Outlook 2022: Embracing Entropy

Four trends shaping the future of media & technology

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IPG Media Lab

21 min readJan 20, 2022

Welcome to the IPG Media Lab’s 2022 Outlook. Each year, we round up the ideas that excite us for the next few years: new technologies, market forces, and shifts in consumer behavior that are changing the media landscape. Since 2006, the Lab has worked with clients to help them best adapt to disruptive change.

Guided by a forward-thinking perspective, the Lab team explores emerging technologies and their potential to become new media platforms. Our focus on research and strategy enables us to analyze the latest platform developments, understand how they will impact consumers, and advise our clients on how to navigate the disruption they bring. Through a finely tuned vetting process, the team organizes their findings, manages introductions, and recommends these partners to solve client challenges or bring forward new opportunities.

The Outlook is informed by our growing team around the world. While the Lab has been based in New York for years, in 2018 we added Singapore as a second home. Over the past four years, we have expanded our network, with hundreds of team members representing dozens of countries around the world, ready to help our clients find innovative solutions to business challenges no matter where on Earth they might appear. Our 2022 Outlook features not only a global perspective, but custom content developed by local teams in each region.

This Outlook is an overview of the trends and topics that we expect to break out in the next few years, why we’re convinced they’re important, and how you should respond. We hope you enjoy it.

Comments, questions, and opportunities to work together are very welcome. Please reach out to Josh Mallalieu, at josh@ipglab.com.

2022: Embracing Entropy

As covid becomes endemic in much of the world, and we think about which cultural changes and behaviors from the past two years will become permanent, and which will recede, it’s increasingly clear that the only common theme of the 2020’s will be entropy. Will knowledge workers return to the office, stay remote, go hybrid, or work from the metaverse? Yes to all of those, depending on the industry and the company, and whether you’re thinking about 2022 or 2025. Will our supply chain issues be resolved? Some yes, and improved dramatically from where they were, and some are destined never to return, forcing our physical and virtual store shelves to reconfigure themselves for a less-reliable reality. Over the next three to five years, the most reliable prediction will be disorder, with multiple possibilities happening at once, and sometimes changing daily.

“Over the next three to five years, the most reliable prediction will be disorder, with multiple possibilities happening at once, and sometimes changing daily.”

A major obstacle during the pandemic has been the lag for most of us in learning new information and incorporating it into our mental model of the world. To quote tech historian Jason Crawford, “It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.” In an information landscape where we’re constantly besieged with new information — some of it factual, some opinion, and some flat-out misinformation — it takes effort and experience to sort through what’s real and what’s important. And that’s just the first step. Once we have sorted and ranked the new information, it must be incorporated into our world view, impacting not only our views on the topic at hand, but also rippling out to second and third order effects on everything else. Not updating our world view quickly enough can lead to a personal or organizational version of “policy drift,” where processes created for a certain set of needs fall out of alignment when those needs change.

For example, data on a new variant of Covid-19’s infection rate and resistance to vaccines may impact not only our own safety precautions in daily life (Do I shop in store or online? Do I go into the office or work remotely? Will my kids be at school or learning online?), but also the ramifications of the choices others make on our own experience (If my kids are remote learning, do I have to work remotely to care for them? If my coworkers who are traveling get sick, how do we cover their workload? ), and implications for our future plans (How likely are we to have to cancel the in-person meeting or vacation next month?). Just keeping up with the information in the first place has been a challenge, let alone constantly reimagining how it should and would impact our daily lives.

But even as we imagine a world beyond Covid-19, how quickly one can integrate a new worldview seems like a key muscle to train for life in the 2020’s. Philosopher Timothy Morton coined the term hyperobjects to refer to challenges such as these, that are so large and complex — and occur over such long periods of time — that humans struggle to comprehend them in their totality, with our brains tuned through evolution to focus primarily on the short term. Covid has been a hyperobject, and unstable geopolitics and the accelerating climate crisis are the other two major trends that underlie everything else that we do. To paraphrase writer Rod McLaren, climate change and politics are part of every issue, because they’re in the landscape. He uses the term “entropocene” to describe the current age: “an era of larger, quicker, less predictable, non-linear change.”

