10 Predictions for 2012

by Perry Marshall - www.perrymarshall.com 

6. Affluent Europeans and Americans are adding a 2nd residence in developing countries. I have a friend who’s doing a seminar on how to set up a second residence in Guatemala. It’s already sold out.

There are some real advantages: Nobody in Costa Rica worries about riots in London, and the cooks and maids there are really cheap.

7. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has long predicted the coming “Singularity.” This is when, through the power of Moore’s Law, a desktop PC finally exceeds the power of the human brain. He says it’s going to happen in less than 20 years.

At that time all the computers in the world will be networked together to form a global brain of unimaginable power, ushering us into utopia. We’ll all upload ourselves into the cloud and achieve immortality. Some folks are cryogenically freezing their heads so they can be resurrected decades from now.

Kurzweil has somehow not noticed that Microsoft Word took two minutes to open 20 years ago and still takes two minutes now. He’s managed to not notice that your computer today is no more self-aware or capable of will or desire than the PC you had in 1993.

Does anyone *really* believe there’s no problem that can’t be solved with more CPU cycles? (“Dear business owner: Your REAL problem isn’t lack of credit or sagging sales. It’s the fact that your computer is just too slow….”)

Oh yeah, and the Singularity crowd assumes you can trust the IT department to house your brain and not sell the memory of losing your virginity to the porn guys.

Meanwhile, people who swore they’d live to be 150 still have strokes at age 57. The “Singuarity” is a rapture story for secular sophisticates.

8. Google plus will never unseat Facebook, but…. Larry Page has tied 25% of employee bonuses to Google+. What this really means is that Google is amassing even more demographic and psychographic data than Facebook ever dreamed of.

This is handy for Google: Facebook takes all the heat from privacy groups for their massive public gaffes, while Google AdWords gets better and better. This is GREAT for advertisers.

9. Retargeting means that the days of 3 cent clicks on Google’s Display Network are over, unless you’re targeting Trailer Trash prospects.

10. Four horsemen: Netflix, Pandora, Spotify and Amazon. The price of books, movies and music is headed towards zero. You’re already seeing 1-day Kindle specials: $20 books are $2.99, 99 cents or even free.

Amazon will start renting books to you on your Kindle the same way Netflix rents movies.

At Amazon, books are just a loss leader for selling flat-screen TV’s and Christmas presents. For you, books are a loss leader for selling ______?

You better decide right now. And if you don’t come up with a loss-leader strategy for your biz… someone else will.

Sleep with one eye open.

Perry Marshall

P.S.: Groupon’s gonna fizzle.

(Spirited, right? )

Entrepreneur Magazine says: “Perry Marshall is the #1 author and world’s most-quoted consultant on Google Advertising. He has helped over 100,000 advertisers save literally billions of dollars in Adwords stupidity tax.”

He is referenced across the Internet and by The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.