passed a billion dollars in sales in their project alone. Digital “property” in the metaverse is selling for millions of dollars to brands looking to set up digital spaces for their brands. 

Now brands and companies budgeting for social media are going to have to accommodate these more densely populated and largely more expensive landscapes. The one-size-fits-all digital application budget leaves little room for exploration into new platforms and may limit a brand’s capacity to punctuate the digital clutter and reach their audiences. Spend wisely and in service of your macro brand and business goals.

2. We’re going to see the the real impact of NFTs—and it has nothing to do with apes.

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs are going to be a permanent fixture in our lives going forward. Currently, we see s no way around that. Depending on how you were introduced to NFTs, your idea of what they are might be different—nowadays most associate it with the aforementioned Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and other limited series of slightly different iterations of an illustrated character that are traded for massive amounts of Ethereum on the blockchain. 

Check out this podcast appearance where Gary Vee (whose take can be controversial depending on who you’re talking to), in which he envisions the future of the NFT technology.  

Since this video was published, more and more brands like Pepsi, Adidas and Budweiser have jumped into the space. He goes on to talk about ways anything can be NFT-ified, and honestly, we see a few of these coming to fruition. We’re probably going to see NFTs transcend everything we do, from buying concert tickets, reservations at an exclusive restaurant or even buying and selling houses like Gary suggests. 

The thing is, whether we like it or not, his advice is probably solid. But while art trading and prospective digital hosting are important aspects of the NFT landscape, what’s really important is the infrastructure for how these transactions happen–smart contracts. Smart contracts are going to shift the way transactions are done in the digital sphere and its anonymous nature and tough-to-crack encryption will push us further from the fast-and-loose data collection tactics that dominated the 2010s. 

Smart contracts are contracts that self-execute with the terms of the agreement between both parties being written into lines of code. The agreement is then distributed across a decentralized blockchain network which is more secure and requires no intermediaries. In short, it’s cheaper, faster and more secure to use than traditional transactional methods. It also makes it easy to do anonymously and with any stipulation you want hard coded into that contract forever. 

Now years into the crypto revolution, investors are trying to find a consumer application for blockchain technology, and smart contracts might be a winner.

We’d remiss if we didn’t leave this observation with a notable caveat: the environmental impacts of NFTs. Cryptocurrencies came under fire last year for their high energy cost. Fortune published an article last year claiming that each transaction using bitcoin consumes around 1,173 kilowatts of electricity–which costs around $176. That could provide power to the average U.S. home for around six weeks. Again, we believe brands and business should move into this space tactfully and fully aware of the potential risk. For most, this is a good time to observe and do some cultural research on the nascent value that NFTs and other crypto-adjacent investments may possess.

3. It’s going to be all about the metaverse.

Last summer, Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook employees that the future was the metaverse, and in October, the social giant officially changed their name to Meta. This dystopian concept, coined in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, has expanded to encompass just about anything you can do online. Now, brands are scrambling to cement their foothold within the metaverse.

If you needed solid proof, Microsoft’s massive $67.8 billion purchase of acclaimed game developer Activision-Blizzard was done to “accelerate growth in Microsoft’s business…and will provide building blocks for the Metaverse.” Virtual property in metaverses The Sandbox and Decentraland have sold for over $100 million to brands and other investors hoping to be in the ground floor of whatever future the metaverse may hold for us. 

But there’s an element of confusion in all this—because now everything seems to be “the metaverse." Anything you can do collaboratively online, whether it’s playing an online game, watching a movie in a chat room with friends and family across the country…basically overnight the definition of what that was fundamentally changed. 

The truth is simple. People just like to do things together, especially when they’re isolated. Current technology means we can have fun with friends from the comfort of our couches, and it definitely makes it feel cooler when we have a nice 3D representation of ourselves to use online. But that isn’t a new concept, we’ve been doing that for years now thanks to the multitudes of multiplayer games. 

But just like the speculative nature of NFTs, this is a speculative game, too. The metaverse isn’t really tied to anything in reality, yet. While the concept is definitely going to dominate 2022, there’s very low saturation of VR and AR products and an even lower amount of people actively engaging in “true” metaverse products.

Plus, there’s a lingering philosophical quandary in here for us. Coming out of the digital fatigue brought on by the pandemic, is now the time for the metaverse?

So many have reconnected with nature, or at least started interacting more with their immediate surroundings, but the metaverse calls for more immersive content–content that you can’t help but recognize is virtual and facsimile of what we could engage with in real life.

Should we be willing to plug in again to experience virtual and augmented reality? The reconnection might cause more burnout, leading to an untimely end for the short-term metaverse push. 

4. Community will be paramount.

As a result of all of this, we want to highlight the importance of cultivating and participating in an authentic communal connection—especially as the word continues to be used unilaterally between tech giants without much context as to who is invited in to join and what those businesses are doing to cultivate a healthy digital neighborhood.

If your organization is looking to wade into what will shape our digital landscape over the next few years, look at what your audience, both present and future, cares about. NFTs and the metaverse are contested, speculative and it’s unclear what their impact will be. There’s no harm in getting into it, but it’s an investment, and your audience might not yet be receptive to it or gain very much value from this avenue.

As the internet gets younger (as in, way more young people on web platforms) the culture of the internet will inevitably feel younger and younger as these age demographics become more present as content creators and advertising markets. That might make you feel like your organization needs to present itself in a way that interacts with that culture, but these new trends might be too new for you to jump into thoughtfully. And that’s perfectly fine.

It is a more constructive use of your time, energy and money to elevate your audience’s online experience in ways that prioritize your brand values. Otherwise, it’s an exhausting game of finding the next-best-thing—and you’re better than that. Experimentation is great, and we’d never advocate for abandoning curiosity, but we do believe in getting weird for a purpose.

If you have predictions for 2022 that you want to share with us, find us on Twitter at @shearcreativity or subscribe to our email newsletter to get all our insights, right in your inbox.