It’s always around this time that pundits line up to give you their view of what’ going to happen in the year ahead, whether it’s music, fashion, food or politics. While we’d love to talk around all of these issues, we’ve decided to keep it simple. So here’s a quick overview of what the team at Lucre predict is going to happen in the world of marketing in Australia throughout 2012.

Social media comes of age

Ok, so Australians are the most ‘engaged’ in the world when it comes to social media – but when it comes to corporate Australia, embracing social media is more hit-or-miss. But 2012 will see a groundswell in businesses shifting from tactical social media activities – maintaining a sole twitter page for example – to much more strategic, integrated, and therefore much more effective, social media executions.

Agencies move from specialist to generalist

The last few years have been dominated by niche agency players, whether it’s SEO, PPC, above-the-line, below-the-line, whatever it is. But client-side budget constraints and the desire for true integration will drive a shift towards agencies becoming more of a one-stop-shop. This is being particularly driven by social media, with agencies of all disciplines recognising how complimentary this channel can be to their offering, not to mention increased client demand for expertise in this area. So that means everything from experiential shops bolstering their team with PR and social specialists to SEO and digital agencies recognising the need to offer a more meaningful and conversation-based social media activity.

Mobile commerce and social commerce

According to eBay stats, 1.3 million Aussies are using M-commerce platforms, and are shopping using their smart phones. As traffic continues to grow on mobile channels in this country, we’re likely to see huge growth in this area. Not only that but ‘social commerce’ – the layer of ‘social engagement’ sitting above an e-commerce site, is going to be big news in 2012, with online peer-to-peer recommendation playing a huge role in driving purchasing decisions.

ROI becomes more important than ever

With further budget constraints and a slow-down in consumer spending, companies are wanting – more than ever – to see concrete ROI from their marketing activity. The often ‘intangible’ mediums of PR and social will be especially under the spotlight, and agencies won’t be able to hide behind smoke and mirrors (not that they should’ve been hiding in the first place…) when it comes to demonstrating effectiveness of campaign work.

Image used under Creative Commons on behalf of t0msk

Sydney, the original ‘sin city’ has this week played host to the annual Australasian Gaming Expo, the region’s largest gaming equipment trade exhibition.. It’s a big deal in the gaming industry, especially given that the event comes at a time when the political spotlight on the Australian gambling industry is shining brighter than ever.

So I thought it was a good time to revisit some of our all-time favourite gambling marketing stunts. With the media reticent to cover gambling, creativity is the order of the day and brands look for increasingly audacious, wild or tasteless ways to reach consumer directly. The result: a lot of fun!

1) A British man bets it all

While controversial, Ashley Revell’s plan to sell everything he had, including his clothes, and place all the money on red at the roulette table in Plaza Hotel and Casino Las Vegas, Nevada, certainly garnered publicity. Revell placed a total of $135,400 on red, and luckily – for all involved – it came good and he came away smiling.

2) Casino of Venice create roulette at the airport.

A simple idea well executed, when the Casinò di Venezia turned the baggage carolsel at Venice airport into a branded roulette wheel, there’s few people who wouldn’t have seen it, not to mention the pages of media coverage generated from this smart stunt.

3) Golden Palace – every stunt under the sun…

Where do you start with GoldenPalace.com? The online casino carries out by far the most audacious stunts, which, time after time, generate mass publicity. Past activities include sponsoring a real-life birth, a woman changing her name to GoldenPalace.com, and sponsoring Dennis Rodman at the running of the bulls in Spain. Here’s one of our favorites (and one of the most disgusting!)

4) Circus Casino’s Perfect Poker Face

Ok, this is one of my own, and it never reached the lofty heights of William Shatner, but achieved real media cut through all the same. We thought: what does the ‘perfect poker face’ really look like? To find out, Circus Casino analysed the faces of the 10 most successful poker players of all time…and this is the (slightly scary) result: the $40m face!

Let me know if there’s any I’ve missed!

The last few years have seen a rise in online streamed music services, which are a hybrid between digital radio stations, and social networks. These allow users to listen to music on demand, usually for free and often via their mobile handset, as well as share playlists and recommendations with their friends.

These services operate in a curious legal position, which is under constant scrutiny from record companies, but unlike peer-to-peer download services, they are not illegal for the listener.

The majority monitize through paid-for premium subscriptions and advertising, while many have also struck revenue kickback deals with record labels, creating an interesting emerging revenue model for the record industry, one which has traditionally been slow to adapt to social media and the digital revolution.

We’re massive fans of Grooveshark, MFlow and Jeli in the office, though let us know if you’ve got any other suggestions we should check out and whether you agree with Nick’s points.

Monday

• Only a short walk to work, but I like to catch up with emails and see what the UK office has been up to while I slept. Oh, wait, I can’t. Get immediate feeling of anxiety and dread, until I realise it’s just a 10 minute walk until I can check my laptop. Phew.

