March 17, 2026
In the fall of 2017, Matt Britton published a Forbes piece aimed squarely at the CMOs of the world's largest brands. The premise was direct: here are ten trends shaping the next twelve months, and if you are not paying attention to them, your brand will fall behind.
At the time, Britton was CEO of Crowdtap and author of YouthNation, writing from a vantage point of two decades spent advising Fortune 500 brands on how to connect with younger consumers in an era of rapid technological and cultural disruption. The predictions he made that fall — about voice commerce, streaming, influencer marketing, cryptocurrency, and the enduring power of certain media categories against all predictions of their death — read, nearly a decade later, as a precise early map of the disruptions that would define the following years.
This is the post-mortem that piece deserves: a look back at what Britton called in 2017, what actually happened, and what the patterns behind his most accurate calls tell CMOs and brand leaders about navigating the next wave of disruption that is already underway.
The first prediction in Britton's Forbes piece concerned Amazon's Alexa and the Echo device ecosystem. Prime Day 2017 had demonstrated that the Echo Dot — at $50, discounted to $35 — was exactly the kind of impulse-friendly, culturally resonant product that could achieve massive holiday penetration. Britton predicted an avalanche of Echo sales that holiday season and framed it as a signal CMOs needed to take seriously.
He was right about the hardware. He was even more right about the implications — the part most brand leaders missed entirely.
"If you try to buy batteries on an Amazon Echo device today, your only options are Amazon Basics batteries," Britton wrote. "This is Amazon essentially making a statement that billions of dollars of investment in brand equity toward household brands like Duracell and Energizer ultimately don't matter to consumers."
This was the genuinely alarming insight buried inside the holiday sales prediction. Voice commerce does not work like visual e-commerce. When a consumer opens Amazon on a screen, they encounter shelf space — a visual array of competing brands, packages, prices, and reviews. When a consumer asks Alexa to order batteries, they receive one recommendation. And that recommendation defaults to Amazon Basics, or to whatever product carries the "Amazon's Choice" designation — an algorithm-determined badge that Amazon does not fully disclose but that has enormous influence over voice purchase outcomes.
Today, there are an estimated 243.5 million voice-enabled smart speaker devices active in U.S. homes, and the conversational commerce market is valued in the hundreds of billions globally. The brand that trained consumers to say "Alexa, order me Tide" rather than "Alexa, order me detergent" won the voice commerce transition. The brands that relied on decades of retail shelf presence and traditional advertising discovered that those advantages evaporated the moment the interface became conversational rather than visual. Experts now predict voice shopping will drive 30% of e-commerce revenue by 2030. The CMOs who read Britton's 2017 warning and acted on it built early-mover advantages in voice optimization. Those who did not are now scrambling to catch up in a medium where the algorithm — not the brand — controls the default recommendation.
Britton's second prediction concerned the streaming wars. "Tomorrow's winners will be the ones that can consistently procure and create original content that becomes binge-watch bait for the new generation of cord cutters," he wrote. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Xbox, and a newly launched Facebook Watch were identified as the primary combatants in what he correctly characterized as a battle for eyeballs that the traditional TV model was losing.
The speed at which this prediction materialized exceeded even optimistic timelines. As of December 2025, streaming reached its highest share of TV viewing ever recorded by Nielsen. Only 21% of Gen Z report having a cable or satellite subscription. The number of cord-cutting households has more than doubled since 2018. Comcast alone lost 1.15 million TV subscribers in 2025 — roughly 3,500 customers every single day.
The "original content" dimension of the prediction proved equally accurate. Netflix's investment in original programming — from Stranger Things to Squid Game to Wednesday — produced the cultural moments that had previously only been possible through broadcast television. Amazon, Apple, and Disney+ followed with their own flagship originals. The streaming wars Britton described became the defining media industry story of the following decade, reshaping not just how content is distributed but how it is produced, financed, marketed, and consumed.
The CMO implication Britton was pointing toward remains operative: brands that want to reach younger consumers through video advertising cannot achieve meaningful reach by buying cable TV inventory. The audience went to streaming. The advertising budget needs to follow.
One of Britton's more contrarian predictions in the 2017 piece concerned the NFL. After a widely reported ratings decline in 2016, many analysts were predicting a structural shift away from professional football. Britton was dismissive of this narrative.
"Much ado was made about the NFL's ratings dip in 2016. I don't buy it, and I attribute last year's slip to the election and not a sudden change of heart for America's new pastime," he wrote. "The NFL is an obsession fueled by gaming, fantasy sports and cultural game-day traditions at the fabric of this country."
This turned out to be precisely correct. The NFL's ratings recovered and have continued to grow, with the league consistently producing the most-watched television events in the United States year after year. The 2024 NFL regular season averaged roughly 17.9 million viewers per game, the highest in years. Super Bowl viewership has broken records repeatedly. The combination of fantasy sports participation, sports betting — which was legalized at the federal level in 2018 and has expanded to most states since — and the social ritual of game-day viewing has proven to be exactly as durable as Britton predicted.
