This week’s bite-sized summary of 5 inflection points shaping today’s world: Revenge travel, Roblox, the status of the crypto market, Covid booster shots, and plant-based milk.
1. Revenge, best served on a plane?
Even though Covid is still raging across many parts of the world, summer is heating up and some borders are opening for international travel. After being stuck in the same country or even city for the past year and a half, those who are willing and able are traveling with a vengeance. NWO’s signal indicates that the chatter around “revenge travel” is currently at an inflection point. But due to the uncertainty of ever-changing travel-related Covid regulations, NWO’s forecast suggests a stalling interest in “revenge travel” over the next 3 months.
2. Roblox comes tumbling down
Online game platform Roblox saw an accelerated growth during the pandemic but is losing steam as its number of users decline with the reopening of schools and reallocation of parental spending. This correlates to NWO’s Impact Score signaling a plunge from a peak of 100 in June to slightly above 60 in July, but the forecast suggests that interest is likely to stabilize over the next three months.
3. Crypto in limbo
After reaching its all-time high of $64,000 in April, Bitcoin’s value plunged 50% just a month later and has been hovering around $31,000 - $35,000 ever since. Ethereum and altcoins crashed along with Bitcoin, losing 50% - 90% of their peak value. For most retail investors, the crash is a chance to purchase crypto at a discount, with the top two coins by market cap still garnering the most interest. Despite Elon Musk’s efforts to pump Dogecoin through tweets and his appearance on SNL, it’s been losing its value as the memecoin that started out as a joke has yet to see any real-world usage. NWO’s forecast suggests consolidation in the crypto market over the next year as investors wait for a breakout confirmation before capitalizing.
4. We need to talk about the booster shot
In April, Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla said that people will likely need a booster shot within six to 12 months of getting fully vaccinated. The booster shot narrative is mostly driven by the US and Israel, as Pfizer is meeting with US health officials to seek authorization for a third shot, while Israel has started administering the third dose of Pfizer vaccine to at-risk individuals. With the vaccine’s decreased efficacy against the more contagious Delta variant, interest in the booster shot is also coming in from Jakarta, Indonesia as the country is currently facing a Covid crisis, with a record high of 54,517 new Covid cases on 14 July.
Interestingly, most people find out about booster shots via search engines first even though social dominates the chatter in terms of volume. This could be due to conflicting media reports on the need for a third shot, leading to people doing their own research in an attempt to clear up any confusion they might have. NWO indicates a sustained interest in the booster shot over the next 3 months.
5. Plant-based milk: Which reigns supreme?
The hottest food trend of the past few years is plant-based milk, with oat milk seeing an explosive growth that’s been unstoppable. The oat milk trend was kickstarted by Swedish oat milk company Oatly, which went public last year with a $10 billion valuation and is backed by Blackstone Growth, Oprah Winfrey, Natalie Portman, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Hype aside, oat milk is also a more sustainable dairy alternative compared to soy and almond milk, which perhaps explains the latter’s downward trend.
About nwo.ai
nwo.ai's predictive platform enables leading Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to anticipate and track global cultural shifts by aggregating, analyzing, and producing actionable reports on human-generated data. We are leveraging petabytes of external, noisy, and unstructured data from various sources - including search, social media, blogs, news, patent databases, SEC filings and we are continuously adding more sources. Our mission is to answer the what, when, and most importantly 'why' behind a consumer trend and enable our customers to detect these shifts as early as possible.
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