I’m at the end of the first week of letting ‘robots’ making my daily choices. The perfect moment to share my first experiences with you! To be honest, Day 1 involved a lot of downloading and understanding how these services work. Less optimal for my mobile storage, but an interesting lesson in finding out a bit more about yourself. First was setting up my accounts and identifying preferences to get the algorithm started. Everything from my fitness goals on the Nike Training Club app , to what diet I’m following to generate daily recipes on Eat This Much . I’ve also looked at how to automate the little tasks or habits in life that I tend to avoid, forget, waste time on, or I can be too lazy to do… Great news – I’ve got a computer to do them for me! Two services that stood out in making my life a little easier this week: Swiftkey and IFTTT. I’ve been really impressed at how quickly Swiftkey learned the way I use different languages (I’m German – or Bavarian if you really want to get it right!) or move my fingers across the keyboard. Have a look at the image on the right to see how the computer has changed my Tap Map. Basically, it’s adjusted the keyboard to my own use of it. Amazing. According to my personal Swiftkey stats I am (already) 12% more productive – awesome! I needed 1,268 taps less on the keyboard and (let’s hope the bosses aren’t reading…!) the automated keyboard corrected 1,096 of my typos. Swiftkey also predicted 27 of my next words. But I reckon this number will go up significantly the more accustomed I become to it. An extremely useful feature is that – depending on who I message in WhatsApp – I don’t have to switch between English and German keyboards anymore. However, I actually expected the computer to learn about my use of slang and abbreviations much faster. This is where the auto-correction takes over, distorting my meaning and resulting in some very funny, but not very coherent messages… My favourite auto-correction by far occurred when my flatmate oversalted our dinner and I messaged my friend about it: “Heute gab’s Megapixel salzige Suppe” – today we had megapixel salty soup (rather than really, which is mega in German) salty soup. The other one I absolutely recommend trying is: IFTTT . For those who haven’t heard about it, IFTTT basically allows you to connect any two services or apps with an IF … THEN connection. Let’s say it’s raining in my location tomorrow… IF the Weather App predicts rain tomorrow, THEN send me a notification on my mobile to “take my umbrella with me”. Very useful for all those who live here in London!! Or, let’s say I am a person who is quite likely to forget to save down email attachments. Easy one to fix: IF someone sends me a Gmail with attachment, THEN save it onto my GDrive. 39 documents have already been prevented from getting lost in the past 7 days! And my all-time favourite travel hacks: IF I am at the airport (map), THEN send a message to my mum with my flight details (Gmail) – and she never has to worry anymore whether I have landed safely or not. IF I arrive in Krakow (map), THEN send myself a map of the city area (Gmail) – worked perfectly when I was there last weekend and saved us a lot of time in finding the right bar for Friday night 😉 IF my friend James tags me on Instagram, THEN save the picture (GDrive) – helpful one to ask him to remove it and save the world from my less appealing party pics. IF I add an image to the “receipt” folder, THEN save it onto my GDrive – sorry OneFifty, I’ll never forget those business trips expenses again… Here’s an example of how simple it is to set up: As I said in the beginning, learning a bit more about your life before automating it was a very interesting process and – let’s face it – we all have those little tasks or things in life that we are likely to forget, waste time on or simply too lazy for, but what do we really do about them? After just one week I found that automation had a huge impact. I highly recommend trying it out! My big focus for week 2 will be food and sport. Let me know any suggestions!

