2022 Year-End Trend Recap
From Crypto’s rise and fall, to the metaverse mania — here’re the top five innovation trends of the year
With the holiday spirit in the air, now is the time to look back on the year we had, and recap the biggest and most impactful trends that emerged out of the intersection of media and technology. As with every year, all the top trends did not come out of the blue; rather, they all have been building up for a few years, and finally broke through into the mainstream in the past 12 months. Yet, with the accelerating hype cycle we have today, all of them felt like trends that we’ve been talking about for much longer. Still, to properly examine each trend’s respective impact on the attention economy and discern their staying power henceforth, it is important to understand how things played out over 2022 that led to where we are today with these trends.
Without further ado, here are the top five trends of 2022 that marketers should know:
The Boom And Bust Of Crypto
Let’s start with an undisputable headline grabber — crypto, which refers to a new class of digital assets built on blockchain technology. Cryptocurrency is its obvious namesake, but NFTs and other DeFi concepts are also often filed under this umbrella term.
Riding high on its mainstream breakthrough year of 2021, the crypto movement kicked off the year with an incredible high, as crypto companies spent millions on Super Bowl ads, and NFTs continued to explode with more brands jumping on the bandwagon. However, the party did not last long — even back in May, a crash in cryptocurrency prices wiped away more than $300 billion worth of market value in less than a week. Like any other speculative assets, the crypto market went up and down (mostly down) over the next few months, until the high-profile FTX scandal last month shredded the last bit of investor confidence and officially ushered in “the crypto winter.” As a result, crypto companies also slashed their marketing spend, leaving some ad-supported businesses with holes in their budgets.
For us here at the Lab, we’ve been tracking the rise and fall of the crypto market under the innovation territory of web3 — web 3.0 technology built on decentralized networks enabled by blockchain. In June, we published a piece recounting the past and present of web3, mentioning that “the frantic web3 developments over the past two years felt akin to the Virtual Reality boom in the 90s — way ahead of its time, both in terms of technological capability and cultural acceptance.”
Later, we followed up that article with an in-depth look into the ongoing debate on whether web3 technology has found a good consumer-facing use case yet, concluding at the time that the growing skepticism around crypto and web3 is “a healthy market correction on a potentially revolutionary, but overhyped, innovation territory,” and cautioned crypto-curious brands and marketers to tread lightly.
Yet, not all hope is lost — a new report by Harvard Business Review found that while many centralized crypto platforms catering to mass audience crashed, other crypto businesses that held onto decentralized protocols and operated with transparency “performed relatively reliably during all the turmoil” despite being subjected to the same external forces. Though generally smaller and less advanced than centralized exchanges, these decentralized protocols may offer a way forward for crypto markets.
The Metaverse Mania
Fighting with web3 for headlines in tech and media trade press was the metaverse mania, which kicked off in late 2021 when Facebook was rebranded as Meta. Naturally, 2022 has been a tremendous year for the metaverse, with just about every marketer asking themselves: what is the metaverse, and how can my brand get into it?
Readers of the Lab would know that we were discussing the metaverse way before it became a mainstream trendy topic — our head of strategy Adam Simon penned a brilliant two-part series on how the pandemic accelerated the development of the metaverse way back in May 2020. In contrast, this year, our main focus around the metaverse have been to layout the various entry points of the metaverse for brands, especially the non-immersive ones, and arguing for a clear delineation between web3 and the metaverse. Of course, our take on the current state of VR technology also takes into account the incessant hype around the metaverse.
Later in the year, we wrote about Roblox’s ad platform and what it could mean for brands eager to join the metaverse, concluding that “in the metaverse, creators are the new media channels, and brands will have to work with them to build and attract visitors to branded or sponsored experiences.” In addition, we also wrote about Meta and Microsoft teaming up to build an enterprise-facing metaverse, and the opportunities and challenges lie ahead for both companies.
Since then, brands like Walmart and West Elm have launched their respective Roblox experiences to appeal to younger generations, while overhyped metaverse wannabe platforms like Decentraland and Sandbox lost some credibility among marketers when their meager active user numbers were revealed. Looking ahead, the early exploration period will likely continue to many brands in 2023, but marketers are also growing more discerning when it comes to the types of virtual world platforms they work with.
