A top futurist at one of the world's largest advertising agencies says that for marketers, the world is no longer flat.
Dan Calledine, head of media futures at Dentsu, said regulatory variations and moves to paid media models have made the world "more uneven" than it was during the last decade of Internet development.
Calledine made the comments to the WARC Podcast's Alex Brownsell, speaking about Dentsu's 2025 Media Trends report.
"Over the past ten years, media usage had become very flat, very sort of democratized to the point that now more than 50 percent of people in the world have a smart phone, and on those devices an awful lot of people have the same sorts of apps," he said. "Over the next five years, (media usage) is going to be much more unevenly distributed again."
"It's going to matter much more where you live" and "what sort of budget you have," Calledine said. "A lot of markets wont allow certain sorts of technologies. We get Apple intelligence in the UK if you have a the new iPhone, but in Europe you don't get it."
Calledine said more publishers are charging, pricing out "free" consumers and fragmenting the media landscape.
"Increasingly the (media) paywall is getting tighter and the paywalls are appearing for new things. It removes this flattening, this democratizing effect.," Calledine said, referencing the New York Times, which recently put its podcasts behind its paywall.
"The world is becoming much more uneven. much less flat, much less democratically distributed in terms of technology and content. So it's really about understanding your audience even better than you did before," he said. "We can no longer think-- 'everybody's got a smart phone, so let's do this.'
Calledine said marketers today need local knowledge more than they did even before the Internet.
"You need someone to say, seriously, this won't work in Germany because we simply don't do that with the technology, or this migth work in the UK, but its not going to work in Italy or its not going to work in Argentina."
Dentsu has been publishing an annual Media Trends report for 15 years.
Calledine and Aurelien Loyer served as co-executive editors of Media Trends 2025.
The report describes today as "the algorithmic era of media" and it argues that, while artificial intelligence "permeates the lives" of people across the globe, it will counterintuitively drive brands to "reinvest in storytelling to burst the algorithmic bubble."
"Niche interests" and "deep fandoms" are the only way to attract quality attention, Dentsu argues.
Based in Tokyo, Japan, Dentus has offices in 145 countries and regions. The company's CEO is Hiroshi Igarashi.