- The trend toward "authenticity" still ramping up in 2020 hits full swing, and commercial entities follow suit. Any announced commercial speech is viewed with distrust, while meme tweets are celebrated as "real." Corporate messaging becomes indistinguishable from random chatter on social networks.
- Advances in ML/text bots automate this process, and the random chatter on social sites like Reddit and Tumblr becomes a wasteland of pretty-good bots trying to steer conversations in a sponsored direction.
- Platforms are created for managing brand campaigns across even larger numbers of ever-smaller influencers. Anyone with more than 1k followers on Insta or Snap can sign up to be micro-compensated for brand mentions both online and in person at parties and such. Smartphones are used to track who is where with who and who is saying what, in order to measure these mentions.
- Influencing becomes an accepted career path, and classes appear in higher education on managing your personal brand, identifying which major brands fit with your personal brand, and building a portfolio of commercial brands that identify you like a unique fingerprint. This is blended with graphic design study to create your personal visual fingerprint/brand identity including logo, color scheme, and accessory items like a particular type of flower. It will be called "Personal Marketing" or something and hundreds of thousands of students will flock to the courses. Every public space, whether park, footpath, flower garden, or grocery store, will be filled with hundreds, possibly thousands of young people simultaneously recording selfie videos for their followers or class projects.
- The line between commercially sponsored speech and original speech becomes almost fully blurred.
- The line between brand preference and personal identity disappears. By 2030 the average consumer's daily life is centered around brand experience.