These hyperobjects sit beneath daily life unevenly, waxing and waning in prominence as personal priorities shift and collide with the most pressing issue of the day. They’re desynchronizing our culture even more than it already was, fracturing traditional social structures based in physical spaces like the workplace and the neighborhood, and encouraging us to invest in more like-minded communities in digital venues. They point toward some of the value that even skeptics might find in a future metaverse. And they indicate that we’re all likely to be recalibrating our mental model of how the world works a lot more often than we used to. We need to face the challenges of the day, understand that they may change quickly, and learn to be “native to now,” as climate futurist Alex Steffen says. Anne Helen Peterson, writing about the future of work, calls it “ruggedizing,” planning for our work and our service to others can freely flow between being in person and happening virtually, depending on the needs of the day. She says that the forced changes of the early pandemic are what will lead to the continued changes to come: “the vast technological shifts of the twenty-first century have culminated in a pandemic that has forced us to reimagine the parts of our lives that felt the least flexible. In this moment, we are more motivated to agitate for change than at any time in recent memory.”

“These hyperobjects… are desynchronizing our culture even more than it already was, fracturing traditional social structures based in physical spaces and encouraging us to invest in more like-minded communities in digital venues.”

While these may seem like macro cultural issues that are too big for any individual brand or company to grapple with, the most nimble among us are already engaging. Companies like Spotify have fast-forwarded to the logical conclusion of the debate on the future of work, allowing employees to work wherever in the world they want, however they please, whether that’s in-office, fully remote, or some hybrid model. Redfin’s real estate listings now include climate change advisories (powered by ClimateCheck), as it will impact the long-term value of any piece of property, and should be on the mind of any potential buyers.

Though this entropy poses significant challenges, it also presents opportunities. Many consumers will be overwhelmed, and trusted brands may be able to provide a beacon, both in terms of how to navigate the world, and in providing actual solutions in the face of hyperobject-sized problems. The only real danger is in assuming that the world won’t change quickly, that the rest of the decade will look or behave as it did at the start. By embracing the change and welcoming the unexpected, we can use the entropy of the 2020’s to upgrade and modernize the pieces of our culture which are still clinging to twentieth century models, and truly future-proof ourselves against whatever may come next.

“Many consumers will be overwhelmed, and trusted brands may be able to provide a beacon.”

Power to the People

The past two years have reshuffled the balance of power in our culture, in some surprising and non-obvious ways. Trust in institutions across the board has faltered, as we see our political and social structures buckle under the strain of a global pandemic. But it’s not just governmental ineptitude that we’re rebelling against. The surge in interests in meme stocks and crypto are propelled by a desire to reap the outsized profits of the financial system to those who usually benefit the least. And while much ink has been spilled on the woes of corporate burnout, the Great Resignation is largely a phenomenon of hourly workers standing up against exploitative wages and working conditions. It’s an uncoordinated strike that has managed to raise the average hourly wage in the US faster than any politician has been able to do for decades. Journalist David Dayden draws parallels to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020: “though the act of quitting is often individual, social media collectivizes it, creating community from an atomized and dislocated workforce.”

On the corporate side, a competitive labor market and the flourishing creator economy have meant that many employees have more options than ever. After nearly two years of remote work for many knowledge workers, producing media — in Zoom calls and white papers, in podcasts and training videos — has become a daily part of corporate America. Millions more workers now have upgraded cameras and microphones at home, often the same models used by professional podcasters and streamers. It takes only a small mental leap to begin experimenting with externalizing those newfound skills and passions, and start building a following and a personal brand. This has been responsible for a wave of new people entering the creator economy during the pandemic, with a record number of new businesses formed in early 2021, a generational shift towards everyone being a creator of some kind. As new platforms and tools become available, the creative economy will expand to new areas, with no-code development and immersive content for AR and VR primed for an explosion as the tools become more accessible.

