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Edition #475
The last note of the year, themes of note from the year that’s been.
The final note of the year, and a little earlier than normal due to how Christmas falls in the calendar. Where to start on the year that was. It feels like the direction of the industry changed quite a bit through the year.
We started with the death of cookies! Then with the ambiguity, it’s kind of gone away. The election provided a distraction but maybe not the revenue much of the sector was after.
HUGE leaps and bounds with AI, seeing real projects, real value and at each step unlocking more potential. It’s like jumping off a cliff without a parachute and building the parachute on the way down, there’s still a lot to be figured out, a lot of disruption, but the only way to arrive at your destination is to take the journey.
It’s not going to be a regular edition, I thought I’d recap on some of the main themes from this year to ponder on over the break.
The main themes:
– We started the year talking about stapling jelly, that is throwing ideas against the wall to see if they stick and I used Pika the AI video generator. This doesn’t feel that long ago, we close the year with the latest release of Sora, itself, stapling jelly on all the different ways we can use it. Could it lead to dynamic creative? Where the ads we input are not creatives but prompts, maybe?
– Predictive analytics, audiences, bots, chats, agents. All strong themes throughout the year. Swapping from experiments to ‘governance’. From heavy management of AI in creative, to streamlining workflows.
– More social content disappears from search, with Reddit restricting which search engines it shows in. Which poses a big question, how much of human knowledge is hidden inside the social networks? Should they be open?
– We learnt about the Dead Internet theory, and the goldilocks principle.
– We saw LLM ads, how they might work. And then Perplexity launching theirs.
– On how even sandwich shops need adtech and the role AI will play. Related, uber eats ads.
– The opportunity for branded audio is opening up.
– The eternal chat on brand vs performance. With many facing market pressures and wanting to do both, a good prompt to stick to doing one thing well.
– The analytics agent (and the agentifying) of the industry. And where a lot of AI is aiming to land on. This Sequoia piece is a good summation of how investors are thinking about allocating capital.
– Olympics embraced creators all the way through.
– We called it on the Outcomes era for advertising.
– Meta had huge growth by being fast to leveraging AI to overcome privacy limitations.
– And AI Overviews is driving more zero click behavior. Which will push advertisers & marketers towards MMM attribution. Google just nails the market positioning by rolling this out to a billion users.
– Attention measurement is in vogue and yet remains underpriced. A key trend to follow through 2025 and beyond.
– The group chat experience continues to grow. Once you’re in one, who is leaving?!
– The focus has been on browsers, to new concepts, the browser wars and maybe Google will be forced to divest their browser.
– Super Bowl and Thanksgiving remain major media events, but creators are changing the way brands participate. It’s as if, all the disruption is heightening the value of the tentpole events.
– A sub thread through all of this, has been the growth of Spotify, continuing to build strength in audio, with podcasts, audiobooks & their advertising offerings.
For a bit of fun, I also put all the email editions into Llama3, and asked it some questions:
- What was the general sentiment this year? Adaptation and uncertainty.
- What were the surprises? Resilience of publishers.
- What were the top 3 trends? Privacy-first solutions, rise of AI, the power of creators.
- What has been the most exciting thing this year? Ethical & privacy focused advertising ecosystem.
- What three words describe 2024? Transformative, uncertain, creative.
I also asked: “what do you think Don Draper would have thought of the big trends of this year? Could you do a quote in his voice summarizing it”
“They’re all chasing ghosts, these new-age Madison Avenue wizards. AI, they call it. A machine that thinks it can dream. Well, I’ve seen dreams, kid, and they don’t involve ones and zeros. They involve whiskey, a good cigar, and a damn good pitch.
This cookie-less future? Sounds like a gimmick to me. People still crave connection, and a good story is timeless. They’ll click on anything, these fools. It’s the same old game, just played on a different field.
And these creators? They think they’re gods, building empires on likes and follows. Well, let them have their fun. In the end, it’s still about the big idea, the one that cuts through the noise. That’s the real magic, not some algorithm.”
And then I followed up, but with David Ogilvy, the OG in advertising.
“The future of advertising is not in algorithms, but in the hearts and minds of consumers. It’s about understanding their desires, their fears, their dreams. This new-fangled AI, it’s a tool, not a savior. The real magic lies in the creative spark, the unexpected insight.
These digital wizards, they’re all chasing clicks and impressions. But true advertising, the kind that builds brands and sells products, is about storytelling. It’s about crafting a narrative that resonates, that sticks.
Remember, the best ideas are simple. They’re the ones that everyone understands, the ones that everyone remembers. So, let’s not get lost in the technicalities. Let’s focus on what really matters: the human connection.”
Fun ha.
But so, I close this year with, to use a Wall Street term, bullish for the year ahead.
Thank you to all the regular readers and those that send stories in or feedback, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and I look forward to catching you in the new year.
That’s it for 2024,
-Ben
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