At Transparent Partners, we get to work with some of the most future focused marketers at leading, influential brands. This provides us with a purview of the developments that are shaping how marketers view the world and how they are taking action to seize opportunities to grow.
Last year we posted the Seven Data-Driven Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023. You can check those out to see how relevant they were this year. More importantly, we’ve identified the following Five Trends to Watch in 2024 and what you can do as a marketer to make the most of them.
Our Trends to Watch in 2024 all share a common theme: Convergence. One ChatGPT definition response that resonates across these trends describes convergence this way: “the tendency of different systems, technologies, or phenomena to evolve towards performing similar functions or to meet at a common point.” Convergence itself, as a trend, is a useful thing to notice because it helps us frame a logical response: Unify.
The one idea that we’ve probably heard most this year from marketers that exemplifies this nicely is the aspiration to conduct Full Funnel Marketing. This is a spot on approach to unify when you recognize the following: a) consumers respond to experiences and communications all across their journey, b) much of their response is often outside our stated marketing objectives, and c) the sum of these responses is far greater than each in isolation.
Let’s get to the Five Trends to Watch in 2024:
1) AI is “Eating The World”
This classic Marc Andreessen (2011) essay: Why Software is Eating the World described software as the dominant force driving progress across industries and the entire economy. This thesis has rung true and today we are in a similar position with AI.
AI is converging with the core functions of every industry with more than 25% of all US investment dollars now channeled into building AI applications. We see this clearly in Marketing with Generative AI beginning to transform creative development as one example. While these shifts can seem overwhelming in our personal and professional lives, what we will cover here is what to do about it as a marketer in 2024.
What To Do About It:
- Adopt AI in your Marketing Operations: AI is a massive productivity booster that continually improves. Identify and implement the AI-enabled tools and ways of working that your marketing teams need today to gain efficiency and drive effectiveness.
- Unify Your Consumer Data: As AI models are more widely adopted they are also becoming commoditized. Differentiated outputs need unique data for training and activation. Your data assets, especially at the consumer/customer level, are even more valuable in the age of AI. It’s critical to organize and unify your data to ready it for the AI applications available now and into the future.
2) Data Collaboration Moves From Innovative to Essential
Marketing relevant data comes in many forms. From zero to 3rd party, identified to anonymous, demographic to psychographic, and from observed behavior to claimed surveys. This data resides in many platforms and systems both internal and external to a brand. Bringing these disparate data assets together enriches the matched records and unlocks greater value. At that point the utility of these different data sets converge to serve the same set of functions for marketers. The most valuable being to power relevant communications with consumers.
Data privacy needs stemming from regulations, cookie depreciation, and consumer expectations bring challenges to matching, enriching, and using data between parties. This is where data collaboration capabilities and tools like data clean rooms (DCRs) are coming to play an increasingly critical role to enable data sharing while protecting consumer privacy.
What To Do About It:
- Establish your Marketing & Consumer Data Strategy: Establish your data vision, use cases and enablers (inclusive of unifying your consumer data per #1 above) across your data & technology stack and ways of working.
- Implement data collaboration capabilities and tools based on your priority use cases while establishing your approach to data privacy.
3) Data Cloud Adoption + Convergence of Technologies = Composable Stack Benefits
A data cloud architecture provides many advantages as brands seek to unify their data assets and collaborate with other parties. Enterprise adoption of this architecture continues to grow as billions of compute jobs are run against data every year with one estimate showing nearly 100% compute growth in 2023.
At the same time, the Marketing Technology Landscape grew again this year containing 11,000+ vendor solutions. As we work with our clients every day to make sense of these various solution options we note a convergence of functionalities with vendor solutions straddling multiple categories (e.g. Clean Rooms with CDP functionality). More broadly, the convergence of Ad-Tech and MarTech continues especially around the use of consumer data.
A Data Cloud coupled with vendor tech solutions that bleed into each other’s functionality, creates an excellent opportunity for marketers. It enables them to design a customized stack of vendor solutions that best meet a brand’s use cases while leveraging the same unified data layer. This is known as a Composable Stack.
What To Do About It:
- Move to a data cloud infrastructure for marketing data: This will be the foundational data layer for any set of plug and play composable technologies.
- Consider a Composable Stack design: This Modern Marketing Data Stack report contains a wealth of information and a blueprint to build a composable stack. As you navigate the various vendor solutions across categories stay focused on the capabilities you need rather than the narrow definitions of each vendor technology acronym (e.g. CDP).
4) Triangulation of Marketing Measurement Tools
Marketing impacts are mysterious. They are a function of human needs, psychology, economic decisions, and group contagion. Marketing activations are complex. They span across funnel stages, channels, tactics, partners, creatives, and more. It’s no wonder that measuring marketing returns accurately and quickly requires a thoughtful strategy and a variety of tools.
The way marketers approach measurement has evolved along with changes in consumer behavior, shifts in media consumption, additions of media channels, and adjustments to advertising technology functionality (e.g. cookie disruption).
The set of measurement techniques available to marketers today are converging in their own way. Marketing Mix Models have become the most foundational tool for gaining a long-term, holistic view of returns at a high level. The faster, more granular view of returns may still be found in some MTA solutions although these are becoming less viable due to cookie/tracking disruptions while Incrementality solutions (based on automated experiments at scale) are gaining popularity. Traditional Brand measurement tools like trackers and lift studies are still useful while faster reads can now be found in solutions that leverage share of search as a brand indicator. All of these techniques and solutions overlap in nuanced ways. The right set of tools depends on each brand’s specific ecosystem and needs.
What To Do About It:
- Design your measurement strategy & solution set: Embrace strategic triangulation. No single technique or tool will satisfy all of your measurement requirements. Start by documenting your objectives, align metrics to those objectives, and then select a set of measurement techniques and tools that best balance accuracy, granularity, and speed according to your decisioning and optimization cycles and plans.
5) Digital Property & Art on Public Blockchains
Brands that engage with consumers in emerging mediums tend to do well. These initiatives allow marketers to reach valuable, niche audiences while exhibiting innovation and forward thinking. Doing so brings attention and build positive brand sentiment. It’s also true that emerging mediums do not grow linearly. They go through slower periods of refinement interspersed with occasional breakthroughs and rapid progress. This is the case with Web3 mediums like NFTs underpinned by public blockchains.
Marketing use cases for NFTs have been established with a running list of initiatives by major brands continuing although with some repositioning of NFTs to highlight utility and value to consumers.
The major development in this space in 2023 has been a series of open source, Bitcoin innovations (taproot, segwit, and ordinals) that created an explosion of art and other free expressions in the form of Bitcoin NFTs called Inscriptions. This is another case of converging technology as Bitcoin, the sturdiest and most valuable public blockchain, has entered the NFT domain previously dominated by Ethereum, Solana, and other chains.
Bitcoin is poised for traditional finance adoption in early 2024 which, coupled with ordinals growth, creates opportunities for forward thinking brands and marketers.
What To Do About It:
- Consider web3 initiatives to grow your brand in 2024: Consumer experiences in this space have native ways to protect privacy and gain consent to support long term consumer addressability and brand engagement.
Conclusion
Paying attention to these trends is super important. There is plenty of opportunity to take action on these to drive your growth. While that’s true, we find that even the most future focused marketers must also put energy into maintaining and strengthening their fundamentals. This includes tagging and taxonomy standards to collect meaningful data, governance to protect it, and operating models to ensure access and usage with measurable results.
Here’s to a peaceful and prosperous 2024!