In part to combat this optionality, and in part driven by corporate leaders seeing their own institutional faith tested, we see companies and brands increasingly stepping in for governments, instituting rules for vaccinations and masking earlier, and implementing more aggressive goals to mitigate climate change. The pandemic didn’t become a pandemic in the US when the federal government declared it so, but when the NBA canceled games and Broadway went dark. In the face of governments being gridlocked and conflict-averse, private companies are leaning hard into their values, as a way to drive social change and to attract talent. And for workers, who have increasing options on the job market and options for going independent, these values may be the best reason to join a company. This “intentional employment” offers the opportunity to contribute to the kinds of broad-based social changes that are not possible as individuals, while fostering a sense of community and purpose.

“In the face of governments being gridlocked and conflict-averse, private companies are leaning hard into their values, as a way to drive social change and to attract talent. “

This desire for community is driven by the decades-long atrophying of civic activity and the dwindling of religious belief, the two bastions of connection and purpose in previous generations. And while work is starting to lean in to offering these intangible benefits, it will have to compete with the two most popular sources of it in recent years: the cults of personality that have popped up around celebrities, and the niche online communities that are forming the basis for the metaverse and web3.

It’s easy to dismiss the communities that have popped up around celebrities as just fandoms, but there’s something fundamentally different around the relationship between someone like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Joe Rogan, or Gweneth Paltrow and their followers than, say, even the most devoted Beyoncé fans. The appeal is obvious, and is stealthily political in nature: they offer a much clearer vision of the future than most politicians, and they have the resources to help us get there, without any counterbalance to their power. And yet in many ways, placing too much trust in them is just a different brand of authoritarianism, with a particularly capitalist tint. “Yes, I can deliver the future I’m promising,” they say, “but to get there we’ll need you to buy some supplements. In exchange, we promise that you’ll be in good company, with like-minded individuals who think for themselves and do their own research.”

The most promising counter-balance to these cults of personality, and an alternative to formal corporations, might be the decentralized ways creators are banding together using connected communities and web3 technologies. DAOs in particular, while not yet able to acquire a copy of the Constitution, offer up a digitally-native way to coordinate individuals towards large-scale action. They’ve not yet proven to be able to tackle big challenges like climate change or covid, and may yet fall victim to the same human weaknesses that have plagued our traditional institutions. But it’s early days, and at least some people building in the web3 space certainly possess the necessary vision and idealism, and the structure of many of these platforms and organizations mean that those familiar with them don’t need to trust in the individuals, as much as the technology.

“The most promising counter-balance to these cults of personality, and an alternative to formal corporations, might be the decentralized ways creators are banding together using connected communities and web3 technologies.”

For brands, this shift in power towards grassroots mobilizing can be a blessing and a curse. The first order of business is to get your own house in order, and align your values and vision with your business model. This will necessarily cause some employee turnover, but that natural evolution will help cement those who stay and those who join as true believers in the vision. Next, it’s time to turn your customers into your fans, activating them through co-creation and collaboration, rewarding them for their support, and making them proud to show off their brand affiliation. This transition from customer to fan can take many forms. AMC Theaters did this when they capitalized on their meme stock status by rewarding shareholders with perks typically reserved for loyal customers. Nike is lining up the pieces to start offering NFTs of sneakers when you purchase a physical pair. And Disney capitalized on a viral TikTok trend by blessing the creation of a crowd-sourced musical version of its movie Ratatouille, drumming up interest in a fan favorite that had been languishing in the back catalog.

