360PR Blog

In honor of Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary in 2009, I thought I’d cap off the year with the Letter of the Day – make that Letter of the Year.  By my guestimation, the letter E was the hardest working letter in the alphabet in 2009 – used in ads, on packaging and in press releases countless times as marketers described their products as having “eco” qualities or making our lives ”easy,” or used “e” to indicate “electronic.”   No doubt D, G and O ranked high as well, for Digital, Green and Obama.

What were some of the other trends in 2009?  Many of us will remember ’09 as the year of the budget.  The way we talk to consumers (mass-market consumers anyway) has forever changed.  Features are nice, but price was the deciding factor for most in 2009, and marketers worked hard to cast price in the broader context of “value.”

There’s no arguing with features that don’t cost much, in some cases are free, and make our daily routines easier.  For that reason, 2009 was also the year of the app.  Is there anything we cannot do a little better or faster today without the help of an iPhone (or Blackberry) app?  There’s even a site dedicated to apps for moms, The iPhone Mom.

In 2009, the world – or at least a good 40 million of us – learned to think in headlines, something marketers have always been good at.  Twitter opened the floodgate on one-liners, and personalities like Heather Armstrong (Dooce) and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh amassed audiences rivaling some magazines and double, triple, ten-fold the readership of many newspapers.

Meanwhile, The New York Times cut nearly 10% of its staff, while several magazines – some still thick with ads like Gourmet and Cookie – turned their last pages.  With traditional media on the run, bloggers took center stage and the FTC took notice, with new rules guiding interactions between marketers and bloggers.  Those who attended the swag-fest that was BlogHer ’09 welcome the formalized rules, a sign blogs are graduating from their teen years to a more mature media channel.

Perhaps least interesting to me in 2009 were the so-called “news” stories that dominated airwaves (and Twitter and Facebook), like “Balloon Boy” and “Kate and Jon,” so painfully familiar to us they don’t need last names.  Those were two of The Today Show’s “Top 10 stories of 2009″ over the weekend, a list I imagine was developed purely for ratings.  I hope.

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