One Egg

This morning I spoke to a very nice reporter from a Brazilian magazine called Veja – which I am told is their equivalent to Time Magazine. The angle for her forthcoming article is that you can do trend spotting by reading blogs. I half agreed with her. Scanning blogs can be a great start but there’s a lot more to trends analysis than that. For PSFK consultancy clients we mix secondary deep scanning (from an international team of scouts) with primary research on the street and with an extensive network of informed opinion makers whom we have met through publishing PSFK.com.

She also asked me to give the name of the top site where her readers can spot trends. That’s when I couldn’t really give an answer. I know what she’s doing as a journalist – trying to find a simple narrative in a complex world but I think she misunderstands the business. When we work with a client, we analyze thousands of data points and with pattern recognition we provide recommendations on themes and trends we see appearing in markets as diverse as children’s healthcare and European digital arts. We nor you can do this from reading our/your favorite cool sites.

It could have been very easy to reel off the ‘big trend’ sites but I think there’s a misconception that blogs tell you the trends. What they tend to do is quickly gather a lot of information about the new in a way we haven’t had before (for free). My advice to the journalist was simple: be very well read. You can’t short cut by reading what Josh likes or Josh likes or Bill likes or Reinier likes or Piers likes. Personally, I scan the headlines of almost 700 websites each morning*. I don’t expect many people to do that – but it’s my job. It’s that dedication to finding change that encourages companies like Apple and Target to hire me and my team. One of the common misconceptions made by ad agency planners and brand managers is that they think they can trend spot themselves. Sure, I believe anyone can do my trend spotting job. But they have to do my job. It’s not about finding time in between making ads or sales charts on a Friday afternoon browsing the top cool blogs with the hope they’ll spot “new” trends.

* Quick note: It’s interesting that this figure hasn’t really changed much since I presented at the APG a few years back. Sources get subscribed to and unsubscribed from but that number seems to be an upper limit.