Lifecycle Loyalty

Although these brand activations are different, they all have one thing in common: they’re rethinking the lifecycle of their relationship between brand and consumer, and reimagining what “loyalty” means in the 2020s. For more and more products, the relationship between consumer and brand is extending well beyond the point of purchase, encompassing the entire lifecycle of the product, from acquisition to replacement. Much as car dealerships maintain constant service contact with vehicle owners, and Apple maintains ongoing software updates and hardware trade-ins for the iPhone, categories from fashion to furnishings to food and beverage are starting to realize that maintaining that consumer relationship over the long term increases the likelihood that when the time comes to replace it, the consumer will simply choose the latest from the same brand they already know and love.

“For more and more products, the relationship between consumer and brand is extending well beyond the point of purchase, encompassing the entire lifecycle of the product.”

The key to this shift is that the brand must offer some kind of ongoing or recurring value for the relationship. This isn’t about sending weekly emails with low-value content as an excuse to stay top of mind; it’s about building value that reflects the lifecycle of your category. That may mean that your contact with the consumer only happens once, towards the end of your product’s life, with suggestions about recycling and benefits or upgrading to the latest offering. Or it may mean data-driven insights, where your product gets better over time the more the consumer uses it. Notably, this trend often aligns with increasing consumer concern about sustainability, and the rising tide of judgment against over-consumption. As more consumers focus on those values, it behooves brands to get ahead of the concern, with an authentic solution for maximizing the life of the product, and a sustainable exit for it.

For brands in categories where consumers regularly need to upgrade or replace products, due to technology or fashion, this probably means more contact in the early days, as they’re onboarded, and around the time of replacement. At the start, it’s about educating them about the product and how to use it. While this might be obvious for products in high consideration categories like tech and auto, it can also be applied to things like fashion and home furnishings — surprising ways to style the item, ideally customized based on other purchases and browsing behavior. And when the time comes to replace the item, it’s about offering a trade-in or convenient recycling in exchange for some credit towards a replacement. There’s also an opportunity to build product upgrades into the natural seasons of life: graduation, moving, marriage, pets, and children have long been signifiers of a need to invest and upgrade in many categories, but what would it look like to track a customer relationship through all of those milestones? The brands and products that we care about have a role to play in many of those, and thinking through a true cradle-to-grave strategy might uncover new opportunities for product development.

Used properly, this may even be a way for brands to move consumers into higher price points than they are accustomed to: if I purchase a product knowing in advance that I’ll be able to trade it in for an upgrade in a year (or two or five, depending on the category), each purchase becomes an investment in the category, one that compounds every time I upgrade. Younger consumers are already thinking this way: Gen Z shoppers are “165% more likely than Boomers to consider the resale value of clothing before buying it.” What’s missing today is that up-front guarantee, but as brands see these trade-in programs as a new way to earn loyalty and lock-in, it should easily offset the costs of occasionally over-promising the trade-in value up front. It’s a toned down version of the “subscription for everything” fad, that offers many of the benefits, without the ongoing costs that can spook some consumers.

“Gen Z shoppers are 165% more likely than Boomers to consider the resale value of clothing before buying it.”

For consumables like CPG and grocery, we can apply this same lifecycle approach, but with a different lens. On one hand, consumers are much more comfortable with subscriptions for consumables if they already have established loyalty and a predictable use pattern. We can improve the experience by leveraging data to make the subscriptions smarter — whether that’s through connected platforms like Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service, or simply by tracking purchasing trends to suggest a more or less frequent cadence. It’s a simple analysis, but consumers will appreciate the care. On the other hand, some consumers are subscription-averse entirely, and finding an excuse to reach out to them when they’re likely in the market again is the best approach. Personal care brand Soft Services, for example, sends a spatula to help get the last remnants of product out of the bottle, along with recycling instructions and a discount code. While two thirds of that could be accomplished via email, receiving a useful tool via postal mail is certainly more memorable than other forms of direct marketing.

Regardless of the approach, it needs to offer tangible value, or else it will be brand-destructive. The goal is to check in at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right response. When you think about your relationship with a customer as being built over a lifetime, it’s easy to see how lower volume, higher value contact is key to maintaining that connection. In the language of psychology, it’s about building a secure attachment, rather than an anxious one.