The insight embedded in this call goes beyond football. It points to a critical CMO discipline: distinguishing between structural declines in consumer behavior and temporary disruptions caused by external events. The 2016 NFL ratings dip was real, but its cause — an unusually distracting presidential election — was temporary. The brands and media buyers who pulled NFL ad spending on the assumption that the decline was structural missed one of the most reliable large-audience advertising vehicles in American media.
Britton's prediction about Snapchat was blunt: "There is not much to stop this one-time tech darling from continuing to drop in popularity and value for the rest of the year. Brands have not gravitated to the platform in a meaningful way, and users see little value in using it beyond one-to-one messaging. Frankly, it is a tough use case to monetize."
The diagnosis proved accurate on its essential terms. Snapchat has continued to struggle financially relative to its early promise. Its stock has never recovered to the heights of its early post-IPO period, and while the platform has maintained a user base and found some advertising revenue, it has not achieved the cultural centrality that Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube command. The one-to-one messaging use case that Britton identified as Snapchat's genuine value proposition — and which is genuinely difficult to monetize — has remained the product's core function rather than the platform evolving into a broad social media and commerce destination.
The broader lesson for CMOs in this call is about distinguishing platform adoption from platform monetization potential. Snapchat had genuine user engagement and cultural currency among specific demographics. What it lacked was the content infrastructure and discovery mechanics that allow platforms to function as viable advertising channels. User engagement and advertising opportunity are not the same thing, and the brands that allocated significant resources to Snapchat based on its user numbers rather than its monetization architecture wasted those resources.
Of all the predictions in the 2017 Forbes piece, the one with the longest lasting implications for brand leaders is Britton's warning about Amazon Basics and the potential erosion of brand equity in low-involvement categories.
"As Alexa continues to make her way into U.S. households at rapid scale, the notion of brand equity in low-involvement categories could very quickly erode," he wrote. "Is Amazon right? Is this the beginning of the end of brand loyalty?"
This is a question that has become more urgent, not less, in the years since. Amazon has systematically expanded its private-label portfolio across dozens of categories. The mechanism Britton identified — voice interfaces defaulting to Amazon's own products, eliminating the visual shelf presence that traditional brands spent billions to secure — has extended to visual search, algorithmic recommendation, and the entire architecture of how consumers discover and reorder everyday products.
The answer to Britton's question appears to be: yes, for some categories, and increasingly so. Consumer staples brands have faced enormous pressure as Amazon's private label and third-party alternatives have captured market share in batteries, paper products, cleaning supplies, and dozens of other low-involvement categories where brand preference was always more habit than conviction. The brands that have survived this pressure are the ones that found ways to create genuine category involvement — through sustainability narratives, through product innovation that is genuinely differentiating, through community building and purpose alignment that creates reasons for consumers to seek them out specifically rather than accepting whatever the algorithm recommends.
The CMO implication remains live and urgent: in any category where purchase decisions are low-involvement and brand preference is primarily a function of availability and habit, the rise of AI-mediated shopping represents an existential threat to brand equity. The defense is not better advertising. It is genuine product and brand differentiation that survives the removal of traditional shelf and search advantages.
Britton's influencer marketing prediction in 2017 was the most tactically specific of the ten, and in retrospect the most prescient about the direction of regulation.
"Instagram will be requiring influencers to indicate sponsorship on posts via a new product feature," he wrote, adding that sponsored posts would be throttled in the newsfeed and require paid advertising support to achieve meaningful reach. "This will make influencer marketing a paid media activation — much like buying a billboard, but far less exciting."
The FTC enforcement dimension of this prediction has proven accurate and then some. The FTC sent warning letters to 90+ celebrities in 2017 for undisclosed paid endorsements. In the years since, it has updated its Endorsement Guides (most recently in 2023), expanded the definition of material connection, and raised penalties to over $53,000 per violation as of 2025. The agency has taken enforcement action against major brands and individual influencers, sent warning letters en masse, and made unmistakably clear that the influencer marketing Wild West that characterized the early 2010s is over.
The paid media dimension of Britton's prediction has also proven directionally correct, though with more nuance than a simple "throttled unless paid" mechanism. Organic reach for branded content has declined significantly across platforms, and the creator economy has professionalized to the point where — as Britton predicted — influencer marketing has become a sophisticated paid media channel with its own targeting, measurement, and compliance infrastructure. Creator economy ad spend reached $37 billion in 2025, growing at four times the rate of the overall advertising industry. Eighty-six percent of U.S. marketers at companies with 100+ employees now use influencer marketing. The industry Britton was predicting would mature into a regulated, paid media channel has done exactly that.
