Every five years, you can expect a new flavor of marketing to emerge and become the most picked flavor at the ice cream shop. Remember when guerilla marketing was the rage? Flash mobs were everywhere and the CEO of Lifelock publicized his Social Security number for people to try and steal.

Marketing tactics come and go with the tides. But strategies last decades.

So, when everything is going digital, the physical is an opportunity in itself. Experiential marketing is not to be overlooked in 2020. In fact, it might be just the edge you need to create a buzzworthy moment.

When we speak of the automation of industries, rarely (if ever at all) do we talk about the automation of entertainment. How can you automate entertainment?

Like most automation, you take the humans out of the equation. With entertainment, the actors, musicians, and personalities are the product. So, you must replicate that product digitally. That’s the idea of digital humans (brand avatars).

Free things generate a greater audience than paid things. Unsplash – the free stock photography site – is no stranger to this rule of human nature. In fact, it was the foundation for their entire company.

Unsplash is a community where anyone can share high-resolution photos for anyone to use freely. It began as a Tumblr blog with ten photos we had leftover from a photoshoot… Those first ten photos have been seen 58 million times.

The Internet brought us: Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Alibaba, PayPal, Salesforce, and many more. The mobile internet brought us Uber, Venmo, Instagram, etc. What will the Internet of DNA bring us?

Although not directly in the line of succession, the Internet of DNA is going to be a major offshoot development from the Internet. What companies will build fortunes on the Internet of DNA?

Another year in the books for Inevitable/Human. Our overall theory creation increased by nearly 250% without sacrificing the quality of theories. In reflecting on the past year, we’ve compiled our seven favorite Quick Theories articles for a variety of reasons. Enjoy!

For any bootstrapped business, especially in the chaotic information space, every year that passes is another celebratory year of survival. Ryan and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting us and are excited to roll out an even better Inevitable/Human experience in 2020 – filled with an ever-evolving platform and new ways for you to get ahead of the future.

Speaking of the future, we thought that we’d give you a sneak peak of what emerging technology we’ll be watching with a very keen eye in 2020. Just a fair warning, this is not us telling you to invest in Bitcoin in early 2017. No get rich quick schemes here. But we believe all of these to be “get rich long-term“ schemes.

The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself.

In the matter of a couple decades, personal location data has gone from a record that no one ever knew existed to a public record that any company can get their hands on.

It’s incredible that smart speakers have made it this far with such a one-sided, negative narrative. And by that, I mean when’s the last time you heard a story of how Alexa helped police officers rescue a missing kid or done something positive in someone’s life? Rarely, if ever at all.

Yet, the smart speaker craze which is stronger than ever. Globally, smart speakers sales are up 35% from last year, despite the most popular narrative about them being that they’re basically corporate listening devices.

When you think of the world’s most iconic brands, you think of the logos, the labels, the slogans, and the commercials. Louis Vitton’s print, Subway’s “Eat Fresh”, Allstate’s Mayhem character. Prominent brand assets tend to be visual assets.

So how does a company carry over their valuable brand assets onto an audio platform – such as smart speakers – in a meaningful way? Through Sonic Branding, of course. The most talented sound engineers can turn sounds into signatures. Signatures that are as recognizable as a big fat swoosh on the side of a shoe.

A 2018 survey found that 85 percent of millennials in the US reported buying a product or service after watching a video.

Whether watching an honest review about TurboTax or a Galaxy Note 10 unboxing video. Video is no longer just entertainment with the commerce element as an inconvenient advertisement.

Commerce is the entertainment. Especially on apps like TikTok.

What do people most likely feel after being in virtual reality? Isolated. You can’t interact with the person sitting next to you. Good luck taking a phone call or responding to text messages. You’re completely cut off from the world. Yet, Facebook has made a baby step in lessening this VR isolation through hand-tracking.

Controllers are normally the interface used to interact in virtual reality. However, Facebook’s Oculus Quest is making the first move toward eliminating the VR controller and replacing it with just your hands. With new machine learning techniques, the Oculus team is incorporating standalone hand-tracking. This means your physical hand gestures can translate into virtual reality.

Ronald McDonald, Homer Simpson, and Barbie. Three of the most influential people to never live. For the past 60 years, these “beings” have made an impact in every household across the US and abroad. How? Because an idea, a manufactured personality, and an image are all it takes to create a “person” that others can love and identify with – especially in the digital age.

This is why it should come as no surprise that digital humans are gaining massive influence. Just a few of the prominent points on Lil Miquela’s resumé thus far…

If you met a transhumanist at a bar, then it’s probably a conversation you’d try to get out of. Not because they were talking crazily. Rather, because your visceral reaction is like vinegar and water. Who would want to upload their consciousness to silicon? Why should we trust Artificial Intelligence to merge with the human form?

These are the narratives that come to mind when we hear transhumanism. However, that’s only a sliver of that ideology. And it’s the really far-fetched sliver. Transhumanism is the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology. In that sense, we’re all practicing transhumanists.

There seems to be endless missions out there to teach kids STEM, enroll them in coding camps, and ensure they understand the language of technology. Meanwhile, kids are severely lacking in learning the language of humans. 64% of all eighth-grade students are unable to read proficiently. Further, 82% of black students and 77% of Hispanic students are not reading proficiently.

Traditional reading curriculums are failing our students. Stacked up against some of the most visually stimulating times – Netflix to YouTube to TikTok – we need to upgrade how we teach reading skills. 

Travel is one industry that’s been very receptive to innovators and changes. In the span of two decades, the Internet has brought two titanic shifts for the travel agency. At first, Orbitz, Kayak, and Booking.com put travel agents out of business. Now, they’re getting an opportunity to rebrand their services and curate travel for a variety of reasons.

Travel is no longer just a vacation good. It’s an experience that can be combined with inter-related services to create an entirely new reason to travel. Travel and work is combined to create digital nomad services. Travel and friendship is combined to create travel communities. Travel and spontaneity combine to create surprise vacations.

After choosing what to wear in the morning, the vast majority of us give almost no thought to our clothing because our clothing gives no thought to us. It’s a utility that sits idle 95% of the time until it’s time to lend us some covering. But like anything in this crazy, tech-filled world, our clothing is not immune to a digitized upgrade.

Sensors sewn into fabrics not only offer us style and modesty, but will grant us insight into the human relationship with our environment.

Any port in a storm. All press is good press. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Humans are obsessed with metaphors. We use them constantly. I even used one in the title “set the record straight.”

Honestly, who can resist a juicy opportunity to use a metaphor? The tech industry definitely cannot.

Isn’t it a shame that every picture you take gets banished to the Photos App – a personal, chaotic abyss. The only chance of remembering these photos is to bravely dive head first into your digital photo album and peruse hundreds, if not thousands of photos.

But what if there were a more convenient way to resurface these memories? This is the idea behind digital graffiti – moments stamped in a time, a location, or in the company of certain people – set to resurface when these contextual clues emerge once again.

If Jerry Lewis were still alive today, he’d probably be raising money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association on a Twitch livestream. Seriously, Twitch, YouTube, and other social platforms are proving that they could be great places for public charity events.

Twitch gamers raised $75m for charity between 2012 and 2017. That’s right, those kids “still playing video games in their mother’s basement” raise huge amounts of money by live streaming.