Digital Marketing Trends To Watch In 2024
Ross Yaeger – Dec 2023
The Macro Environment
We won’t attempt to sum up the economy as a whole, but some trends like interest rates and inflation, will unavoidably have a major impact in 2024. In what might be good news, the Fed has recently indicated that due to inflation improving, they expect interest rates to drop next year. Analysts expect this to increase business spending in 2024.
In regards to how much of their advertising budget advertisers will spend on digital, not much change is expected. After many years of rapid growth, digital marketing channels now make up about 80% of all advertising spending in the US. Advertisers aren’t rapidly shifting their marketing budget from other channels (print, radio, tv…) anymore. While this might sound like a big change, it’s been expected for years, and doesn’t change digital advertising’s effectiveness as an advertising platform.
Still, big changes are expected in 2024, including the rollout of AI and cookies finally being removed from paid digital advertising. We’ll share the big things we’re expecting below!
Google Deactivates Cookies, Advertisers Scramble
One of the biggest impacts to businesses will come when Google finally stops allowing advertisers to use cookies to target advertising campaigns. They’ve been hinting at this change for years, but most analysts think 2024 is when it’ll actually happen.
Google is starting to deactivate cookies on Chrome to get the ball rolling. This change will make using demographics and browsing history to target campaigns significantly harder. We expect some advertisers will likely see a drop in their ROI as alternate strategies are figured out.
“We’re starting with a small percentage
of Chrome users (in January) so developers can
test their readiness for a web without
third-party cookies”
The industry is split on what this will look like, with some advertisers focusing on alternative technical solutions that might help, others are shifting their ad buys to alternate sources that know info about users, and other advertisers are just hoping it all works out ok. Almost all major industries are still using cookies to target the majority of their advertising spend though (graph above), so it’ll impact a high percentage of ad buyers in one way or another.
Once Google starts deactivating cookies en force (in Q3 maybe?) we expect to see an increase in advertisers buying directly from websites and some de-emphasis on public programmatic buying. Especially among more sophisticated buyers. If you want help optimizing your advertising campaigns for cookie targeting going away, please contact us!
AI Content Generation and Targeting
Like many industries, digital marketing will see significant changes with AI. In fact, 50% of North American marketers say that AI is already making changes, or will in the next 12 months 88% think it will happen within the next two years!
What will that look like though? It’s expected that large media buyers and agencies will be investing heavily in audience targeting and bidding strategies, especially with the expected deprecation of cookies mentioned above. These change in bidding and targeting might not be directly visible to smaller advertisers at first, but they’ll permeate the industry within a few years.
“AI in content marketing can make
suggestions based upon connecting ideas
& concepts & Data that haven’t been
brought together before. There is
potentially a lot of value in that.”
Additionally, in 2024, many digital marketing systems will begin to offer AI assistance for content creation. This include images and written word, and we expect most agencies and advertisers to lean into this full-heartedly. That’s not to say they won’t be cautious about quality concerns though. In fact, we expect to start seeing more and more brands experience embarrassing AI marketing mistakes. Remember to be careful out there!
One last area AI will have a marketing impact is in search algorithms, so we might also see some SEO best practices start to shift as time goes by.
Conversational Search
The surge in voice-based activation and engagement is indicative of a shifting consumer behavior, where the ease and naturalness of vocally interacting with devices are becoming increasingly prevalent. This trend underscores the necessity for businesses to proactively adapt to changing user preferences and optimize their digital content for seamless audio engagement. Anticipated by many as a pivotal moment, 2024 is poised to mark the year when prioritizing accessibility through audio interfaces hits the radar of CMOs.
The Twitter/X Implosion
Twitter really isn’t that big of an influence on the greater digital marketing environment, but we’re sure that we’ll continue to see a lot of news about Twitter/X in 2024. Elon Musk’s latest antisemitic posting spurred a large number of advertisers to abandon the platform, leaving Twitter with an even bigger advertising revenue shortfall, and a large attrition of their advertising sales staff. In other words, just another day at Twitter/X.
We don’t know if all this chaos means the company will go bankrupt, or it Musk will cover the company’s loss until they can recover. We do advise advertisers to avoid spending money on the platform while the chaos ensues. Meta and TikTok offer similar ad offerings in a more predictable environment. If you want help with your ad campaign, please let us know here.