Every month this year, we’re living a different trend , identifiable through social. But you know that…  This month, we’re tackling one of the most interesting, broadest, and longest term trends: automating your life. What do we mean by this? The trend is services which either do things for you, or tell you what to do, based on your data and lifestyle. Why do people want this? It simplifies things, allowing their needs to be better met, and their time to be used more efficiently. When you consider that an adult makes about 35,000 decisions a day (226 on food alone!), you can see both the appeal, but also the market opportunity. What are examples of these services? Well, Spotify’s recommendations can improve the quality of your listening (largely), for no effort. Amazon’s Alexa means you don’t even have to lift a finger to order a pizza. Strava optimises your exercise, for nothing more than taking your phone on a run. A, I (Anne-Catherine) am going to let automation improve my October. This will broadly fall into the following areas: Work Entertainment Travel Wellbeing (exercise, health, food) If you’ve got suggestions of how I should do this, let me know. Here’s my starting point: Work At OneFifty we already use Slack and Todoist to increase our efficiency levels, so to add to this… Boomerang , for Gmail. Swiftkey , when typing on my phone. IFTTT Todoist / Slack integrations Entertainment Only listen to Spotify’s recommendations – no proactive suggestions, for whole month… Clothes We can’t find any good recommendations beyond wearing the same thing every day, a la Mark Zuckerberg. Thoughts? Travel Let CityMapper decide every route for a month Wellbeing Use  Eat This Much  – an automatic meal planner for my food preferences, budget, and schedule. Based on my goals and activity level, use daily workout recommendations from Nike+ Training Club . As a sense of scale, let’s examine why automation is growing on social at the moment: A minimum of 26 million people rely on their smartphones to keep themselves organised (we added up “installs” from the Top 5 todo apps with a 4+ star rating on the GooglePlay store to gather this information). In the context of increasing personal productivity and efficiency levels, relevant automation services such as IFTTT, Fitbit, Siri and Alexa have been mentioned about 15,000 times since the beginning of 2017 in the UK. The past quarter has seen a 22% increase in social mentions compared to last year’s quarter. Facebook VP David Marcus announced during this April’s Facebook F8 conference that ‘there are more than 100,000 bots available on Facebook Messenger today’. That’s up from 33,000 last September (2016). We’ll be updating you on progress… and I look forward to your suggestions on more automations! #automation #september

Ah September. You bring stormy weather (thunder and lightning occur most frequently in the 9th month of the year), spiders and that tingly back to school feeling. What is it about this time of year that gets us reaching for the reset button? I didn’t schedule the start of my new job at OneFifty with our blog themes in mind, but it does seem like a funny coincidence I’ve decided to leap into a fresh new environment in September.   Or is it? After a huge spike the week following New Year, the next most popular time to look for a new role is in late May, early June. Given it takes an average of 3 to 4 months to interview and secure a new role, those in that spike stand a good chance of walking to their first day sometime in September. Is too much of a stretch to think visualising a new start in September could be a common impetus behind a job hunt in June? For so many reasons, this month feels like just the right time to sink our teeth into a new challenge, perhaps something the start of the new academic year has ingrained into us over the years. We’ve had the whole of summer to gradually unwind and regroup, so we feel capable and determined to push ourselves towards a few more targets before the end of the year. This month is the start of the farming calendar when new tenancies traditionally begin and those working on the land begin to sow new seeds after harvest. Even though most of us no longer have any link to agriculture, this rhythm, as old as the hills, might still be influencing the way look at September. Keen to know more about what a new start at OneFifty involves? I’m reliably informed there’s a whole interview with me coming soon, so consider this a teaser… #trend #consumertrends #september #reset #socialtrends

As part of September’s ‘life reset’ , the trend OneFifty is living this month, we’ve identified four ways in which people reset: renewing, restarting, upgrading, and starting something new. Four noble members of the team have each taken up one of these challenges. Katie’s challenge is to start something new, and for this we’ve decided to let social data determine her new hobby. To find out exactly what hobby Katie should take up, we first turned to Facebook Audience Insights, which would be able to give us the key demographic stats on a variety of different interests and hobbies. We started by inputting the key criteria which would need to remain the same for each search: Katie’s gender and location. This would then filter down our search to only women living in London, a good starting point for then refining hobbies by age, education, marital status, and job. The next task was to think of some hobbies which might be taken up by women Katie’s age – this lead us to the Google search query: ‘what are good hobbies for women in their thirties?’ (she tried to claim 20s, no one’s believing that…). Aside from some unsurprising popular choices such as yoga and horse riding, we found some pretty interesting suggestions: pole dancing, foraging and knitting, to name a few. After some serious deliberation, we had our shortlist: baking, ballroom dancing, horse riding, pole dancing, knitting, yoga, volunteering and foraging. Some interesting facts from our findings: 21% of London women who are interested in pole dancing work in a management role, and are 50% less likely to be married. London women with a university education make up 68% of those who are interested in knitting, and make up 70% of those interested in volunteering. 34% of London women who are interested in foraging are aged between 25 and 34; the largest age category for this hobby. Whether this means foraging in the woods or through people’s bins remains unconfirmed. With the percentages given for each demographic category, we took an average to produce an overall compatibility score. And the winner was…. Baking! Here are the stats: 25-34 years old = 35% Married = 47% (London women are 13% more likely to be in this category) University education = 67% Work in management = 25% (London women are 4% more likely to be in this category) In addition, this year the baking conversation gained 242,570 mentions on Twitter from 177,900 users, with 60% of chatter coming from women, and 35.4% from London. On top of that, some of the top influencers within this baking conversation, such as Suzy Pelta and Juliet Sear , are women in their thirties who live in London. It seems as though Katie and baking were destined to come together for September’s life reset. As to be expected, everyone in the office was delighted with this outcome, and can’t wait to be Katie’s guinea pigs this month as she treats us all to some (hopefully) Bake Off worthy creations. The fact she has barely baked before is not a concern. There will be no soggy bottoms in this office. #baking #data #2017trends #Socialdata #consumertrends #socialtrends

You probably know by now that every month of 2017 we’re living a different consumer trend, identified by social media. To name a few: we have turned vegan for a month, braved the London roads cycling and become master gin tasters (not all in one go!). This month we’re exploring beer, and the rising trends within it as a drinks category. In the UK the average person drinks a huge 72 litres of beer per head every single year , with 11,000 beers to choose from. From chocolate, to avocado, to bacon, there is every flavour to quench anyone’s thirst. No wonder beer still makes up the biggest percentage of alcohol drunk across the UK. Although total UK pub beer sales have decreased by 2.9% between 2015 and 2016, the social conversation shows no sign of slowing down. Over the past year more than 3.7M people have mentioned it and there’s been a general increase from September last year to now, with volumes of conversation increasing in a general upward curve. Graph shows hot topics of conversation within the beer conversation There are particular areas of beer which have shown significant growth. Craft beer has exploded onto the UK beer market and has seen 40% growth in sales a year since 2015. This is reflected in the social conversation, which has seen 13% growth in specific mentions of craft beer on this time last year. The secret to the growing success of craft beers may be partially linked to its female popularity. On Facebook, women are as likely as men to like pages containing content about Craft beer, whereas men are more likely to be interested in pages that mention beer generally (and are not craft specific) males are far more are more likely (13% more in fact) to be interested in it. This is different to tweets mentioning craft beer, which have a far more male skew (70:30). This indicates that women – although interested in craft beer – are not (yet) willing to openly associate with craft beer, which could be linked to prior preconceptions and the male stereotype of a ‘beer drinker’. Other beers drunk such as lager and Bitter have seen a smaller increase in social conversation. Interestingly they are both commonly talked about in association to brands, whereas craft beer is generally mentioned in a general term of ‘craft beer’ At OneFifty this month we will aim to try as many beers of possible to let you know if craft beer really is a good as all the social mentions suggest. Which is why we’re off to The Great British Beer Festival. We’ll also be looking at the data in more depth too and see what the most recommend beer is on social, more on conversations between genders and the top beer apps. Cheers. #2017trends #beer #culturaltrends #consumertrends #socialtrends #beertasting #socialmediatrends #trends

The Rooftop Film Club believe that ‘great films deserve great locations’, and they certainly lived up to their promise of providing an iconic city backdrop. We were in the centre of busy Shoreditch with a panoramic view and a stunning sunset. I’d made it; here I was, little old me, living it large in the big smoke, pretending to be a hipster, in my new start-up job. So I hear you asking, what’s this outdoor cinema gig you’re going on about? Well, this month we had the hard job of living our latest social trend, ‘outdoor cinema’ . The search interest in outdoor cinema has more than tripled since 2012 with consumer interest (expressed through Google search) showing us that July is the month to go. We looked at the data and the clear winner in creating social conversation volume was La La Land, raking in 180 mentions in our 3 month sample. So of course (for educational purposes only) we went to experience it for ourselves