“The goal is to check in at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right response.”

The Multiplayer Internet

While the metaverse is on the lips of many tech executives and pundits, the truly immersive, all-encompassing virtual world first envisioned by Neal Stephenson (and then repackaged by Mark Zuckerberg) is going to take a decade or so to be technologically feasible. In the meantime, with most of our major platforms building in that direction, we’ll start to see bits and pieces of the metaverse become integrated into shipping products. Entrepreneur Shaan Puri suggests that the metaverse isn’t a place, but “the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life…it’s a gradual change that’s been happening for 20 years.” The most immediate change in how we interact online won’t be about everything turning into 3D game-like experiences, but an increased sense of presence: an awareness of who’s in the same online space as us, able to interact in real time, and what those who came before us found the most interesting or important. It will enable the kinds of multiplayer interactions native to gaming, which will form the basis of many future metaverse experiences.

“The most immediate change in how we interact online won’t be about everything turning into 3D game-like experiences, but an increased sense of presence.”

It’s about both synchronicity and asynchronicity, an application-level understanding of who’s active at any given moment, and what those who came before were doing when they were active. In a primitive form, you can see it in the trending charts of Netflix and Spotify, which have replaced traditional forms of mass culture as harbingers for what to watch and listen to if you want to maintain your social capital. Or TikTok’s algorithm, which keeps you up to date on what’s funny or interesting to your niche community, or Shein’s algorithm, which does the same for what they’re wearing. A generation ago, Groupon promised to unlock the financial power of the crowd, but meme stocks and NFTs are starting to actually deliver on that promise. And platforms like Peloton point to a future of community-driven windowing, where the choice isn’t between “live” and “on demand,” but everything from primetime television to shopping becomes an activity that can be time-shifted to be, “live with my friends.” What if every webpage, app, and streaming service displayed online presence in the same way a Google Doc did, and allowed you to focus down on just the people you cared about, whether that be friends, your neighbors, or a specific Discord community? Within a few years, every internet service will be covered in footprints, and have different ways of exposing them to us.

Presence will enable fundamentally different experiences than before. Like the “most highlighted” feature on Kindle, or trending lists in media, it can have a “rich get richer” effect of funneling us towards the most popular content and experiences. But that simplistic thinking will soon be overruled in favor of something more akin to TikTok — who cares what’s the most popular, show me what is most likely important to me. This niche-ification of every corner of the internet will be, as it often is, both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it will continue to foster the creation of real communities online, allowing like-minded people who are physically located anywhere to connect and bond. The acceptance of relationships that exist primarily online as equally valid as their offline counterparts is an important cultural shift that is required not just for the metaverse, but for the viability of society as a whole in a time when we may be called to work, learn, and socialize online for weeks at a time at any moment.

“Presence will enable fundamentally different experiences than before.”

But we also know that niche culture can be a synonym for communities of disinformation and extremism. Live video and audio are particularly susceptible to abuse today, both because it’s harder to moderate, and because of the stronger parasocial relationship that’s fostered by the authenticity of the mediums. As more of the internet becomes “live,” it will inevitably be exploited by personalities looking to build their brand to the detriment of society. And we can’t rely just on the desire for mass-market social capital to be the counterbalance.

The tools for enabling this kind of presence are developing quickly. In the latest version of iOS, Apple introduced SharePlay, a framework that allows any app to synchronize what it’s showing to the user to align with what their collaborators are seeing on their screen, behind the scenes of a FaceTime call. While it has thus far been used mostly for co-viewing of media content, it’s specifically architected to allow any type of experience to be replicated on distant devices. Zillow has already rolled out the ability to browse real estate listings together remotely, and it’s not hard to imagine that before long we’ll see a social shopping experience designed specifically for the feature. While SharePlay is designed for intimate groups, iOS 15 also included App Store features to help developers promote live events. Perhaps most obviously useful for the metaverse-style concerts hosted in apps like Roblox, app events are also broadly applicable to many styles of content — anything from a movie premiere to a fashion sale can be promoted as an event, effectively helping any app with regular updates pop itself to the top of the App Store.

