My last column of the year is live:
“Am I too cynical about ‘predictions for 2019’ posts? More than a few seem to conflate a company’s own hopes/goals with prognostications about what the market will do independent of them. Is it snarky to ask, ‘How did your predictions for 2018 work out?’”
So tweeted Scott Brinker – HubSpot’s platform ecosystem vice president and the editor of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog – in late 2018, a few months before David ‘Shingy’ Shing left his ‘digital prophet’ role at Verizon Media.
As far as we know, no one else has hired Shingy for a similar job. The news may have placed a dark cloud over the predictions industry. After all, what if those forecasts are largely useless? I cannot help but wonder if Shingy’s departure this year will herald the arrival of more common sense in the marketing industry.
No, it is not snarky to question predictions. It is a very valuable thing to do. After all, countless companies pay countless money to know what will happen in the future.
During the same month as Brinker’s tweet, I evaluated and rated the prior marketing predictions for 2018 from the top analyst firms and marketing software companies: Deloitte, Forrester, Gartner, Gartner L2’s Scott Galloway, HubSpot and Salesforce. (Who won? Read the prior column to find out.)
This year, I did something similar. I had collected all the 2019 marketing predictions that I had seen since the end of 2018. For this final column of the year before the holidays, I did the same type of review. To be fair, I focused on other organisations this time: GroupM, Kantar, MoffettNathanson Research and the World Federation of Advertisers.
Before my evaluation, some notes. If I could not find good, independent information on a given issue, I cut the prediction and neither credited nor penalised the company. And, of course, not all data from 2019 has been reported yet.
Now, in alphabetical order, here are this year’s contenders.