“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”

Peter Drucker

If predicting the future is even close to Drucker’s adage, then Deloitte’s annual Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions are as good a map as we’re going to get.

Developed from hundreds of discussions with industry executives, analysts, and commentators, the reports are fascinating for their variety, depth and accuracy. While they’re not intended as a forecast for what will happen in marketing or advertising, they do provide a view of how technology is evolving and what marketers can do to adapt.

I’ve outlined 4 trends in the 2014 report of particularly relevance to marketers. Below I’ve outlined the TMT insight, as well as why we need to start adapting to these changes now rather than later.

Social has become channel agnostic. Marketers just need to catch up.

A wave of reports from Pew, Piper Jaffray, Forbes, and others have recently suggested that Facebook is beginning to lose it’s hold. While the reports were denied by Facebook, the rise of Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and others make a strong case for multi-platform social strategies.

Deloitte does not address Facebook directly; however, they do discuss changing social trends through their prediction connected to the continued rise of instant messaging services (IMS).

In 2014 instant messaging services (such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik, and others) will carry more that twice the volume (50 billion vs 21 billion per day) of messages sent via a short messaging service.

Instead of using the SMS functionality built into their phones, consumers are opting to download separate apps for conversations with friends and family. As a result, marketers currently reliant on SMS to connect with their customers need to find other communications channels.

Consumers are turning toward too many different social platforms for brands to continue with an isolated “Facebook strategy” and “Twitter strategy.” To recount a keynote from Barbarian Group’s Benjamin Palmer at this year’s DX3 Canada, marketers need to accept that social has become fundamentally multi-platform.

The added challenge is that many new social channels — such as Snapchat — do not yet have formalized advertising opportunities. Brands including Taco Bell, Acura, and the New Orleans Saints have turned to content creation to build a presence on these platforms, but many brands don’t have the same appetite for content marketing.

Film still matters.

We’re not about the cut the cord anytime soon. TV has experienced its changes, but Deloitte claims that the minutes of traditional TV viewing continue to remain the same.

In surveys, a significant proportion of pay-TV subscribers have signalled their intent to cease subscribing, yet year and year the intentions have failed to materialize, and the base of pay TV has remained constant or even continued to rise in many countries.

This isn’t to say that TV hasn’t changed. One third of TV viewing is now through on demand services using laptops, tablets and smartphones. This year Netflix won 3 Emmys and a Golden Globe.

TV’s reach and place in the media mix remains. Dan Wieden put it well in a recent interview when he discussed the role of TV to build strong, provocative relationships between his clients — including Nike, Levis, and Chrysler — and their customers.

“I don’t think we’re in a place where we’re going to have to choose between broadcast or interactive. That ridiculous. That’s like saying do you want a right hand or a left hand. I want to use both my hands. And other appendages as well.”

The challenge for marketers is now how to best adapt content for desktop, mobile and tablet, while also measuring impressions across multiple platforms.

Wearable tech will grow

This year’s CES witnessed the explosion of conversation about wearable tech. Deloitte has echoed this trend, forecasting 10M units and $3B in revenue in 2014. That said, Deloitte cautions overestimating the impact of this technology.

“To put the likelihood of another disruptive technology into context, since the 1970s there have only been three consumer device categories (PCs, smartphones and tablets) that generated over $100 B in annual sales.”

An interesting perspective within the Deloitte analysis is their focus on smart glasses — instead of products like fitness bands — as being the main driver for the expansion of the wearable tech market. Specifically, analysts estimate smart glasses could save companies up to a billion dollars in the manufacturing, oil and gas industries by providing remote workers with instruction guides and expert opinions while in the field.

I’ve written about the need for brands and advertisers to start thinking about wearable tech previously, but in brief, if the forecasts of Deloitte and others are accurate, wearable tech will change the value exchange between brands and consumers.

While consumers will tolerate display advertising on a smartphone or tablet screen, it’s unlikely they’ll interact with branded content on the 1" screen of a smartwatch or fitness tracker. Consumers will demand utility in exchange for sharing content — marketers can start getting ahead of this curve now.

Rise of the phablets.

There is no longer one mobile, but many mobiles. In the early days of iPhone, Android, and the popularization of tablets with the iPad, there were a limited number of screen sizes to optimize for when building apps and websites.

Now, Deloitte predicts that compact tablets will have taken segment leadership within about 18 months of the first mass-market models (read: the iPad mini) while Phablets will represent a quarter of smartphones sold — double the 2013 volume.

To contextualize the impact of this change: a 10 inch tablet has 50% greater screen than an eight inch tablet. While a desktop experience may suite a 10-inch iPad, different renderings may better suit both the smaller iPad mini and phablets.

Many sites have moved to responsive web design, dynamic CSS, and other methods to accommodate for multiple screens; however, a significant challenge is that the way banner ads and mobile videos are displayed across screen sizes is not fluid. This issue is even more pronounced for app developers. Marketers cannot simply check whether a site is mobile friendly, we need to better understand how it will render across devices.