My final column of the year is live in The Drum:
Bob Hoffman once wrote that ‘the great thing about talking about the future is that you don’t have to know anything. You just make shit up and nobody can refute it.’ Well, I will do my best.
Since the end of 2017, I have collected every report that I came across with predictions for 2018 for the purpose of writing this column. Below, I judge whether the forecasts from Deloitte, Forrester, Gartner, Gartner L2’s Scott Galloway, HubSpot, and Salesforce were correct.
Why? There is significant money in futurism. Businesses pay a lot to receive reports and listen to speakers such as Shingy, Oath’s ‘digital prophet’. But what if that money is completely wasted?
Before my evaluation, some notes. I included only forecasts that were specific and quantifiable. (Most were too vague to be proven or disproven – a qualification that eliminated Shingy from consideration.) If I could not find good, independent information on a given topic, I cut the prediction and neither credited nor penalised the company. And obviously, not all data from 2018 has been reported yet.
Now, in alphabetical order, the professional analysts and marketing software companies.