Girl trends, AI anxiety, Trump trials, Barbenheimer, and billion-dollar music tours – 2023 snuck out from the strangeness of the pandemic years and revealed itself in technicolour cultural chaos. But what does it all mean? Canvas8 presents Keeping100 – our bumper end-of-year insight review.
What was 2023? It has had a certain everything, everywhere, all at once vibe. Bed bugs took to the streets and made their way from Paris to London and beyond. The viral ‘Roman Empire’ trend got its own rap in an SNL sketch. Pop culture fan faves Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, and Barbara Streisand (and Prince Harry) all released scandalous and headline-generating memoirs. Nepo babies made slogan tees about being nepo babies and annoyed everyone even more. UFO culture re-entered the American consciousness. Sam Altman was fired and re-hired by OpenAI, and André 3000 released… a flute album.
There hasn’t been a singular mic drop moment in 2023; instead, it has brought a lot of being-on-the-backfoot energy. People experienced violent geopolitical instability alongside rising living costs, ongoing energy prices, inflation, record-breaking heat waves, AI everything, and all of the curious and outlandish cultural moments that kicked the surreal scale up a notch. In all, it has been challenging and out of the ordinary on a scale not seen before.
Behaviourally, it has given us a lot to explore. As we approach the year’s end, we can barely believe we’re already introducing our next Best of Insights review – but here we are. We’ve dug deep at Canvas8 to review the ups and downs of the past 11 months for our annual Best of Insights 2023 report.
Generating over 4,000 insights each year across 15 sectors and 14 markets, Canvas8 tracks human behaviour from emergent signs of habitual change to fully formed Macro Behaviours. This year, we’ve created a series of themes that spotlight the range of behavioural changes and cultural shifts we’ve seen and tracked over 2023. The result? Our 2023 Best of Insights report. Our team has looked back to look ahead and make sense of what went down over a wild and sinewy year, analysing thousands of insights to produce ten themes across 100 insights.
When the rate of change is so pacy, it’s essential to take a moment to reflect on where we’re at and what that means for where we’re headed. Welcome to our end-of-year insights finale – we hope you’ll find 2023 as complicated, mysterious, surreal, and energising as we did!
Download the full Best of Insights 2023 report here.
Want to hear from our team of editors? On Tuesday, 12th of December, we’re running a public event to dive into the report and discuss our Best of Insights 2023 findings. Sign up now to learn more about the trends and cultural shifts that took place this year which will stick around for 2024 – and ask questions about how these apply to your role, brand, or business.
DATE: 12 December 2023
TIME: 16:00 GMT • 08:00 PST • 11:00 EST
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