Alanna Strauss, exec VP, entertainment and Culture Lab, The Martin Agency
What is most often considered ancillary in advertising—entertainment, social, and experiential—will become more of the focus as we see that those brand moments continue to capture incredible mindshare. Traditional advertising will always play an important role, but it will no longer be the main hub with everything else surrounding it.
Emily Stutzman, CEO and co-owner, Happylucky
In a backlash to AI, misinformation, and the isolation, loneliness and overload of digital media, consumers will seek out more analog, connected, emotional and sensory brand experiences. We will see brands prioritize creating meaningful connections, loyal relationships and KPIs rooted in memory, like brand recall and brand affinity, being prioritized over short-term vanity metrics like impressions and likes. Call it collective effervescence—the power of IRL experiences to connect our humanity, bridge divides, align us in purpose and shift hearts and minds.
David Suarez, co-founder, Bandits & Friends
With the upcoming election and continued disarray in the world, humor will continue its rise and become the most popular and effective genre of advertising. Digital and social will continue to drive aspects of business, but with the inconsistency of some platforms (i.e., X (formerly Twitter), YouTube inventory being in question, etc.), brands will course correct from a somewhat unhealthy focus on performance marketing to prioritizing long-term brand building. Also, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will announce they are having a baby. It’ll be a boy, 9.1 pounds. You heard it here first.
Alphonzo Terrell, CEO and co-founder, Spill
In 2024, URL and IRL will come closer and closer together. The most successful brands will create products that can facilitate online and offline connections as a single user experience. We’ve seen some interesting examples in retail, but there is a really strong opportunity to see this applied to new sectors like QSR, social and others. At Spill, we want to make the in-person experience as rich and rewarding as the online experience by partnering with like-minded brands.
Alicia Tillman, CMO, Delta Airlines
We still very much live in an experience economy. This was the case pre-COVID and it is arguably at an even higher level now as customers continue to have many choices when it comes to brands. They are absolutely prioritizing brands that focus on driving their loyalty and bringing them exceptional experiences. We think about that tremendously as marketers as an absolute priority and focus for us.
We are sponsors of Team USA and we are heading into an Olympic year in 2024. That’s really big for us. It’s also a presidential year in the U.S. and that’s a big one. When you have a presidential year, the whole question of trust is one of the first things that is on people’s minds and if they feel they’re being failed in any way from the political system, they naturally turn to brands to give them a sense of hope and promise.
Also read: Olympics 2024—how Team USA is targeting Gen Z
Rahul Titus, global head of influence, Ogilvy
2024 is the year where you’re going to start seeing employee advocacy really come into its own in terms of fully formed programs—everything from employee retention to marketing to loyalty. The most exciting part to me is employers using employees as part of their B2C marketing and comms strategies. We’ve seen beauty brands like Sephora and L’Oreal really lead the way in this and incentivizing their employees to basically promote their products [on social media] with discount codes and access to exclusive offers. A lot of that has been quite grassroots, so far, but I think in 2024, it's going to suddenly get very professional.
Another one of the big trends we’re going to see 2024 is the growth of livestreaming, which we’ve already started to see in 2023. We always talk about our phones being our second screen and how you would watch a reality show while also looking at X (formerly Twitter) to look at what people are saying about it, but we're now seeing that second screen becoming the main screen. We don’t believe in TV being your main screen anymore in the world of influence. You want to watch a TV show? TikTok. You want to watch an influencer? TikTok. And with the launch of TikTok Shop, we’re going to really see influencer commerce become mainstream and TikTok Live being almost the QVC of social media.
Lauren Tucker, founder and CEO, Do What Matters
Talent.Talent.Talent. The divide between talent and management will continue to widen as agency and holding company leaders desperately hang on to old-school, 20th-century management practices and policies. Across generations, talent will find new ways to express their creativity and business acumen outside the walls of traditional agencies, and marketers will go to this well of talent to find more powerful ways of connecting to the increasingly multicultural and global market. Holding company leaders who realize their primary mission is to nurture and advance talent will win more business than those who focus on deal-making. Agency leaders and marketers who marginalize or abandon inclusion, equity, and diversity will yield share-of-market to enlightened leaders who know inclusion management is the key strategy for managing 21st-century talent and engaging the 21st-century consumer.
Tyler Turnbull, global CEO, FCB
In 2024 we’re going to see even more CEOs embracing marketing as an imperative to business growth. A fundamental shift is already occurring in the relationship between CMOs and CEOs. With greater pressure on marketing investments, creativity will prove the most effective way to activate business across every touchpoint in a consumer journey. I expect to see more innovation in the way creative ideas are being delivered–more unlikely channels such as email/CRM and commerce, which are quickly becoming the go-to creative canvases for brands. In other words, great work will continue to separate itself from the mass of mediocrity and true marketers will lean into it more than ever.
