5 Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2012

We look ahead and dare to describe what we see.

1. HTML5 adoption will remain stilted on the desktop while it flourishes on mobile devices. Too many households and corporations are happy to remain with Internet Explorer 8, locking them out on the full HTML5 experience. Without legacy issues, smaller screens will offer an unfettered canvas for developers to create useful commercial applications with HTML5. While we wait for older PC browsers to die, we'll see Javascript blossom as a sophisticated rich-media platform allowing developers to mix-and-match HTML5 features with legacy standards. The mainstream appeal of the iPad will encourage more developers to drop Flash. But HTML5's canvas technology will not replace Flash as an animation platform in 2012 because, still, nobody will have a computer powerful enough to run any meaningful canvas application.

2. Design. The cartoon-y adornment that defined the Web 2.0 standard will finally fall out of favor with mainstream audiences. While design elites have been done with this look for a while, marketers will finally get over their need to get their money's worth from designers with "more ink." We'll see more unfussy layouts allowing editorial and user generated content, not decoration, to define the look. Streamlined "meta" design standards like Microsoft's Metro UI and Facebook's Timeline will emphasize well-crafted type and data visualization. Marketers will struggle with this shift because this new look is in style but it requires them to relinquish design control to the users and the authors. We'll see lots of faked-out content that tries to mange this uncertainty.

3. Mobile. Consumer brands that have dabbled in application publishing will start to wash out as they discover the true cost of developing, maintaining and marketing mobile applications. They'll find that creating something really compelling for a mobile device requires plenty of time, resources and risk-tolerance. They'll start to divert those budgets into refining the mobile web experiences as they see small screens show up more in web analytics. With amateur vanity apps out of the way, consumers will expect more useful and more entertaining apps. Focused software publishing shops will answer the demand with mature apps that cost more and deliver more.

4. Social. Facebook will keep abusing users' privacy and nobody will do anything about it. Personal connections, not features keep people coming back to Facebook. That's the formula for social platform success—other people. While Facebook cements it place as the AOL of our time (offering your relatives a place to write awkward opinions), Twitter will continue to stake is fortune as a tastemaker and news-breaker. Almost every big event will be broken on Twitter first, but only by a margin of minutes. But it will still not be the mainstream forum Facebook has become. Google Plus will continue to report impressive numbers of registered users but conspicuously neglect to discuss user activity, which will remain light.

5. New Products. Utility, not public preening, will drive interest in new platforms. For example, Pinterest will have slow but steady growth as users discover the value of personal curation and sharing for everyday purposes. While Reddit and Mashable offered some version of this before, mainstream users will take to the visual orientation Pinterest offers and its less clique-ish (trolly) tone. Look for family scrapbook pages to become the killer app on Pinterest, attracting Boomers to participate more willingly than they do on Facebook.