It seems like every January, sensational headlines compete for our attention by telling us that, this year, everything will be different. But the arrival of AI and the precipitous rate with which it has dominated marketers’ mind space and agendas lends the “everything-is-changing” narrative more credibility.
And, while I’ll leave the predictions to Nostradamus, the four waves below have all gained velocity in 2023 and appear ready to crest in 2024. Here’s how we can prepare:
Everything becomes an advertising network
The digital landscape will continue to merge commerce and advertising, increasing in complexity as ecommerce brands like Amazon become horizontally embedded in digital platforms like Meta, and everything from Uber to Walmart to Netflix to telcos becomes an ad network.
However, it’s far from a one-size-fits-all. Marketers will need to update their tools and workflows to automatically keep up with the changing content and format requirements of each platform to ensure their message aligns with the environment where it’s being received.
Ad network complexity will exacerbate digital wastage
With over $450bn in digital media spend forecasted for 2024, nearly $234bn (52%) is predicted to be spent on digitally suboptimal ads. Research by CreativeX found that in 2020 and 2021, brands wasted over half of their digital ad budget on content that was not set up for success on digital due to incorrect formatting, poor application of sound, missing branding, and more.
As the advertising landscape gets mired in complexity and more players attempt to take a bite out of advertising budgets, the last mile of creative execution will become more important to the successful realisation of creative campaigns. Brands will need to develop processes for successfully adjusting their campaigns to be fit for each platform to avoid wasting millions on ads that are not properly set up to succeed.
GenAI will make things better, but also worse
The good news? Speed and cost of content creation will decrease, and the floor for decent bearable ads should too. The bad news? If we struggled during the last few years of content proliferation, it’s time to buckle up – as volume increases by 10x to 100x, brands will experience quality and decisioning bottlenecks due to there being more content than there are people who can review and approve it.
The irony? AI can be applied to solve the problem that AI is generating, building content QA systems that automatically check content for everything from digital suitability to brand consistency and more to ensure that even the ads the robots make for you are aligned to your brand and your existing creative learnings.
The great reunion: are media and creative getting back together?
Over the past two decades, the media agencies had all the data, and therefore held most of the power. Now that technology has opened up marketers’ ability to tap into a new data source and extract data out of every image and video, the playing field is changing, especially since creative data is going to be a necessary ingredient for building brand-specific (compared to generic and off-the-shelf) GenAI applications.
Forward-leaning brands are uniting teams under creative excellence departments, applying creative data across the entire business, from agency measurement to campaign and creative decisioning itself. Agencies are bound to follow suit.
As Bill Gates famously pointed out:“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.” He said this in warning, to remind us to avoid being “lulled into inaction”.
The waves cresting in 2024 are less trendy patterns reserved for the early adopters, and more the result of long-standing industry gravitational forces finally coming together to change how we make, measure, and deploy great advertising at scale.
Anastasia Leng is founder and CEO of CreativeX
