Golin Harris - Next 50 years of PR

In last week's PRWeek I found a pleasant glossy booklet attached in the middle called 'The Next Fifty Years' produced by a company called Golin Harris.

It is a fast and decisive read, and something I thoroughly enjoyed out on the porch with my glass of Pinot. And it has some interesting insights into what the future holds. The piece is jam-packed full of statistics, which I will probably be digesting for some time to come: For example, the Golin Harris team provides estimates that by 2050 every one in four Americans will be of Latino ancestry. By 2020 they will represent a full half of the US workforce. Minorities as a whole will comprise 33% of the US population by 2016.

More. We are all aware that there is a growing older population that, typically, will have enormous buying power. By 202 the Centre for Aging in London estimates that there will be nearly 700 million people in the world over the age of 65.

According to the report, and I am sure you will agree, technology is playing a major role in societal and economic trends worldwide. iPods, cell phones and PDAs provide a convergence of technology that previously we have used on PCs: email, photos, IM, games, web, and scanning barcodes to describe a few of the things that these hand-held products deliver. This convergence is set to continue. More inspiring: in the two years that MySpace has existed, 80 million people have set up pages there and membership expands by 5 million a month. According to this report, in ten years, MySpace could be one billion.

Also exploiting some of this technology is what is called 'new activism'. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are filling the vaccuums left by governmental agencies as they retreat from many public areas. According to a UN report, there are nearly 40,000 international NGOs, and 2 million in the US. Estimates imply that those numbers could double by 2050.

About Tomorrow. In this report, while effectively summarizing many of the facts of today and the estmates for the future, it also tries to encapsulate the future. What do these rapid changes mean for PR professionals? Even businesses that operate in a national or international arena? According to Golin-Harris, product improvements and new technologies will cease to have any effect. It is the authenticity that will bear value. PR people are storytellers and we need to find, and communicate, the authenticity at the core of a company and its clients.

This is a fascinating little publication, and it really gets you thinking. The authors admit that predicting What Will Be in 50 years is difficult. No one can say that we will have a hybrid helicopter on our roofs. But they believe that the winners will be the ones with the insight to understand the changes that are taking place, and those who have the courage to communicate authentically with diverse individuals in languages they understand.

This paper will have little effect on your current, day-to-day PR practise. But I think it will get enough of us thinking about the future to be able to help move towards it.

Do download it from this page. http://www.nextfiftyyears.com/