Personalization Dominates: 25 Top Execs Look at 2020 Trends, from Tech and Crisis to Social

In last year’s December edition, we argued the mood of the moment when people are making predictions influences what they see for the coming year.

Late in 2018, as we reached out to communicators to prognosticate for 2019, the headlines were blaring about a lack of trust in large tech brands. Just prior to Thanksgiving 2018, The NY Times published a 5,600-word exposé about Facebook. The article went behind the scenes, discussing all sorts of unsavory practices stemming from evidence of Russian meddling via Facebook in the U.S. 2016 presidential election. It revealed Facebook’s extensive lobbying efforts to cover its guilt, as well as hiring a PR firm to find dirt on rivals. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were pilloried. Initially they denied the article’s accusations. A few days later they obliquely admitted guilt in several areas.

It’s little wonder then that many of the 25 people we asked to make predictions for 2019 concentrated on the importance of trust and how PR could help win it back.

While you’ll see trust mentioned throughout the 2020 predictions, mostly it is viewed as an underlying value that has long been critical to effective PR.