Navigating the New Marketing Normal: Guidance for More Effective Marketing in 2024

It’s safe to say that not many of us were expecting 2023 to be such a disruptive year for marketing. Generative AI was the phrase on everyone’s lips, and, coupled with an explosion of data and an ever-changing digital advertising environment, many of us have been thinking about how our marketing strategies will need to adapt to this new landscape.

While it’s hard to accurately predict what’s coming up in 2024, it’s clear that businesses (advertisers and agencies alike) are feeling acute pressure to showcase to their clients and investors how they can deploy AI to drive impact. With this in mind, here are three things to consider as you finalise your plans for the coming year:

1. Efficiency continues to be the name of the game in 2024

In 2023, economic uncertainty put a new level of pressure on marketing budgets. The economic outlook we faced a year ago forced the global marketing community to dig deep and look for ways to find waste and drive efficiencies. Thankfully going into 2024, the economy feels a bit more stable and budgets a bit more certain. And yet, due to the sudden step change that we’ve seen based on the mass availability of genAI, marketers are being asked the question yet again - how will you drive even greater efficiency this year?

2. Creative is the next frontier - and we can’t sacrifice effectiveness

Creative has long been the foundation of advertising, where impassioned artists made the case for their big, blockbuster idea. And that won’t change. What has changed is the level of complexity required to execute that idea. So many hands (and now genAI technologies) will touch and tweak that creative before it goes live in a local market near you. And this has consequences for how your big idea lands. Research by CreativeX estimates that in 2023 brands wasted more than $200 billion in digital media spend on ads that weren’t fit for platform. Truly successful creative relies not only on an inspired idea but also on its excellent execution.

The good news, there are huge efficiencies to be gained in this context, and AI is set to unlock several work streams. Creative directors, and their partners in marketing, are fretting about how genAI will impact content generation - and rightfully so, while the cost per creative may well come down, there is a real risk that creative quality decreases even further.

The good news is that AI can help to ensure that your big idea lands properly by establishing systems that validate creative excellence in every execution of your ad. As genAI ramps up and there is ever more content in the system, excellent execution of your brilliant creative idea will become even more critical. AI systems can provide this assurance, not just for one ad, but for every iteration of your ad at scale.

3. Drive creative transformation at scale, by building AI systematically

2023 was the year that brands and agencies rushed to showcase what AI could do. Everyone endeavoured to jam some version of AI into their narrative - and into a campaign here or there to show the world that they were up with the times.

If we agree that the creative landscape represents a huge opportunity to drive greater efficiency and impact, then let’s level set - you’ll need more than a flash in the pan. Marketers’ success, long term, will be defined by their ability to put AI to work systematically and sustainably. The key to successful integration of any new technology is to consider where within your current workflows and architecture that tech can have the largest impact.

We’re working with some of the most sophisticated brands and agencies in the world, to look at their creative workflows and the systems that support them, and to think through where to build AI in to have the greatest impact. GenAI can sit side-by-side with AI-powered data collection and learning technology. They can be plugged into your DAM and across your workflows - so they are used by the agencies developing and deploying content, ensuring creative excellence and driving learnings, by connecting to all the platforms and technologies that underpin the creative process.

Marketers have worked hard with their agency partners to construct sophisticated solutions for content development and deployment. For AI to have an impact, it will be strategically applied across workflows to drive impact at each step of the journey.

The time to do the heavy lifting is now. As you finalise your plans for 2024, remember that this is the year that AI will enable some marketers to drive step change. It will become clear who’s making the most out of the AI revolution. Will you spend your year focused on simple, flashy exhibitions of AI? Or will you and your teams do the heavy lifting and start to consider how AI technology can plug into your creative systems to drive efficiency and effectiveness at scale across your business? Because those who don’t will soon fall behind.