Steve Viglione, exec VP, executive director, marketing science, BBDO
2023 was the year of generative AI, a year of radical transformation. But what was notably missing from this movement was each and every company’s sales, customer and proprietary data. Models were primarily built on public data. Concerns around data security and privacy held companies back from super-powering their models with first-party data, and for good reason.
In 2024, companies will realize the power of their internal data by building those same large language models on top of their own data in privacy-safe ways. Marketers will wake up, open their computers, and instead of looking at screen after screen of dashboards, they will simply ask a blank text box, “What do I need to do this week to improve my campaign?” The invisible analyst will evaluate the current state of the campaign, explain how it’s performing, identify the risk areas and make suggestions on how to improve.
Aaron Walton, CEO and founding partner, Walton Isaacson
Because AI is definitely part of any 2024 trend discussion, I decided to ask ChatGPT to speak to 2024 ad agency predictions. AdAge readers may be relieved or at least amused to read this response: “As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, I don't have specific information on advertising agency industry predictions for 2024. Industry trends and predictions can evolve rapidly, and new insights may have emerged since then. To get the most accurate and up-to-date information, I recommend checking industry reports, publications, and reliable sources in the advertising and marketing sector.”
AI is a tool, a multi-faceted tool that helps with innovation, ideation, and investigation of a whole host of variables. I see 2024 bringing a greater appreciation of AI.
If everything lives “in culture,” and we need culture to identify how we as human beings connect with the world around us, then the promise of AI isn’t to prostitute the culture. It’s to present clear signals around how culture is being built and by whom. While bias can still live within the people programming the machines (including those that are AI-powered), the hope is that AI is built intuitively to discern when outside voices are not being accounted for. But for bias not to live within AI (as Google found out with Tensor flow), the people programming it have to come from a position of anti-bias first.
Over the years, DE&I added a B for Belonging but, no matter the letters, the actual work behind the idea receives a lot of lip service across corporate America. Diversity was diluted once virtually any combination of people could fall under the diversity umbrella. Similarly, inclusion. But Belonging speaks directly to company culture and, when paired with Equity, gets to the heart of things employees of all walks of life are hungry for. So, 2024 could be the year of BE. Get Belonging and Equity right and the other key dimensions of DE&I success will follow.
Also, those of us who already prioritize diversity and inclusivity (mostly diverse people ourselves) are tired of the way others treat this like a trend or optional. But we are not going to let this critical area of our business slip backward on our watch. Leaders are becoming more and more diverse, and they are calling the shots.
Craft. It’s a given that craft be present in what we do, yes, but more often than not, today’s agency creatives are playing a game of imitation, relying largely on the labor and talent of others to express the intangible of their own imagination. So with the rise of generative AI prompt-based tools in creative agencies, I am already seeing a delta of who does and does not know the basis of their craft to communicate their ideas. From Bauhaus versus brutalism design and persuasive versus expository copy, to understanding the impact of Spike Lee’s double dolly can have visually in a film … knowing these and more specific craft references are how our creative instincts go from head to hand, without relying on a mid-level designer to “find something” when, as an art director, you should know the art you want to direct.
In all, I predict we will see how far we can push our imagination with these tools quicker and with clarity—that is if we invest the time in knowing the history and roots of our craft. Crazy right? AI will force the analog, “back to basics” in us after all. No YouTube tutorial, just craft vibes.
Deacon Webster, co-founder and chief creative officer, Walrus
We’re heading toward an industry where there are only two types of ad agencies: VML/Accenture-type behemoths that differentiate themselves around pipes, heft, AI, data, reporting, optimizing, price—everything BUT the creative product—and independent shops whose bread and butter will be to experiment and push creativity forward in a highly customized way. I see continued trouble for the mediocre middle.
Daniel Weisman, group media director, Noble People
2024 will be one of the hardest years ever for brands to stand out. The presidential election will squeeze ad space, sour consumer moods and create a toxic cloud over cultural tentpoles and brand-safe staples like the NFL. Fresh video content will be delayed, leading to clutter. Streaming services will hike prices and lose reach. The open web will become irrelevant. Meta and Google will continue to homogenize who you target and how you show up via AI. Budgets may shrink. Inflation may persist. You can’t just rinse and repeat the same strategies in 2024.
James Young, exec VP, head of digital production, BBDO North America
In 2024, I expect significant advancement in the [gen AI] space, but perhaps not with the same kinds of headline-grabbing splashiness we’ve come to expect and get excited by. From what I’ve seen and heard, I think the fine-tuning of models is going to get where we need to start creating consistent outputs (characters, for example) and highly reliable objects. For example, being able to train a model on a particular product and then generate images with one-to-one representations of that object will have significant impacts on asset production. Especially when generated by models trained on licensed materials.
I also expect these tools to become a lot more user-friendly in ways that allow even more people to apply them to their workflows. They’ve already attracted massive user bases, but I expect to see a big shift towards people adopting the utility of these tools into their day-to-day work habits.