For the Cynical, Time-Starved, Attention Deficit, and Lover of Run-On Sentences (not to mention parenthetical phrases and/or statements) Ad Professional

As those in the know in the ad industry have been predicting the key things that will evolve, change or simply finally actually happen that probably should’ve happened years ago (I’ve heard this isn’t just the year of mobile, but the year of the confluence of mobile, social and experiential or something like that), I’m electing to take a more introspective, unvarnished look at us – we knowers of knowledge, trackers of trendy and paramours of prognostication.  Allow me to guess how we, the ad community, will act in this new year…

Prediction #1 – Shiny objects will continue to be shiny but not as shiny as newer, shinier objects

We will be amazed (read: myopic) by seemingly profound and new (read: more or less slightly tweaked) hardware, software, applications, websites, and whatnot now coming into our collective consciousness.  We will expound their virtues, rush to try them out, gush about paradigms shifting, and maybe even spend some of our own money to buy one or two of these things.

At some later point, we will demand accountability for all this stuff, stating that the time for exploration and “test and learn” is over, these things need to prove their worth.  And we will demand that accountability at roughly the time we begin to hear what will be profound and new at CES 2012.  Hey, it’s tough to hold the old stuff in your head when you need to free up space to be properly amazed by and have enough exhalations to use in describing all the new stuff.

Prediction #2 – Fragmentation will be what you make of it – or don’t make of it…whatever

We will have an epiphany that the buckets we classify media into shouldn’t be ever smaller based on new hardware that delivers media (Hey, where’s the Directorix of Advertising that Occurs on the Android Platform?  She needs to connect with the Grand Poobah of Platforms that Show Up on Tablets and Other Things Like Computers but Aren’t!), but larger (or at least simpler) based on how people actually use media to get things done – seeing how what’s being delivered is probably video, sound and/or textual content of some sort.

Once had, said epiphany will quickly dissolve as we try to grok the meaning of a tablet that has most of the functionality of a mobile phone (not to mention being roughly the same size), a landline device that allows a person to text, and (GASP!) Internet that shows up on a TV screen.  How do we deal with these things?  Who can buy them?  Who can create things for them?  Who?  Somebody get the Imperial Leader of Stuff That’s Never Been Done Before!