The CMO takeaway: influencer partnerships in 2026 require the same compliance rigor, measurement discipline, and media planning sophistication as any other paid advertising channel. The "authentic organic" illusion that characterized early influencer marketing is legally and practically extinct. Brands that are still operating influencer programs with informal disclosure practices and vague measurement frameworks are both legally exposed and strategically behind.
Britton's cryptocurrency prediction was bullish: "I predict that many progressive investors will back these emerging and speculative currency platforms as a safe haven. With signs of government cooperation around the world, I believe that cryptocurrency is here to stay, and that it will see meaningful price growth for the rest of the year."
On the narrow question of 2017 price growth, Britton was spectacularly right. Bitcoin went from roughly $4,000 when the article was published to nearly $20,000 by December 2017. On the broader question of cryptocurrency's maturation as an asset class and its ultimate stability as a store of value, the story has been far more complicated — marked by the 2018 crash, the 2021 boom and subsequent 2022 collapse, and continuing volatility that has resisted the "safe haven" characterization Britton predicted.
The lesson for CMOs in this prediction is less about cryptocurrency itself and more about the methodology of evaluating emerging technologies. Britton identified the real dynamic — that speculative assets can function as stores of value in geopolitically uncertain environments, and that institutional adoption tends to drive price appreciation — but the timeline and stability of that maturation proved much more erratic than the prediction implied. Emerging technology adoption rarely follows smooth adoption curves, and the brands and investors who treat early adoption signals as confirmation of smooth linear progress routinely get caught in the volatility between the early signal and the eventual mainstream reality.
Looking back at a set of predictions a decade after they were made is valuable not because it scores the forecaster but because it reveals the underlying methodology. The predictions Britton made in 2017 that proved most accurate share a common feature: they were grounded in observed consumer behavior rather than in technology capability.
The Alexa prediction was not about voice technology — it was about how consumers behave when interfaces change and about what that means for brand equity built on visual shelf presence. The streaming prediction was not about Netflix's content quality — it was about where younger consumers had already moved their attention and what it meant for brands that needed to follow them. The influencer prediction was not about platform policy — it was about the structural inevitability of regulatory intervention in a medium that was operating as advertising without being regulated as advertising.
Consumer behavior is the leading indicator. Technology is the enabler. The CMOs who read consumer behavior early — who understand what the next generation is already choosing when they have freedom to choose — are the ones who make accurate predictions about where markets are heading and build their brands in that direction rather than defending positions that consumers have already abandoned.
This is the core of the work Britton does at Suzy, and the foundation of the consumer intelligence approach that the platform is built on: that real-time, accurate consumer intelligence is not a research function but a strategic imperative. In a market where consumer behavior shifts at the pace of cultural change, decisions based on lagging data are systematically late.
The Amazon Basics batteries observation pointed to a structural change in how brand equity functions when purchase interfaces shift from visual to voice. Decades of brand investment in packaging, shelf placement, advertising, and logo recognition provide zero advantage in a voice interface where the algorithm makes the default recommendation. Brands in any category where consumers might default to voice reordering — batteries, cleaning supplies, paper products, household staples — face the risk of having their brand equity bypassed entirely unless they train consumers to ask for them by name and optimize for voice search algorithms.
Britton identified in 2017 that the FTC's enforcement actions against undisclosed celebrity endorsements were a harbinger of platform-level policy changes that would make influencer marketing function more like traditional paid media. This has proven accurate. The FTC has continued to tighten disclosure requirements (updating its Endorsement Guides in 2023), raised penalty levels to over $53,000 per violation, and extended its definition of material connection to cover virtually any compensated endorsement relationship. The influencer marketing industry has matured from an informal "authentic" channel into a regulated, professionalized advertising medium with its own compliance infrastructure and measurement standards.
The common thread in Britton's most accurate calls is starting from observed consumer behavior rather than technology capability or market analyst consensus. The question is always: what are consumers — especially younger consumers at moments of genuine choice — already doing? Not what technology might enable, not what analysts project, but what real people in the real world are already choosing when they have freedom to choose. Building strategic intelligence around that question, in real time, is what separates the brands that lead market transitions from the ones that respond to them.
The predictions in Britton's 2017 Forbes piece have aged remarkably well because they were built on a durable foundation: deep, firsthand understanding of how consumers behave, what technologies enable rather than what they promise, and which structural forces are powerful enough to overcome organizational and cultural inertia.
That methodology does not expire. It applies today to the signals that Generation AI is already producing — the behavioral choices that a generation growing up with artificial intelligence as a native feature of their environment is making right now, that will become the mainstream consumer reality of the 2030s in the same way that Millennial cord-cutting behaviors that Britton documented in 2016 and 2017 became the mainstream reality of the 2020s.
For a full exploration of what those signals are predicting, Generation AI is the essential guide. And for ongoing conversations with the brand leaders, CMOs, and cultural architects navigating these questions at the highest levels of business, The Speed of Culture podcast is where those discussions happen in real time.