​With the new year just starting, many conversations in the workplace will revolve around “the next big thing.” How will marketers engage consumers, viewers and fans this year more effectively than last year?

Fast Company narrowed down the many possibilities with insights from creatives, digital thought leaders and brand executives about what they’d like to see in 2015. A few of those answers are below:

1. The use of celebrity will increase, but the definition of “celebrity” is changing.

Tor Myhren, worldwide chief creative officer at Grey, says that as big brands continue to use celebrities in their campaigns, “micro-celebrities (like YouTube celebs) will continue to grow and become a more central part of media and partnership strategies.”

2. Technology will become a much bigger, and simultaneously much smaller, part of marketing.

“The result for our business is to create new and innovative ideas around the convergence of digital and experiential, that also has the ability to be documented socially,” said Brent Choi, chief creative and integration officer at JWT Canada/JWT Toronto, who talks about the growing conversation around unplugging devices in favor of face-to-face interaction. He also says that the growing development of technology often pushes consumers to want less of it in the campaigns they see, often choosing experiential, true stories over highly technical, virtual messages.

On the other hand, Linda Boff, global executive director of brand marketing at General Electric, says virtual reality will mark the coming year’s campaigns, pointing to Oculus Rift and connected TVs to create both short- and long-form original content.

3. The user is king.

Marketing needs to include more humanity in the increasingly technological field, according to many creatives. “More soul, more instinct, more humanity. More human truths, less advertising truths,” said John Patroulis, chief creative officer at BBH NY. Others add that 2015 is the perfect time to take all of that data collected from last year to really get to know users/viewers/consumers and talk to them on their level.

Boff added: “I worry that with all the shiny new media toys we all have access to, it’s going to become easier to forget that the User is King. As marketers, we always must remember that someone is on the other end of the experiences we are creating.”

4. This is definitely the year for risk-takers.

The year ahead is the one to stand out, according to most of the creatives interviewed. “People are busy. Their lives are complicated,” said Jon Jackson, global creative director at Huge. “There’s so much choice that there’s not a lot of point in creating something that’s not intended to be the best in its class.” Thus creates even more of a need than ever before to stand out from the competition.

Allie Kline, CMO at AOL Advertising agreed wholeheartedly: “We are amidst the most disruptive time in media’s history and we want to be the company and brand that makes room for unprecedented transformation in both culture and code.”

Read more at Fast Company.

Brief Take: Marketers agree that the year ahead looks promising, as long as creatives continue to focus on the user and not the “shiny toys” that sometime distract from a campaign’s main message.

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