Back in 2005, for The Annual, AdNews asked industry figures to predict what the state of play would be in a decade. That's now. We decided to revisit those predictions and see who was right – and who was wrong. Over the next few days we'll be revealing who had an accurate crystal ball a decade ago – and who was frankly full of shit.
We revisit the predictions of Harold Mitchell – who wrote his thoughts for the decade ahead in the 2005 Annual - to see how the godfather of media faired.
While we have no evidence that Mitchell owns an actual crystal ball, it turns out he was pretty on the money when it came to seeing what the landscape would look like a decade into the future.
Ten years ago, Mitchell said the winners in 2015 would be highly targeted media, serious press, good magazines, Foxtel, the internet and smart business-like media people, noting the losers as broad mass appeal media, classifieds in the press and cinema.
He only made one misstep when reliving his predictions and Mitchell was quick to pick it up.
“There's one I missed – cinema. I thought Cinema would struggle but they've continued to invest in the product, they've changed the nature of cinema," he said.
Mitchell also said 10 years ago that the events of 2015 would be largely determined by the words demography, geography and technology, trends that he believes are still relevant as we move into a new year.
“People are getting older, and how are we handling that and what are we doing? Geography, which is the rise of Asia, these are all things to watch out for in 2025.”
As Mitchell noted in 2005, he believes the rise of Asia will continue even further.
He also said moving into the next decade, it will be increasingly difficult to launch new brands.
“In the past brands were launched by broad mass media and therefore they were products for a mass market such as the Holden and Ford brands," Mitchell said.
“Individual media, and even with social, it's hard to get everyone at once in the lounge room now to make something famous. I think it's going to be very difficult to launch new brands and as a consequence older brands should be cherished and nourished, and people should create new products off those old brands. My advice is go back to the old brands that are already there and build off them.”
Mitchell also had previously told AdNews that moving into the next decade, people would need to embrace different cultures and ideas, to ensure an end to xenophobia.
While countries will grapple with xenophobia and the great difficulty of borders, he believes that in order to thrive as an industry we need to look to what the wider global community is doing, rather than looking to shut them out.
“Immigrants are vital to the country, education is vital to the country, and startups are vital to the country and immigrants will be a big part of that,” he said. “If you look at the startups in America right now, 50% have at least one highly educated immigrant in them.”
“Don't believe that you have to build borders to our country, which includes to our intellectual success. We need to put ourselves more into the world than we ever have done in the past,” Mitchell reiterated.
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