This blog turned five last month and I did not notice until an old post surfaced in my own search results. I read it. Then I read the twelve around it. Then I sat on the office floor for a while with the laptop open, which is how Barnaby ended up supervising, since a person on the floor is his business.
So here is the accounting. Not the humble kind where the confession is secretly a brag. The real one.
In 2017 I wrote that conversational interfaces were about to become the primary brand surface, and that within three years every serious brand would have a personality tuned for chat. I built a whole framework for it. Voice attributes, escalation ladders, the works. The bots were bad, people hated them, and the ones that survived did so by being invisible utilities with no personality at all.
In 2019 I called the direct-to-consumer playbook durable. Own the customer, skip the retailer, spend the difference on brand. Then the mattress and razor and suitcase companies discovered that acquisition cost is not a fixed input, that the difference gets spent on Facebook, and that a brand built on a discount code is not a brand.
In April 2020 I predicted the pandemic would leave brand communication permanently plainer, that we would come out unable to go back to the aspirational register. Then came eighteen months of piano music and the word unprecedented and, by last summer, ads that behaved as though none of it happened.
Last year I said Clubhouse was the most important new earned media channel in a decade. I will let that one sit there.
And the largest one. In 2019 I described a lip-syncing app for teenagers as a fad with no commercial future. It has since rewritten how music gets discovered, how a brand like Duolingo builds affection out of a mascot behaving badly, and how much culture moves through fifteen seconds of someone's kitchen.
Every take I got badly wrong was a prediction about a platform, and every one that held up was an observation about a person.
The posts that aged well are unglamorous. That people forgive brands for being late but not for being fake. That distinctive assets outperform clever positioning. That internal alignment is most of external consistency. None of them required me to know what would happen next. They required me to notice what was already true and say it plainly.
The posts that aged well are unglamorous.
Which is the lesson, five years in. Forecasting is the fun part and the part I am worst at. The wrong posts stay up.
Saturday I will be at the same sticky-floored bar in Southeast, where the host calls everyone baby and I will sing something above my range, badly, with total commitment. Five years of being wrong in public is good practice for that.