How the Carnivore Diet, Potter, Swifties and cyrpto grant us what we need most — Meet Liver King. He’s a media personality caricature repping the “all meat diet.” He chomps animal brains to win big in the attention economy, as much as he fights for the reassessment of what a more nutritious diet may entail. His success primarily lies in the former: attention. Many dismiss his honesty. There…

Let’s zoom out to set the stage. We’re heading full speed down the Long Tail of the Creator Economy. The cumulative 99% of Creators are competing with the traditional 1% (institutions). The niche is flourishing — winning even — and we’re beginning to finally find representation in our products and…

As any gamer knows, discussions online aren’t the most… let’s say, rosy. However, there’s a sea change as of late. Surges of gamers are opting into communities where there’s no toxic critiques — only upbeat praise and celebration. They’re creating and seeking out Low Sodium subreddits. “Low Sodium” is a…

Over the last couple of years, there’s been a sea change across beauty subreddits, revealing a complex sentiment shift. Consumers are fed up with the social pressures, countless product releases, and double-standards. This isn’t that new of an insight. Two years since lockdowns and sweatpants, a return to “normal beauty…

Consumers are no longer blindly accepting messages from traditional sources of influence: brands, influencers or legacy media. Alternatively, they’re seeking intimate consultation from one another — the last bastions of radical honesty. We’ve come a long way since being told not to get in a stranger’s car. Now, not only…

Post-pandemic, the predominant cultural genre hasn’t actually been feel-good comedy: Ted Lasso, Schitt’s Creek, Abbott Elementary, etc. That’s just been the easier narrative to explain. Instead, it’s been horror. In 2021, the horror genre gained 13% market share of the box office, its highest control since ’95. …

The Meta Trends are invaluable in identifying where the collective, trend forecaster psyche is at. But as we learned in a five year look back: biases thrive, agendas direct, risk is feared, quantification is scarce and toxic optimism influences. Deeper, as we learned in a series of exercises with AI…

After Sarah DaVanzo and I leveraged NWO.ai’s invaluable AI to score and re-rank the Meta Trends, we were left stuck with one finding: Both the global and U.S. AI data-driven ranks were significantly different from the original human rank. The AI declared that what we humans thought was most important was not actually the case. Were we just splitting hairs of importance here, or were these divergent rankings a signal that our Meta Trends (which came from source material) were not as…

Earlier this year Sarah DaVanzo and I published the fifth annual 2022 Meta Trend analysis, a distillation of 40+ industry trend reports to ultimately identify the most frequently reported (i.e. noteworthy) trends for the year. Fourteen (meta) trends were identified to represent what the entire trends industry was collectively forecasting. …