in one of London’s well-known open air cinemas. We booked in to watch the film at Queen of Hoxton’s rooftop cinema and we were pleasantly surprised with the visit. They transformed the usual rooftop bar setup into a deck chair filled outdoor cinema within 10 minutes. Before we could even pick up our bags to find a seat, Anne-Catherine (the organised German) had already pushed past half the crowd in order to secure the perfect spot. In all fairness, they were actually pretty good; pleasurable distance from the screen, right next to the bar and easy access to the exit for when the boys decided they’d had enough of the ‘soppy rom-com’. You’d expect that being in London town, under a flight path, we wouldn’t be able to hear the film above the outside world noise. Our fear was thankfully unfounded. On arrival we were kitted out with state-of-the-art wireless headphones, allowing us to enjoy the film completely distraction-free. The film was thoroughly enjoyed by all (boys included), it’s easy to see why it is still so popular months after being released. The pool-party scene seemed to be the communal favourite, where Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone cross paths once again. She’s flirting with him while he’s playing keyboards in a cheesy costume with a tacky cover band. Her lip-sync to the song she’d requested, “I Ran”, was undeniably one of the films most enjoyable scenes. The outdoor cinema experience in itself was something to remember. With a barbecue grill, cocktail bar and one of the nicest roofs in Shoreditch. We all enjoyed the experience and I’d genuinely look to go again. So if you’re tall, dark, handsome and preferably under 25, I’d be more than happy to accompany you 😉 #lalaland #outdoorcinema #socialtrends #trends

We’re continuing to live our social trends each month, with veganism , cycling , gin , health reset , gardening and marble being those we’ve identified, and lived, so far. This brings us to July’s pick – outdoor cinema. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a large cinema screen assembled outdoors, in a park or rooftop for example, to be enjoyed in the open air. Check out @frangarnonflectar and @hannah_miles  on Instagram to see which London outdoor cinema’s they visited.   So why are open air cinema’s trending this month? There’s a clear push by brands to promote their events and movies. This started back in 2013 when Samsung partnered with The Nomad  and  Häagen-Dazs with Luna Cinema . Today, we see a very brand driven conversation with summer ticket competitions and event announcements dominating the social conversation (Luna cinema alone accounts for 25% of the overall conversation). People going and talking about outdoor cinemas are somewhat “social butterflies” with many options to have relaxed evenings out. We found the audience most engaged with this topic is urban (predominantly London) and socially very active – in an online and offline world. They are aged between 25 and 44 with 79% being women. Other brands or media that they have an interest in are, for example, London Foods, TimeOut, The Londonist and Event magazine.  As summer properly starts, open air cinemas are becoming a big deal for urban cosmopolitans. We’ve had a look at how our chosen trend compares to some other popular social activities for relaxed summer evenings this year: Mini golf and Escape Room. “Outdoor cinema” had out-talked both competitors in the July and August, where it was almost twice the size in total mentions. Compared to last year’s June, we see a 26% increase in volumes. The conversation around “outdoor cinemas” isn’t the biggest by volume, but a good example of an experience worth sharing on social. There are between 300-350k monthly active users on Facebook showing an interest in “outdoor cinema”, Twitter mentions were just above 20k mentions in the UK over the past year and we estimate there to have been around 50k Instagram mentions. To set those numbers in context, Glastonbury had thirty thousand people generating fifty thousand mentions in the last 7 days. Search interest in outdoor cinema has more than tripled since 2012, with mentions of “open air cinema”, “rooftop cinema” and “outdoor cinema” beginning in early April, and continuing until late September. Consumer interest expressed through Google search shows us that July is THE month. This isn’t really a surprise as this is when British weather is most pleasant (and least risky) to be sat outdoors for a substantial period of time. When we compare this Summer trend with “pub quiz” (a typical year-long interest for us Brits), the interest in “outdoor cinema” overtakes it in the month of July only. With 2014 being a year to remember, as it was the first (and surely not the last) time this occurred. The question now then, is how will we be living this trend? There’s an interesting audience insight here that makes us want to explore a) how brands can expand audiences outside of a London focus and b) what it needs to grow in a fairly brand driven conversation. So pull out your deck chairs, pack the picnic basket and take a look at our calendar , where we’ve put together a small selection of some of the best open air cinema’s that will be screening across the UK this July. #outdoorcinema #socialinsights #socialtrends #trends

