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Why are marketers stuck in 2010? There are four reasons:The crushing pace of technological change — A feeling of helplessness about the pace of change leads to uncertainty about direction, effectiveness, and even personal relevance as a marketing leader. Marketers rely on what they’ve always done because they don’t understand the changing world.

Over-reliance on technology and automation — Today, marketing has become a glorified IT department. Marketing decisions are being made by statisticians and data scientists in ways that may increase efficiency – and maybe even sales leads — but drive us away from the heart of our customers.

Organizational paralysis — Companies formed departments and teams years ago to work on social media, content, and other initiatives that don’t work like they used to. Becoming “locked-in” to marketing tactics that simply don’t work any longer might be due to outdated agency relationships, organizational resistance, cultural obstinance, lack of skilled leadership, relentless bureaucracy … or some combination of these factors.

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”