As the holiday season approaches and we begin to plan for 2024, our inboxes are often inundated with industry forecasts, evolving trends, strategic priorities, and “expert” recommendations. But what trends are worth the hype? According to the latest ad landscape report
, the marketing and advertising industry is gearing up for a year of transformative change. Here’s your insider's guide to the trends worth mentioning and the strategies you'll see prioritized in the new year.?
- The cookie is down to its last crumb—this time for real. Although Google has yet to confirm when the ID deprecation will be complete, the expected shift is still planned to happen sometime in 2024. In the new year, marketers and brands will be forced to begin the shift from third-party cookies and will look to build strategies around data aggregation, compliance and predictive modeling. The absence of cookies will also likely mean a showdown between identity providers, or those attempting to leverage deterministic, probabilistic and contextual ID services.?
- AI continues to be integrated into… everything. But what will the areas of focus be? All signs point to creative ideation, content creation and media planning. Google is also set to roll out generative search, which will end up reducing traffic to long-tail publishers’ sites and apps. However, on the heels of ID deprecation, AI will likely be used to supercharge contextual targeting and fill necessary gaps in consumer data.?
- TV ads will become increasingly hard to measure as Nielsen sunsets its legacy TV currency. The massive shift from linear to connected TV (CTV) over the past decade has rendered Nielsen’s methodology obsolete, requiring a measurement evolution of sorts, which will be slated to take place sometime in September of 2024. What does this mean? Nielsen will likely forfeit its iron grip on TV data, and the monopoly on measurement will end.??
- The future of streaming is bright, but it’s also ad-supported. Companies like Netflix, Disney and Amazon have all jumped on the ad-supported bandwagon over the last 18 months. What does this mean? Three major streaming services that were previously ad-free will now have plenty of inventory to offer as they hope to satisfy pent-up demand from advertisers.?
- Platforms will seek new ways to collaborate, fostering a more diverse and competitive market. Smaller “walled gardens” (like Twitter) will continue to look for potential alliances within their larger counterparts (i.e. Google Ads) in order to scale reach and increase ad inventory. Pinterest and Snapchat brokered a similar deal with Amazon in 2023, but who will be next?
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