Our predictions for technology in 2019

At this time of year it appears that people in our industry have to come up with some predictions for the following year as if being an industry prophet gives us some kind of coveted credential. So here goes and maybe I’ll write something next year to see if I was right?

Tipping point for television

Television has dominated our attention for decades, ever since TV sets have been affordable, they have been the favourite way to advertise to the masses for many a fortune 500 company. It used to be hard to imagine anything that would be able to compete with scheduled broadcasted entertainment.

Well, not only has the internet been winning an increasing share of our time from the TV networks, the demographic targeting that the internet has in it armoury means that the value of that time can be better realised.

So, we predict that in 2019, people will generally begin spending more time on the internet than watching TV. Once this happens, it will only be a matter of time before companies marketing spend currently targeting TV is redirected to the web, this will cause a chain reaction meaning that more money will be spent creating on demand TV shows and other internet content and the beloved TV may be relegated to showing only reruns.

Costs for social media advertising will significantly increase

Lots of businesses are reaping the benefits of advertising via Social media and finding that they are not requiring a huge budget to before seeing a return on their investment. This is mainly because Social advertising is in its infancy and the competition is relatively low. We have seen this before with other advertising systems like Google AdWords.

We believe that by the end of 2019, to get the same reach on any of the major social platforms will cost more than double what it does in December 2018.

Smart homes will experience fastest growth so far

Throughout 2018, the number of devices for Alexa and Google assistant have increased considerably, homes are starting to become familiar with speaking to these devices in order to listen to music, watch YouTube and get the answer to questions. We have even seen parrots order food from Amazon without their owner’s knowledge!

As people become more familiar with the power of these devices and hardware manufacturers continue to dream up ever increasing uses for integrating with their SDK’s, we predict that market will explode in 2019.

It is already predicted that 50% of internet searches will be performed using voice by 2020 and these devices will be a major contributor to that.

Minimalism and thumb friendly web design

During 2018, single page websites have continued to gain popularity along with the idea of “Mobile First” design. We believe this will continue to develop during 2019 evolving further in to designing layout that are sympathetic to thumbs being use for navigation. Menus are already migrating from the top left to the top right and the information flow is vertical.

Minimalism will continue to become more and more prevalent. Favouring images over text will continue, however as this conflict with Search Engine Optimisation, this will be offset with more video to compensate. Good titles will be ever important and success will be derived from cleverly using snappy sentences over images that Google can index well.