This month we’re exploring the growing interest in gardening , and as such, I thought I’d share my personal experience. The story of my allotment I took possession of my allotment five years ago. Took possession misleads one to the basis of it – I pay £25 a year ( a princely sum) to rent it from Wallingford town council. You can read about the history of UK allotments here . I’ve always loved the outdoors, and found living in London challenging. For all the benefits of one of the world’s great cities, it feels unnatural (literally and metaphorically) to me. I and my wife moved to Oxfordshire, and got a garden (at last). Not only did I love cultivating this to be an aesthetically pleasing space (flowers etc), but I began to grow some vegetables in containers. But I wanted more – more veg, more scale, more challenge. The allotment was the solution. The dream of self-sufficiency within my grasp. Only weeds shoulder-height (and I’m 6ft+), and neglect of the plot stood between me and gardening glory. That and teaching myself about gardening. What do I do with my allotment? Well, at the size of a five-a-side football pitch, the horticultural world was my oyster. The first year was really just about weed removal. These days there is a semblance of control, with about a third of the plot (rotating) deliberately unkept at any point in time. I grow a combination of summer and winter vegetables, and try to be broadly organic, which presents challenges as I don’t have the time to do the weed and pest control manually that requires. The limited time I can devote to it also influences some plant choices – I favour things which require relatively little direct intervention, and if they can suppress weeds (like potatoes), even better. The output is decent: we have enough potatoes to last us eight months of the year (and I’m greedy), and likewise onions, for example. Soft fruits are there (gooseberries, blackcurrants, strawberries, raspberries) but they are relatively space ineffective for their yield across the year as a whole. There are some personal favourites which, as I’ve learned with time, I’m increasing or decreasing. For example, this year marks the end of my efforts with asparagus (much as I love it, the 11 months of weeding and large ground required vs the one month of yield just isn’t worth it), whereas rhubarb continues to occupy ever greater areas of my heart and land, with its flavour, lack of attention needed, and long cropping period. My family have mixed feelings. My wife enjoys the outcomes (i.e. the veg) but is less keen on the time it takes or the somewhat spartan appearance. My 18 month old son, however, is a devotee, enjoying the freedom to roll in mud, dig at will, and be occasionally helpful planting onion bulbs, bean plants or dig out weeds. Overall, I spend somewhere around 3 hours a week on it. I think 8 hours a week consistently across a two year block would see me reach allotment perfection. Why do I have an allotment? So, why do I have an allotment, a seemingly incongruous choice for (vaguely) young man who otherwise lives and breathes the internet? Principally: Health /environment – regardless of one’s exact interpretation of science, eating more vegetables one has grown one’s self is undoubtedly good for you Taste – simply put, food you’ve grown yourself tastes better. That’s a combination of the psychosomatic effect of growing it one’s self, the freshness when picked ‘to order’, and varieties one wouldn’t be able to buy which may be poor commercially, but great in flavour terms. Switch off – there’s no screen when you’re gardening, which has a positive effect (every so often) on my well being Pace – you can’t (within reason) rush plants. They grow with the seasons. That’s a useful lesson for a firmly ‘type-A’ individual. Connection with past – I have keen gardeners on both side of my parental line, but also our shared past – an understanding of what truly happens to feed us all. Cost saving – now this is variable, and certainly isn’t the main objective, but it’s undoubtedly true one can save money. My choices aren’t geared around this – my potatoes won’t save me much money, although my rhubarb saves me significant amounts, as do my tomatoes. But it’s definitely there. Am I alone? One thing I’ve been surprised about is others’ surprise. Allotments, let alone gardening are perceived as somewhat antiquated. Certainly not for millennials (I just scrape the technical definition, if not the pejorative definition). But, whenever I talk about it, people start to express their shared enthusiasm, or desire for similar. It validates our research. But yet it rarely gets the acknowledgement by brands it metrics. I’d argue it’s the single most-effective way to engage me in content, for example. We need more allotments – physically and emotionally, in my view. #gardener #allotment #gardening #garden #2017trends #trends

You might have seen that the consumer trend we’re living this month – identified by social data – is gardening. What makes it so big? Here are a couple of previous blogs. But to really get under the skin of it, who better to interview than the man running the social media of the world’s largest gardening charity, and leading authority on all-things green-fingered? Say hello to Ian Reynolds from The RHS… Ian, how have you seen gardening grow in popularity over the last few years? What people consider to be gardening has become so much broader. It’s not just about your garden or allotment, we’re now seeing ‘day-to-day’ gardening indoors. You don’t have to have any outdoor space to think of yourself as a gardener, it could be tending to houseplants or growing herbs in window boxes. Take myself, I definitely consider myself to be a gardener but I don’t have a ‘garden’. I am however planning out what indoor plants I’m going to have (in as many places as possible!) in my new flat. It’s not just me – if you look at gardening Instagrammers, some of them are huge and they solely focus on houseplants. Has