2013 is winding down and we are all anxiously looking forward for the year to come. Trends, trends, trends, predictions and wraps ups galore. There is no shortage of predictions as to how the new year will take shape.

I am as guilty as everyone else in my attempt to peer into my crystal display for a glimpse of what I think 2014 has in store. My hunches will be based on my own experiences with a sprinkling of my daily routine of obsessively scanning various social feeds and blog rolls to gain insight into where industry shifts will be taking place. My primary focus will be on the intersection of advertising and technology.

The range of “what’s in store” headlines and conversations happening all around us is vast. 2013 was an explosion of creativity and innovation. We saw the arrival of everything from wearables to non wearables, third and fourth screens, ephemeral social interaction and a rainbow of mobile tracking and alternative payment and transactional methods emerge. We saw the rise of digital currency in many different forms from Bitcoins to Social Networth and I predict that 2014 will certainly nurture the evolution of alternative currencies. We will also continue hearing about big data and its cacophony of topics and opinions that surround it and it’s application and ownership rights well into the new year.

In 2014 we will take further steps to continue to redefine TV through alternative networks and programming as well as new advertising models that will leverage the realtime activity happening on social media. We will see services like AppleTV, Chromecast, Netflix and YouTube and the ongoing reality series that is decoupled cable options crouching at the gate ready to pounce at the first opportunity to dethrone the old network model.

2014 will be the year that TV will adopt the addition of a formal sidekick in Social Media which will continue take its place as TV’s official pilot fish and programming models will rely heavily on social influence to decide how content is delivered to audiences. We will see a more tightly coupled second screen experience that will add a layer of deeper enagagement around the shows we watch.

In 2014 devices are going to explode into all shapes and sizes. From tiny smart watches and computers you wear on your face becoming more ubiquitous to a slew of new sizes and form factors of mobile devices. Desktop and laptop computers will continue to decline in usage as we rely more on our phones, tablets, phablets and everything in between for work and play.

New social and interactive channels and the technology they rely upon will further become the lifestream of everything we do. Connected applications and networks will become the body in which we need to breathe our creative souls into. These new channels will provide us deeper engagement, interaction and consumption and will continue to feed the great oceans of data just waiting to be fished for insight.

We will all become channels and tributaries that feed into a vast sea of data and marketers will be spending exorbitant amounts of time, money and creativity in trying to figure out how to make sense of it all in a meaningful way.

I have barely scratched the surface of describing how 2014 will define the underpinnings of what to expect from an engagement, enablement and infrastructure standpoint. 2014 will be the year we collectively better define what it means to create more value through content and utility by embracing new forms of communication that have these two pillars tightly woven into their applications.

Advertising as we know it today can be looked at from two very distinct vantage points, it is either highly disruptive where we will do anything possible to grab the attention of our audiences. We employ contrasting messages and highly unusual placements, over exaggeration and overturning conventions. We want to tell grand stories that will be noticed and remembered and that will hopefully improve brand perception and increase awareness and engagement through highly disruptive means.

However as we move into 2014 that kind of disruption will reveal itself to be a useless method that conflicts with the audience’s desire to fixate their attention to content that is tightly woven into the context of their lives on a second by second basis. Audiences are now deeply engaged in many different user experiences and traditional disruption will be viewed as a form of negative distraction and seen as intrusive and annoying.

Native communication (advertising) will have to now comply with all of the various and unique new channels our audiences are engaging with and must not diminish the experiences that customers expect when they are hyper focusing on consuming their own lives and the lives of others while walking down a busy street or standing on a crowded subway car.

2014 will be the year in which these two opposing philosophies must strike a balance and a harmony with one another. Marketers and communications experts must figure out how to create new native advertising opportunities for our audiences that provide enough of a disruptive experience so that people will enjoy and take notice of our efforts and that advertising won’t simply get lost in the stream.

As critical as I have been about the now infamous Oreo tweet during last year’s Super Bowl I cannot deny its impact on the industry and the reverberations that it has caused as it rippled through the halls of every great agency across the world. That one tweet became a catalyst for change and has triggered the desire of every brand to be in the moment as they communicate with their audiences.

Brands have been asking their agencies to replicate that event similar to the way we are asked to create a viral video. Codifying and replicating that particular tactic is extremely difficult as it was somewhat serendipitous and completely reliant on a situation that was unexpected.

However it is the reaction to that tweet where we can all learn a valuable lesson around how to better build trust with our clients and ourselves in the moment and to react to that moment in an “on brand” and in a meaningful and valuable way that leverages the context of the moment to further catapult our messaging into the social stratosphere in a way that creates conversation without disrupting the conversation.

As culture happens in real time through services like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr and other real time social networks, agencies and brands must quickly figure out how to provide more than just a witty response. We must capitalize on those opportunities by creating value within the messages we choose to broadcast as we ride cultural waves in a way that is highly native to the channel.

I have complete faith that we will, as an industry, find ways to capture the speed of culture and create new and innovative ways to react instantly to unique moments. Success will be defined by how natively those reactions feel in the moment and the result will ultimately create a new kind of disruption that will get audiences to lift their heads up for a second and take notice.

Tactical shelf life will become much shorter and will require more unique attempts to grab attention. 2014 will be the year in which we will see more brands making more frequent attempts based on real time conversations and trends. How those messages hit the mark will be completely dependent on how well brands and their agencies can integrate and react quickly to the opportune moments without the need of long lead times, layers of approvals and complete trust in one another to react in a way that is aligned with the brand and its values.

2014 will be defined by our collective willingness to react more frequently to the moment and to innovate around how to better enagage our brands and culture in a more natural conversation.

Happy New Year!