Good year / bad year

As the festive season draws near and thoughts turn to what's in store for the industry in 2024, we at Contagious prefer to reflect on the year just gone. It's much easier to make judgements than predictions, you see. It's also more fun. So here are the people, things, concepts and entities that we think will be either relishing or ruing 2023.

Good year for…Saatchi & Saatchi. The storied creative agency landed the most prestigious brief in UK advertising in May when it won the pitch for the John Lewis Partnership’s advertising account. The retailer’s annual Christmas campaign is a festive institution and presents a massive opportunity for a creativity agency to let loose and shine. But it also presents an opportunity for an agency to fall very publicly on its face. It’s too early to say whether Saatchi & Saatchi’s Snapper campaign, which introduced a message about embracing new traditions, will get John Lewis’ tills ringing like it hopes, but it's clear that the agency didn’t f**k the job up, from a creative standpoint, at least. That's worth celebrating.

Bad year for…Sir Martin Sorrell. The ad mogul’s holding company, S4 Capital, issued three profit warnings in 2023, for which he blamed hostile macroeconomic conditions and a slowdown among tech-sector clients in particular.

Good year for…Meta. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 would be a ‘year of efficiency’ for Meta but it has been so much more. As well as reducing its Q3 expenses by 7% in the third quarter, the company also managed to increase revenue by 23% over the same period, and profit by over 100%. This ‘champagne and cocaine’ combination (as professor Scott Galloway likes to call it) has pushed Meta’s stock price almost back to its all-time high.

Bad year for…X. Whatever you think about Elon Musk, it is true that he has accomplished hard things in his career. And to be fair he has pulled off something as the owner of X that is pretty difficult? — not make money from digital advertising. It may be that Musk has some other plan up his sleeve to turn X into a cash pile. But there has been no sign of it yet, and after a year of outbursts and erratic management decisions, it’s tough to see big brand advertisers coming back.

Good year for…Ian Padgham. The 3D artist fathered a new category of advertising. Padgham was responsible for the videos of bus-sized Jacquemus handbags driving through the streets of Paris and a tube train with eyelashes passing under a giant mascara wand for Maybelline, which were widely shared online this year, giving rise to FOOH (fake out of home).

Bad year for…generational segmentation. Pew Research called out the ‘clickbait’ and ‘marketing mythology’ that had sprung up around millennials and Gen Z earlier this year as it explained why in the future it would only do generation research when it had the historical data to compare generations at similar life stages. Incidentally, we wrote about some of the more robust-looking data on generational differences, here.

Good year for…‘Rizz’. Short for ‘charisma’, Rizz was Oxford University Press’ word of the year.

Bad year for…‘Please’. Writer Walker Mimms reckons it is increasingly being used to communicate brusqueness — and sometimes even hostility — rather than genuine courtesy.?

Good year for…crypto. Despite the catastrophe at FTX and the value of NFTs falling off a cliff, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s stock price is up 330% on the year while Bitcoin is (at the time of writing) back up to a respectable $41,655.

Good year for…DaFuq!?Boom! The animator — real name Alexey Gerasimov — is the break-out creator star of 2023. His bizarre short-form web series, Skibidi Toilet, has amassed over 65 billion views this year on YouTube alone and is being described as the first mainstream meme propagated by Gen Alpha.?

Bad year for…Linear TV. Nielsen reported in July that broadcast and cable TV viewing dipped below 50% of total TV usage in the US for the first time. Meanwhile, the leaders of UK broadcasters Channel 4 and ITV have both said they are struggling with the most depressed advertising market since the 2008 financial crisis.

Good year for…Movies about brands. Forget Barbie for a minute. This year we’ve also had films about the early days of Nike, the origin of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, the Beanie Babies phenomenon, and the rise and fall of Blackberry. Are brands the new cinematic superheroes? Or is so much content being produced now that there are just a lot of films about everything?

Good year for…GUT. The Buenos Aires-headquartered agency group had an annus mirabilis, winning three Grands Prix for three different campaigns at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June.

Good year for… advertising. Obviously, advertising is a massive global industry and you can cherry-pick examples to prove any point or theory that you like. But we spend almost all of our time on the lookout for interesting and innovative campaigns from around the world, and this year it felt noticeably easier than in 2022. So, thank you and keep it up.

Campaign of the week / Map the Gaps

Outdoor living retailer Yeti sent out 13 brand ambassadors equipped with GoPro cameras and its own cooler backpack to capture some of the hikes and trails not on Google Street View.

?The footage shot by the ambassadors — which showed the hikers and climbers wearing Yeti’s cooler backpack — was uploaded to Google Street View and also published on the brand’s website.?

Yeti also used the images shot by its brand ambassadors to create print ads promoting its cooler backpack. Read our full analysis of the campaign, here. Contagious.

Read this / Is this the end of 'social' media?

2023 has been a weird year for social media. Meta is flush with cash after increasing revenues and cutting costs (see above) and TikTok continues to tighten its chokehold on youth culture, but it is hard to shake the feeling that social media — defined as online public spaces where people go to share and interact — is on the downswing.

One reason that feeling is hard to shake is that almost every major news publication — from the New York Times to the Financial Times, Bloomberg to Business Insider — has been talking about it.

But it’s also because it’s true. Social media platforms have begun to change as a result of stalling growth, more hostile economic landscapes and shifting user behaviours. In this article, first published in the 2023 Most Contagious Report, we take stock of what’s happening to everyone’s favourite waste of time. Contagious.

To read this week's Contagious Edit in full, click here.

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