social media changed gardening? Definitely, yes, in two main ways. Firstly it’s made it a lot more accessible. It’s much easier to find and ask for advice and share what you’ve achieved to inspire or help others. There’s a real sense of pride from others interacting with what you’ve done, so gardening isn’t a chore. Secondly, which relates to the point above, it’s broadened out the category. Take houseplants, for example, they’re one of the top things that people are sharing on social. Social has been such a great opportunity for gardening to look less fusty – and more cool! Are more people interacting with to The RHS via social? They are, and it’s been a great opportunity to deliver on our vision. Our tagline is ‘Sharing the best in Gardening’. Given our long heritage, some people think we’re closed off – which we’re not at all! Social allows us to be more open – we’re an authority on gardening but we’re also doing something fun! We want more people to enjoy it – it’s brilliant when we can help them do that. In terms of who’s chatting to us – on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram – there’s an amazing diversity and they’ve definitely got younger. Gardening, in all its facets, is for everyone now and people are far less embarrassed to ask questions. That’s what we love to help with on social – get everyone to enjoy gardening whether they’ve got houseplants or a Chelsea garden. How did you become the man behind The RHS’s social media? I’ve always loved nature and greenery. I started out at the Royal Forestry Society after doing Geography at Southampton University – but I knew nothing about Forestry so I was put into marketing! After three months I moved to The RHS and have been here for three and a half years. I really enjoy being able to communicate and help people in such a direct way. It’s also a brilliant community to be part of – we interact a lot with other gardening groups, from the National Trust to Michael Perry – better known as Mr Plant Geek (have a look at his blog or Instagram if you’re not aware of him). More than that, I increasingly see our followers helping each other out and answering questions, which is amazing. Will gardening continue to grow? I think so. Our lives are only getting busier and we’re more conscious of taking meaningful ‘time out’. Your research echoes that – people enjoying spending time gardening and producing something from nothing gives a great sense of achievement and freedom. There’s also mental health benefits which have been widely stated. There’s still work to be done by charities, groups and societies such as ourselves though. Looking back over the last 10 years, we were at a point where 66% of front gardens were green. 66% are now grey. There are huge consequences to that – nature suffers, areas are associated with poverty and environmental problems (like flooding). Also, green spaces have been proven to make us happier. That’s why we have a campaign at the moment called ‘Greening Grey Britain’, with the mission of transforming thousands of grey spaces into living, planted places. Introducing something really small and simple, such as a shrub, flower box or climber, can make a huge difference. Is growth coming from any particular groups of people? That 55+ age group is naturally interested in gardening and has been our heartland. The difference now is that they’re increasingly on social – in the past we struggled to engage with them but not so much any more. Beyond that there’s a group we call young and emerging –  children who are sharing photos of gardens. They’re now exposed to gardens far earlier, they have the means to talk about it and they’re tagging us in after to going to gardens such as Wisley. That’s brilliant. We are trying to be more relevant to more people. We have incredible show gardens but for a lot of people that’s unrealistic for them to replicate so we’ve broadened it out as to how and what we talk about gardening-wise. It’s about hitting that mIddle ground between people who like social events and love their garden, and then bridge that gap to inspire them to get into gardening. It’s why we’re involved in other shows and markets – to expose what we do to more people. It’s more than mowing lawns and cutting hedges! Finally, if some of our readers have been inspired to get more green-finger themselves, where a good place to start when it comes to houseplants? People think it’s is hard, but it’s not. There are really easy places to start – and I should know because whilst I’m great at talking about it, I’m not a natural gardener! If you’re looking at houseplants, go for a cactus. They’re very difficult to kill (although embarrassingly I have managed it… I now have 30-40 growing very successfully!). Or look at what your not so green-fingered friends are growing and copy them! Once you’ve mastered a cactus you can move up to a succulents – also pretty difficult to kill – and then maybe onto a fern. But look around you, see what other people are doing and ask questions! #rhs #gardening #socialinsights #garden #Socialdata #socialtrends #may