As increased flexibility around how and where we work saturates our culture, this virtual presence from our work applications and multiplayer games will infuse every corner of the internet. By embracing live presence and time-shifted togetherness, we can determine now what works best for our brand, our category, and our consumers, and use that experience to start paving our own paths to the metaverse.

“By embracing live presence and time-shifted togetherness, we can determine what works best for our brand, our category, and our consumers.”

The Great Escape

If the entropy that’s brewing — and the ensuing anxiety that it fosters — becomes the animating cultural force for the 2020s, one thing that we all seem to agree on is that we need a break. But of course, times being what they are, no one can agree on what that means. In the tech and media sphere, we see a surge of Neo-Luddites, ditching their smartphones, advocating for limited screen time, and focusing on re-wilding themselves and their children. On the other hand, it’s this same desire for escape that’s driving techno-utopians into building towards the metaverse, as a way for tech to infuse even more parts of daily life, providing a highly polished experience without all the problems of the physical world. Our visions for the best way to unwind have never been so divergent.

But this instinct to escape is changing behavior in other places as well. We can see it in the increased focus on self-care and wellness, like increased appreciation of the importance of mental health and mindfulness. It’s also present in the expanding social and legal acceptance of many common vices, from marijuana to sports betting to psychedelics and sex work. And while there are social equity reasons to support increased legal access for many of these, it’s hard to miss the undercurrent that we increasingly believe that people should be allowed to have their vices, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. For the elites, who have always had repercussion-free access to such things, this escapism is a driving force behind the race into space. Space isn’t just a physical escape, but also an emotional one. It’s something they can attach to their personal brand that is still able to conjure that feeling of techno-utopianism, free from the cynical problems of algorithmic bias and workers’ rights. And for those without planet-sized bank accounts, but still the technical inclination, web3 offers the tantalizing allure of escaping the bonds of the major tech platforms, and finding a blue ocean to build another version of the internet.

This broad spectrum of how escapism is manifesting itself represents where we think our biggest challenges lie. If you’re worried about misinformation and algorithmic bias, it makes sense to want to step back from tech platforms, logging off or building new applications on web3 technologies. And if you’re worried about the dangers of a pandemic and climate change, it makes sense to want to build a richer online world, isolated from physical danger. While it may be easy to criticize the urge to disengage with the pressing issues of the day, it’s important to respond with empathy — no one can engage all the time, and with so many conflicting concerns, our personal escape hatch might change by the day, a reaction to whatever is at the top of our scare stack at the moment.

“This broad spectrum of how escapism is manifesting itself represents where we think our biggest challenges lie.”

For brands to navigate the age of entropy, this means embracing contradicting messages. On one hand, consumers want to align themselves with brands and companies that engage meaningfully with the issues of the day, and taking a public stance is increasingly important. But on the other hand, consumers are also looking for an escape, and that’s something that many brands may be more comfortable providing. We’ll need to use data-driven signals and context to help make smart decisions on how and when to engage. For example, as the home continues to evolve as a services hub, it will also be a reliable source of comfort and escape for consumers from the chaotic world outside, allowing us to automatically deploy services which bring peace of mind, while allowing consumers to opt-in to more challenging engagements.

“We’ll need to use data-driven signals and context to help make smart decisions on how and when to engage.”

The key will be threading this needle carefully and with authenticity, not expecting all consumers to have the energy to engage with values-driven activities all the time, and not presuming that the definition of escape is the same for everyone. The brands that are able to do both, to be both meaningful and fun in a real, human cadence, will continue to cement their relationships with consumers, and be a source of some order in the chaos.

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