Tuesday

• A strange sense of calm washes over me when I realise I can’t “be got hold of”. I like “not being got hold of”.  In a moment of weakness I briefly consider using a phone box but the handset looks suspiciously greasy. Give it a miss. Get into the office to find that three people have emailed me asking where I am. Ooops.

Wednesday

• Middle of the week, meaning it’s now sufficiently long enough after Saturday night to justify drinking alcohol again. However, lack of planning and Google maps mean that I’m left walking up and down a street for 10 minutes before I have to find it ‘manually’ – i.e. stopping someone to ask for directions. This immediately restores my faith in the good will of humans.

Thursday

• Lack of headphones on a train to a client meeting means I have to endure the conversations of a group of school children. From what I can gather, “Darren” has cheated on “Sonja” but she’s “ok with it”. I wonder how socially acceptable a pair of ear plugs worn in public would be.

Friday

• After work drinks in the Beresford. Have an epiphany of sorts; if a social media consultant doesn’t check into a bar, is he really there? I think about this for a while as I realise I can’t use Foursquare or Scvngr.

Saturday

• I realise going for a run without headphones on is actually much safer as I can hear the cars.

 Sunday

• See some great street art in an ally way in Surry Hills. I’m collecting examples for a post on my blog but I can’t capture it. Damn.
• One of the many curses of the iPhone is to “quickly’ check emails before going to bed, which inevitably leads to a sleepless night as I think about work. For once, on a Sunday night I don’t do this, meaning I sleep like a baby, dreaming of Monday when I will be connected once more.

But not this time.

This time I’m going to do things differently. I’m going to keep things firmly 2011 and have a completely crowd-sourced holiday. That’s right, I’m binning the books and, using only my iPhone and a range of social networks, I’m going to go it alone.

That means from the moment I arrive to the moment I leave Melbourne, I’m basing my trip on information I can glean from Twitter and Facebook, venue suggestions and tips on Scvngr and must-dos on Foursquare.

This could lead to a dreadful holiday experience, careering from random venue to random venue. Or maybe it will lead to the most amazing, spontaneous holiday ever. Either way, it’ll be fun finding out. Look me up at www.twitter.com/willockenden if you want to help out. The results will be published right here, very soon…

Image used under Creative Commons courtesy of Endlesstrail

Let’s not forget the kind of mad excitement a new IKEA store can generate in a neighbourhood, and this is all about capitalising on that sentiment.

Visitors to the site can get a 3D sneak preview of inside the store covering a staggered 40,000 meters. They even get to meet the manager, ‘Freddy’ with hidden competitions throughout the store to win IKEA goods.

Ikea are consistently innovative when it comes to digital, and Scandinavia are shit hot when it comes to online work. In fact, this view was confirmed when I watched a Mumbrella interview by foul-mouthed but bang-on Mark Comerford at Hyper Island, a digital “creative leaning academy” in Sweden.

He puts this down to the region having pretty much universal internet access, followed by ubiquitous broadband access, meaning digital companies are used to having this powerful infrastructure to play with. He also says Sweden is used by UK and US companies as a test-bed for new apps and technolgoies, to see how they’ll play out in this highly connected environment. More of this later as it’s an interesting issue for sure.

So, clumsy fashion analogy aside, what I’m finding most interesting about the reports from SXSW is that a lot of talk seems to be focused on apps and services with a social gaming element, where users score points or are rewarded for a particular action in the ‘real world’.

While social networks like Facebook and Twitter impact on our real world behaviour to some extent, for example how we organise our social lives, seek information and view issues around privacy, in the next few years social gaming apps are set to fundamentally change the way behave and interact with the ‘real world’. And this is next generation social gaming; more than simply checking in at a venue on Foursquare.

Take Scvngr, which is the tip of a potentially enormous digital iceberg. Part social network, part game, Scvngr allows users to check in to a location, just like on Facebook Places or Foursquare, but then goes a step further as users are encouraged to take part in a series of fun, real world ‘challenges’ to earn points, such as turning a fast food joint foil wrapper into an origami bird or performing a dance routine outside a shop and filming it. These acts then earn points which translate into freebies and discounts.

The chief executive (or Chief Ninja, as he calls himself) of Scvngr reckons that over the next 10 years, developers are increasingly going to create a ‘game layer’ on top of real life society, which I guess, could blur the boundaries between computer games, and actual life (for the more confused members of society, anyway).

And, just as Facebook’s Razon Detra is “connect and share”, this new wave of apps are all about “going places”, “having fun” “exploring”, you name it. This is all incredibly positive, as it’s all about encouraging people to have fun and experience life fuller. Maybe we can call it ‘real life 2.0’. It’s certainly an interesting challenge for marketeers in finding new ways for brands to be ‘fun’, and at a push even a challenge for video game producers, who could see gamers flock away from screens to ‘real world’ activities, as everyday life becomes more like a video game.

So, whether real life will become like the film Scott Pilgrim or not, either way it will be fun finding out, and it’s nice to see the return of ‘real life’.