AVOD Services Reshape Streaming Landscape
The streaming markets continued to evolve in 2022 following two years of pandemic-boosted viewership growth. This year, however, some of that accelerated growth started to show its strain on the market. The rising subscription prices, the incoming flux of ads, and the studios second-guessing their release strategy are turning some consumers against streaming, as we wrote in a late August article dissecting the growing backlash against streaming services,
In an effort to raise profitability without further alienating subscribers with higher monthly fees, many media companies turned to advertising. Previously premium ad-free services like HBO Max and Disney+ all added ad-supported tiers to their services to broaden their appeals to an increasingly budget-conscious audience. And the viewers embraced ad-supported streaming. The number of AVOD viewers in the US was forecast to rise by 8.6% year over year to over 140 million in 2022, per an eMarketer report published in March.
Given the market environment, it is not surprising that even Netflix, the flag-bearer for ad-free streaming, compromised on its long held principle of uninterrupted binge-viewing and launched an ad-supported subscription tier in November, less than seven months after its initial announcement following a disastrous Q1 earnings report. In a July article following the announcement of Netflix selecting Microsoft as its ad tech partner, we examined why Netflix made the aboutface move, and why brands should heed the shifting dynamics in the OTT space as pandemic-spurred acceleration in streaming growth comes to an end.
Last month, we revisited the topic as more streaming services appeared to double down on bringing ads into previously ad-free streaming environments, especially via live sports content. With Apple, Amazon, and Netflix all pursuing live sports content, advertisers gain a new window to reach cord-cutting households. Looking ahead, the rise of AVOD services, and ad-supported tiers in general signals an ongoing push towards revenue diversification among streaming companies, and further unbundles cable TV packages.
The Social Media Permacrisis
Somewhat mirroring the crisis response of “adding ads” in the streaming world is the perpetual sense of crisis that social media platforms went through in 2022. Not only did the hype around social audio die down quickly early in the year following a breakthrough year in 2021, the various attempts by the likes of Instagram and TikTok to launch live commerce features in the U.S. and European markets also stalled. Facing an existential crisis on top of a near-term financial crisis, Meta’s pivot from social media to building the metaverse was looking precarious, as we mused in an February article examining the two-fold crisis that Meta was facing (and still faces.) By the end of the year, it is still unclear whether Meta has found the right path forward.
However, as far as dramatic crisis on social media goes, no platform can top the headlines that Twitter generated this year since billionaire-provocateur Elon Musk decided to become the most famous chronically online person by buying Twitter for over $43 billion in April. At the time, we wrote a piece examining the interplay between weaponized memes, cults of personality, and the unexpected lessons for brand marketers. Then, fast forward to November, when the Elon Musk takeover was finally finalized, the ensuing chaos also spurred another article chronicling the immediate aftermath and commenting on the uncertain future of Twitter.
With Facebook and Twitter in perpetual crisis mode, which partly sterns from the fact that they have trouble competing with TikTok for consumer attention, it is not surprising that Gen Z are leaning more towards alternative social platforms, such as BeReal and Gas, and using them for social-driven discovery. According to Google’s own data, nearly 40% of Gen Z prefers searching on TikTok and Instagram over Google Search and Maps. Regardless of the staying power of BeReal, one thing is clear, brands must try harder to prepare for a brewing attention shift that moves local discovery off Google search into mainstream social platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, while the real social aspects of our digital lives migrate to group chats or alternative platforms like BeReal.
A New Age for Subscription Bundles
2022 was also the year that the subscription economy entered a new era. The average U.S. household now holds nine paid subscriptions across videos, music, and gaming, according to a Deloitte report. Moving beyond the conventional types of media and D2C product subscriptions, new subscriptions from service-oriented brands in various sectors such as travel, fast food, and healthcare, as we analyzed in a March article, all point to the new rules of cultivating brand loyalty in the post-pandemic new normal.
On the other hand, 2022 also showed us that subscriptions with only one product offering may no longer be enough. Instead, super bundles are on the rise, as we observed in a piece published in October. From Disney+ adding exclusive early access to holiday merch for subscribers, to LuluLemon launching an multi-faceted subscription bundle that include online workout classes, apparel product discounts, and access to select partner gyms, experiments of super bundles emerged in 2022 as a great innovation tactic for enhancing customer loyalty by mitigating subscription fatigue, strengthening ecosystem lock-in effect, and facilitating vertical integrations.
Overall, subscriptions are becoming a popular way for brands to incentivize digital engagement and increase the stickiness of their products through repeat businesses. Most of the subscriptions mentioned here are essentially paid loyalty programs to deliver a multitude of embedded services that are designed to confront the broader challenge to traditional loyalty models.
