A Look Back At My 2017 Predictions…
In August 2017, I wrote a story for Forbes where I made 10 key predictions for the Fall & Holiday season. What’s amazing is that even though I delivered my predictions as recently as August, so much has evolved since then in our world. Change is accelerating and in some ways predicting the future is harder than ever.
It’s always fun to take a look back and see how I did… so let’s see just how right (or wrong I was):
Prediction #1 — AmazonEcho Dot will dominate sales
Prevailing headline: On Black Friday, Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer in any category. [Amazon Press Release]
Result: Spot-on, and I expect sales of these devices to remain red hot heading into 2018
Prediction #2 — More TV cord cutters than ever before
Prevailing headline: In 2017, a total of 22.2 million U.S. adults will have cut the cord on cable, satellite or telco TV service to date — up 33% from 16.7 million in 2016 — the researcher now predicts. [source]
Result: On target. Now to be fair, this was an easy one and was frankly part of a larger point I was attempting to make about the disruptioknof televison. Nonetheless, the announcements by both Apple and Amazon to sell their own televisions really drove this point home.
Prediction #3 — NFL’s ratings will rise
Prevailing headline: NBC wasn’t the only one to see its NFL ratings take a dip. CBS’ slate of games over this past weekend were down 27% from last year, while ESPN was down 9%. Fox was the only network to see its ratings go up from last year with its numbers up 6%.
Overall, the ratings for the NFL’s season are down 9% from last year. [SOURCE]
Result: Missed, wide wide left. A combination of over-saturation of games, the rise of eSports, political issues entering the game and streaming proliferation continues to put pressure on our newest national past-time. But how ‘bout them Eagles?!
Prediction #4 — SnapChat will continue its rapid descent
Prevailing headline: Snap lost a staggering $443 million this past quarter as it struggled to improve its efficiency while growing its advertising base. The company took a $40 million charge on unsold Spectacles hardware, confirming reports of them selling worse than the company expected.
Snap blamed its revenue miss on shifting from direct sales to an auction-based bidding system for selling advertisers. It hopes this will make it easier to cheaply scale its ad business in the future, but that caused a massive 60 percent drop in the cost per ad impression year-over-year. [source]
Result: Couldn’t have been more right, and while I never like to gloat about the failures of any company SNAP themselves had to have seen this coming and I hope for their sake they can somehow right the ship in 2018; although its far from likely in my opinion.
Prediction #5 — Apple will launch the most successful phone ever. Plus they will move the Home button
Prevailing headline: Apple sold 11.8 million iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus units in the quarter, well short of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, which exceeded 14 million units in their first quarter of availability. [source]
Well, they launched two phones. I predicted one. They also did move the home button on the iPhone X, in fact they actually eliminated it.
Result: I’m going to count this one as a miss. While the iPhone X was certainly a successful launch, it looks like the iPhone 7 is still the biggest launch to date and to be honest after owning the iPhone X for a month I can tell you that I am misusing my iPhone 7!
Prediction #6 — The stock market will correct itself in a big way
Prevailing headline:Dow rockets past 24,000, building on incredible post-election surge
Result: I missed that one… bigly. Like totally missed … sad. A mixture of deregulation hopes and new tax reform has investors and corporations alike incredibly hopeful …for better or for worse.
Prediction #7 — Cryptocurrency is a thing and it will have “meaningful growth”
Prevailing headline: When I wrote my predictions, Bitcoin was $2,700. It’s now $17,500. Well here is where bitcoin is really trading at right now.
Result: I gotta take the points for this one. back in August nobody in the mainstream media was even talking about this topic and now your neighbor, mother, and mailman will be looking to shift some of their savings into Crypto for 2018.
Prediction #8 — AmazonBasics will grow and potentially signal the death of brand loyalty
Prevailing headline: Amazon’s private label brands are taking over market share.
Meanwhile, the retailer has also made headway in other categories, too. Its AmazonBasics brand, for example, now accounts for around one-third of online battery sales and is seeing 93 percent year-over-year growth. And again, the majority (94%) of these online battery sales — a $113 million market — are taking place on Amazon.com. [source]
Result: Nailed it. This was inevitable but for some reason major corporations still don’t see what’s happening right in front of their eyes. Many of our nation’s most prestigious companies are once again at risk to go out of business in the next 5 years all because of a guy from Seattle that wanted to sell books on the Internet.
Prediction #9 — Uber will hire a non-controversial and hopefully female CEO. Will IPO in 2018
Prevailing Headline #1: Uber hires former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi whom was unanimously approved by Uber’s board
Prevailing headline #2: Uber likely to IPO in 2019:
Result: This was a a mixed bag so call it being 1/2 right. I said “hopefully female CEO” so we’ll still give me a .5 here
Prediction #10 — Instagram will require influencers to disclose their paid posts as sponsored
Prevailing headline: Instagram is moving forward with the rollout of its branded content tool, which allows celebrities and other popular users to identify posts that are paid for by advertisers.
Instagram is using the tool to create a standardized format where posts are identified at the top as a “paid partnership with” an advertiser, and also to provide the advertiser with data about a post’s performance. [source]
Result: Spot-on, although I knew a pilot program was already in the works so this was a bit of a gimme, but I’ll take it.
TOTAL RESULTS: 6.5 right & 3.6wrong… but if you would’ve put $100 into Bitcoin after reading my article in August you wouldn't be complaining much right now.
Happy holidays all :)
