These days, you are nothing if you aren’t trending. Every brand, every celebrity, every piece of media is vying for your eyeballs, and since there are so many screens to attract your attention, there are so many ways in. The news cycle is 24 hours, the social mediasphere is constantly changing, and now data is making ads even more targeted and effective.

You say anything around your phone and you are getting ads for it hours later.

You are being tracked. Everything you do on social media is converted into data that can be used to reach you, and there is a group of people who are able to mold and shape these trends. These dark wizards are called digital marketers.

But here’s the thing, while businesses are trying to accumulate more and more data to be more and more effective at getting your attention, it’s starting to reach a tipping point. Suddenly, there is too much information. And while we think our number crunching supercomputers can predict human nature, we’re seeing that that simply isn’t the case.

Data is, after all, just information. It can show us where the conversation is going, it can show us what is popular, but can it predict trends? Trends are infinitely more complicated.

What is a “Trend”?

A trend is a wave of the zeitgeist. It’s a general movement of something in a certain direction. It’s a style or a fashion that emerges, explodes, and then wanes over time.

The word “trend” goes back hundreds of years to Middle English, but these days it’s used more like a verb, as in “trending.” Something is “trending” if it’s being talked about, shared, worn, or seen about town.

Trends are more than just popular movies or celebrities. They shape our memories. Everyone remembers what was trending in high school and it influences personal style and taste. Nostalgia is a powerful thing; it’s strong enough to resurrect old trends and bring them back years later.

Trends move in cycles; they follow the tastemakers as they mature and start to take charge of media. These cycles lurch along in roughly 20 or 40-year waves. We are currently in the middle of a massive 80s nostalgia moment with the popularity of Stranger Things, Top Gun, and oversized shoulder fashions.

Boy Bands started as a trend in the late 90s — early 00s. Now, 20 years later, they’re back but this time the biggest ones are from Korea. There is always an update or a twist–a build on what came before.

A Timeline of Trends

In the 80s and 90s, trends stretched for months, sometimes years, making it easier for brands to harness.

The 1980s:

Tretorn shoes, crimped hair, Hi-Cut sneakers, Swatch Watches, Rubik’s cubes, Power suits, the walkman, Pacman, Apo Hiking Society, Aga Mulach, Bagets, Sharon Cuneta, Sharon-Gabby Love team, and Gary Valenciano

The 1990s:

Shawarma, Tamagotchis, Keempee de Leon, Baby G watches, The Macarena, Beanie Babies, The “Rachel”, Pokemon Cards, “pearl” shakes, Regine Velasquez, magic pencils, John Pratz, Rico Yan, Jolina Magdangal, Lisa Frank, “Ito Ang Beat Sabay Sabay”, and MTV Philippines

By the 2000s, trends were fluctuating month by month and during the pandemic (because of TikTok) they started moving even faster.

The Anatomy of A Trend

Stickiness, silliness, nostalgia; there are so many elements to what makes a trend. It needs to stick in people’s minds. It needs to be silly enough to catch attention and make people share it. Or it needs to tug on the heartstrings.

It’s not as simple as something gaining popularity at any given time. Trends have to start with early adopters, get propagated by influencers and celebrities, and stick around for a little while. Patterns that peak too quickly and fizzle out before they can gain worldwide popularity are mere fads.

To be a trend, it has to last for more than just a few days or hours. Virality is nothing if it can’t be sustained.

Businesses and brands are all trying to hop on trends or find the next big trend. They pay lots of money for marketing that is catchy and gorgeous, but the problem is it’s getting harder and harder to get people’s attention. If everything is trending all of the time, consumers don’t know where to look.

Everything is the best, so nothing is. Everything is special, so nothing is. How do you stick out in a market so saturated with stuff?

Influence Peddlers Are Losing Out To Peers

Even special people don’t get to be special anymore. Celebrity endorsers don’t have as much sway as they used to. People would rather get a good recommendation from a trusted friend or loved one over a superstar, or a community influencer over an artista.

Celebrities have to cultivate their followings with curated social media and PR — and the jig is up! People now know that they don’t do their own makeup or their own styling. Suddenly their opinions aren’t backed up by anything beyond their popularity.