As part of this month’s trend Matt and Olivia decided to cook up a storm with ingredients which were the latest food trends. Here’s how it went, from Olivia. Our trend identified turmeric, cauliflower, matcha and avocado as the up and coming social foods . Not ingredients I would commonly put together! I mean who doesn’t love a matcha covered cauliflower with avocado and  turmeric dip?!?! Turns out most people… So we did some research and came up with two dishes that sounded, at the very least, edible. For our main course we decided upon roasted turmeric cauliflower fajitas, with all the dips, and for dessert dark chocolate matcha date bars. The first step was roasting the cauliflower. Being a cauliflower virgin, I didn’t quite realise that there is a large stalk in the middle of the vegetable which made it quite hard to cut (got there in the end!). We then placed all the cauliflower on a baking tray and covered it with turmeric and olive oil. We left it to roast for 30 minutes. Whilst that was cooking I set about making the guacamole. This involved scraping all the flesh of the avocado into a bowl  and mashing it with garlic, lime and chilli flakes. Being head chef I delegated the mashing of the avocado to Matt, unfortunately he took mashing literally and mashed the avocado with a potato masher… We then chopped the rest of the  vegetables (courgette, peppers and onions) and stir fried them with more turmeric and BBQ seasoning. It was then ready to eat! We loaded the fajitas with the cauliflower mix, guacamole, tomato salsa, refried beans and a little bit of cheese. I have to admit it surpassed my expectations – it was very tasty. The cauliflower added a great texture and taste to the mix.  One of Matt’s flatmates even said ‘1 out of 3 times I would have this instead of chicken’: a win for us! We then started making dessert. We chose a relatively simple dessert: dark chocolate matcha bars. This involved adding dates (pitted), almonds, dark cocoa powder, a few spoons of matcha, some peanut butter and maple syrup – all blitzed in a blender. We then rounded the mixture into balls and had a taste. As a date lover I really enjoyed it! It would be great as a dessert, or even a pre gym snack. #healthreset #cooking #healthy #food #April

We’re spending 2017 living a different consumer trend , identified using social data. You can check Jan , Feb , March and April , but May sees us getting green fingered, with gardening. Yes, gardening. Year-on-year growth in consumer intent is witnessed through Google search, whilst social media data shows that May is THE month where we go plant potty. The spring is not just when plants grow apace, but when social discussion of gardening lights up. Over the last 5 years we’re seeing a growth in searches of approximately 30% on 2012 levels, with 8m social media users in the UK interested. The conversation itself is sizeable: just shy of 3m tweets in the UK in the last 12 months, 40k+ blog posts, whilst Instagram sees over 5m shots snapped (all time). In Instagram hall of fame terms that’s far behind cats (over 100m) but bigger than rugby, for example. Analysing the conversation and behaviours is instructive. It can broadly be clustered into 3 core behaviours: The enjoyment of spending time at home Home improvements Learning more about gardening / discovering specific information More discrete within all this are the serious gardeners – who form part of the 3rd behaviour. This is, overall, a trend driven by everyone, not just the committed enthusiast. Men discover gardening in their late twenties, judging by Facebook data, whilst women get interested in their mid-thirties. Notably, at least as expressed through social media, it is the under 45’s who are keenest on gardening, belying some of the traditional stereotypes. The trigger for said interest appears to be getting engaged – with interest being markedly higher amongst those tying the knot – although this also correlates to increased home ownership, with the separation of the two factors nigh on impossible. So, if that’s the size and growth of interest in gardening, what are we going to be doing as we live the trend? Well, we’re going to be sharing more in-depth research on aspects of the gardening trend, we’ll be talking to some of the top creators, and we’ll be getting our hands dirty. Literally, and metaphorically.

We believe marketing is effective when it focuses on actual behaviours – the things we all do, like it or not, everyday. Social and digital data sets can often (but not always) allow us to identify these due to the scale and speed with which they can be gathered. That’s why, this year, we’re identifying consumer trends and then living them ourselves. In January it was veganism, February cycling, and March gin. So, it was with a degree of satisfaction (OK, a lot of smugness), that we read ONS’s inflation basket update this week. For those unfamiliar, ONS is the national stats body for the UK, and they run a 700 item strong basket, which is intended to be reflective of UK household consumer spending. Prices in that basket are then used to calculate inflation. Every year the basket’s composition is updated to reflect changing household purchasing patterns. It is one of the most accurate guides to what the UK is really buying, and the annual updates provide a snappy barometer of what’s rising and falling in wider consumer popularity. This year (2017) saw gin, cycling helmets and non-dairy milks (e.g. almond, soy) enter the basket. Or, in other words, items which directly confirm the trends we’d previously identified through social data (veganism, cycling, gin). An important caveat to our prescience is that we aren’t claiming our research predicted a trend through social data (although that is sometimes possible) – but identified a purchasing trend which was underway through a parallel series of behavioural data (social content creation and/or engagement which meets certain patterns). This work demonstrates the potential to use consumer social behaviour to identify and interact with realtime purchase shifts. The pressure is now somewhat ‘on’ for the trends for the remainder of 2017 we identify, having secured a 100% accuracy record in Q1…