The marketing world is made up of strategies and trends. A whole division of this world is made for anticipating and projecting what comes next, and it just so happens that this division is wrong… all of the time. Generally people only remember the correct predictions, like Apple as a company anticipating a market for digital music. The following Throwback Thursday series will consider stories out of the the business and marketing world which got it wrong and not only wrong but laughably wrong. It will also highlight stories which now seem very obvious but were newsworthy at the time.
This internet thing, it might be good as a news source:

(Source: New York Times)

(The best selling phone of 2004 didn’t have a news app, but it did have a color screen!)
Job Boom’s that We Never Saw:

(Party like it’s 1999)
The article talks about rising unemployment and how there would be a bounce back: “At this particular moment in economic history, that is quite a statement. Two million workers have been downsized or displaced since the recession of 2001. At 6.2 percent, the national unemployment rate is the highest it’s been in nine years, and the number of new jobless claims has sat above 400,000 for 20 weeks. To base hiring policy today on the prospect of a return to the tight labor market of 1999 seems not just counterintuitive–it defies the evidence of one’s own eyes… The cause of the labor squeeze is as simple as it is inexorable: During this decade and the next, the baby boom generation will retire. The largest generation in American history now constitutes about 60 percent of what both employers and economists call the prime-age workforce–that is, workers between the ages of 25 and 54. The cohorts that follow are just too small to take the boomers’ place. The shortage will be most acute among two key groups: managers, who tend to be older and closer to retirement, and skilled workers in high-demand.” This was from Paul Kaihla of CNN Money, September 1 of 2003. Ten years later here we are, absent of this ‘Job Boom,’ and more seriously wondering how to project such a serious projection. Media like this is commonplace in business sections and it’s refreshing on this Throwback Thursday to see that often times it turns out to be incredibly wrong, and incredibly unfortunate.
The Evolution of Digital News Marketing:

(The Beginning of Digital News Marketing)