But a following isn’t enough to ensure that a product they endorse goes viral. Even the hottest name of the moment posting about something is going to require boosts and manufactured virality.

Some Assembly Required

Trends aren’t spontaneous anymore. Posts, pictures, and even memes are boosted and sponsored. Our reality is constructed by the version of the internet we surround ourselves with. There is often a breakthrough meme or post or movie star who becomes the shiny thing of the moment, but that kind of popularity is rarely organic.

The people who construct this reality are the digital marketers. They are the people behind the curtain pulling the strings of the internet and manipulating what we see and what ads will pop up on our feeds.

These black magic wizards use the reality stone and shape our world by massaging the algorithm. They make sure you get shown what they want you to see on Facebook, Google, and Instagram. Take a look at your feed. Those ads that you get are tailored specifically for you by digital wizards and social media managers.

It takes a lot of data to do what they do. There is data on everything from word choices that foster trust to what memes are making the rounds on social media. And they use all of that to create targeted ads for their clients.

But when does a lot of data become too much data?

These days there is so much data out there that it’s hard to make sense of it all. Because of the increase in processing power, we have machines that can crunch numbers and programs that can track everything. Now there is so much data to base decisions on, it should make decisions easier right?

Wrong.

The Numb3r5 Aren’t Enough

Too much information can freeze decision-making. It’s over stimulating and pulls you in too many directions at once. Imagine being bombarded with a constant stream of information that changes every day. How do you make decisions when you are always trying to keep up with the barrage of information?

That’s why digital marketers exist. They take these big chunks of data and translate them down into workable insights that can be used by normies. They are like dams, they hold back the deluge of data and harness it to make electricity. Then, they shape our reality around us.

They can encourage us to go places with a well-timed coupon. They can boost the popularity of an influencer with a funny reel. They can even make us time-travel with nostalgia and throwbacks.

They look at the data and parse the signal from the noise. And then they use the signal to sell us stuff.

Data is important and we need to be using it to inform our decisions and strategies, but it’s also meaningless if you don’t know how to translate it. It’s the essence of sei-katsu-sha: people aren’t all one thing or ones and zeros for that matter. The robots haven’t replaced us yet; there is still an element of je ne c’est quois that no one can predict.

The Overconfidence Is Real

The big secret of virality is that no one knows how the fuck it works. These wizards who are supposedly all-powerful? They are still baffled by the odd craze that hits that mysterious sweet spot and absolutely smashes manufactured virality out of the game.

Remember AlDub? That came out of nowhere. No one could predict how hard that would hit with fans. They sold out concerts and won everyone’s hearts and no one could have foreseen that the characters would be such a hit, much less that they would be so magnetic together.

To replicate the success of these viral instances, businesses are frantically trying to amass more data, get more numbers to crunch, and find the perfect calculation for virality. It’s just not possible. The human animal is too complicated to predict like that.

Anyone telling you that they have enough data to make you go viral is lying.

No matter what we do, we can’t guarantee where the wave of the zeitgeist is going to go. The best that Digital Marketing Wizards can do is try and redirect it once it washes over us. They can shape the conversation, but they can’t always start it. And no amount of data is going to tell you how it’s going to turn out for you or your brand.

Is Data The End Of Creativity?

No. It might be the end of a certain kind of creativity. It means that to get attention, you don’t just need a beautiful image or a well-written line. Now you have to be creative with media, release dates, and influencers. Extreme targeting means we have to be extra sensitive to our audience’s needs.

Data doesn’t mean that you get to sit back on your heels and let the information drive you. You need analysts to crunch those numbers and turn them into stories so people can turn them into ads, memes, or yes, even a billboard if you want to be old-fashioned.

There is too much out there now to parse even for a supercomputer. All of this information causes overload which makes decisions difficult. What’s chaff and what’s good?

People are still necessary in the equation and listening to the advice of those who understand how trends and data work will make all the difference in your business.

When it comes to trending and becoming patok in this market, it’s not just a good tagline or hook. With every post you make, you need to keep track of what’s popular, the season, the time of day, the Twitter feed of the influencers, who’s dating who — it’s all too much for a person to handle. For that part, we have robots.

Photo by Markus Spiske: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-codes-1089440/