[2014 trends] Ten trends in marketing management for 2014

1. Zero paid media: Is Joseph Jaffe right? Is this the year when paid media are no longer required to build their brands. In his book Z.E.R.O. he puts the case for why brands need zero paid media, but instead, owned and earned is the real media value.

2. Zero agency fees: Agency fees are continually under competitive pressure. Procurement continues to drive lower rates. In the UK, the Government used a reverse online auction process to select agencies on the lowest rates. But if not already, will they hit rock bottom this year?
   

3. Zero choice of agency: Omnicom and Publicis announced their merger in 2013 to create the largest advertising holding company in the world. Even while this merger is progressing, both are continuing with an agenda of further acquisition.

   With more holding company mergers and acquisitions rumoured to follow, will marketers' choice continue to reduce?

4. Zero privacy: 20 years after Orwell's Big Brother, technology and big data means that privacy died sometime in the past five years. More data on individuals has been generated and collected in the past ten years than all of history, but will 2014 be the year Governments catch up with the legislation to manage privacy or will the consumer fight back? (See big data below)

5. Zero originality: With so many ideas available online, you would think this would stimulate more originality. But true originality is more likely to come out of a tech start-up than an agency these days. All we see from agencies is copies and reworking of others ideas. Or have we just run out of ideas?

6. Zero best practice: Technology is driving change so fast that best practice is out of date by the time you have identified it. In fact, what increasingly passes for best practice is reduced to simply being common practice. Innovation in the face of this change comes from next practice thinking.

7. Zero digital specialists: Digital agencies are digital specialists. But in a world where everything is digital, is there a place for simply being digital? Instead there will continue to be increasing numbers of specialists in the categories created by the technology.

8. Zero Big Data: Last year everyone was talking Big Data. With so much data available through social and online networks and platforms we have more data than ever before. But do we know the individuals behind this data any better than before? Hopefully this year is when everyone wakes up to the fact it is not the size of your data but the value of your insights.

9. Zero media costs: With traditional media rates falling and the continuing market pressure on both agencies and media owners to drive these rates down further, will we see media being given away for free? The hope is that media owners will realize they can charge for the value delivered and not simply hold on to their current audience delivery model.

10. Zero production values: Consumer generated content has marketers questioning the value of high value productions. If YouTube can have hundreds of hours of content added every day, what price to pay for content? Yet quality content is scarce and quality branded content is even scarcer. So on the basis of supply and demand, what price for high quality produced content?
    

The question for the industry decision makers and influencers is: Where do we all benefit from 'zero' and where do we need to build anew from the zero base?

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