Over the past 12 months, Nine’s strategy and Powered teams have been monitoring everything from the objectives clients include in briefs, demographics, new and disruptive technologies, cultural shifts, and new phenomena. In any given year, there are a lot of ideas on the list – but especially after the past 12 months. Between the two teams, Nine’s Director of Strategy and Insights, Toby Boon, says, but they narrowed it down to 12 trends with four key criteria:

• Audience first.
• Something that is ongoing in 2022, not a “flash in the pan”.
• Relevant to the Australian market – consumers as well as advertisers.
• Relevant to Nine’s advertising partners.

“Power Predicts is probably my favourite project to work on all year,” Boon says. The first five of 2022 are:

Me Time

“Me time is one of those positive things that’s come out of all the challenges of the past couple of years,” Boon says. Consumers have simply had more time. When someone can’t go into the office, can’t socialise, can’t catch up with friends and family, and can’t go to the shops, their amount of free time increases dramatically.

“Whereas once upon a time, we thought that curling up with a magazine or catching up on all of the week’s episodes of a reality show was a bit of an indulgence, now we’ve actually come to realize that ring fencing that time for ourselves is something that is actually pretty important for our wellbeing,” Boon says.

Brands can leverage this on the right platforms. When people are relaxed, the research says, they are more receptive to messaging. Sitting down for a couple of hours to read the Sunday Life Magazine can be a powerful medium. “There has been such an evolution in terms of the creation and distribution of content over the last decade, two decades,” Director of Powered, Liana Dubois, says. “Total audio, the rise of live streaming, the rise of podcasts and things like total publishing… It’s really interesting from a content distribution point of view.”

Attention Seekers

Attention metrics were a key topic of conversation in 2021, and that’s only going to develop and evolve in 2022, Boon says.

“The evolution of attention as a metric for measuring effectiveness is something which we’ve been tracking really, really closely over the past couple of years,” he says – and media agencies and advertisers are leaning into it, seeing attention as a proxy for effectiveness. 

Over the next 12 to 24 months, attention is likely to be added to the media buying process as another layer. “Attention is well recognized as being the closest media proxy to an actual sales conversion for a client,” Dubois says.

At last year’s Nine Upfront, the network announced it would be conducting a survey to measure attention in its audience. “We had the first media owner attention piece of research that was conducted towards the end of last year, we’re working on the results now,” Boon says.

Blurred Realities

Just about everyone in media has seen coverage of the metaverse, the word describing a blurring of the distinct physical and digital worlds. “The reality is that for a lot of brands, they're not in a place yet where actually they can be applying or even exploring those sorts of far-off trends,” Boon says. Likewise, consumers aren’t there yet either.

That doesn’t mean brands shouldn’t be looking at it, but the road to the end goal is still packed with opportunity, per Boon. Sport is the best example, and Augmented Reality (AR) was a key feature at the Australian Open.

“It's going to be incredible,” he says. “It is about this idea of bringing people closer to the action through digital and through technology… If you want to play with technology, don't worry yet about what's going to happen in five, 10, 15 years’ time. Think about what you could be doing now.”

Beyond the Blind Spot

There is an age group between 55 and 64 years old that were the original digital trailblazers. They are tech savvy, forward thinking and, crucially, represent an estimated $2.3 billion worth of household spend every week – almost $120 billion each year.

“This is a group of people who have, let’s be honest, been ignored by traditional media planning, have been left isolated and unrepresented in a lot of our creative messaging,” Boon says. “And yet they have a huge amount of spending power and influence on other people in the market… we think that this is going to be a growing audience for a lot of advertisers.”

Paul Rudd in Ant-Man and Sarah Jessica Parker in Just Like That, the return of Sex And The City, are representations of life in a person’s 50s – two examples of people who are very influential. “And we see it within some of our channels, as well,” Boon says. “If you look at a place like Talk Radio, that’s a place where this audience has been active for a very long time.”

Brand Together

Collaboration and contributing to society are increasingly seen as metrics to measure leadership – not just level of sales, marketing penetration and dominance. “We're starting to have greater expectations about what businesses can bring to the party,” Boon says. Banks are looking to position themselves as supporting small businesses, for example. Larger scale brands are increasingly lending their platform to smaller brands that stand for a particular cause. “They both benefit from that,” he says. “The smaller brand gets the bigger platform, the larger brand is able to leverage the credibility of the smaller brand, but there's real purpose there.”

And while brand collaboration isn’t anything new – think Tim Tam McFlurries, Dubois says - what’s new is brands coming together to solve social issues. That’s relatively new, and a key trend for 2022.