087: Looking back and ahead

360-odd days ago most of you had never heard of me

Jan 04, 2024

Sunday January 7 marks the first year anniversary of this newsletter. 87 posts and 233 subscribers later, here we are. I’ve been looking through Substack’s writer admin panel. I do not know most of you! But I’m tremendously grateful for your participation in this adventure. I would like to know more of and about you. A few kind souls have sent feedback. Thank you! Look how easy they make it these days:

Year 2 Trajectory

My newest curriculum, AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs, goes live at MCAD on Monday January 22. This newsletter began with a “Before/During/After” premise: Three posts encapsulating each class session. I did all 45 posts for The Future of Advertising, and then again for Leading Creative Projects. Get ready for the same reporting volume with the new class.

Given the impact and relevance of AI on Creativity, I’ve been concluding most posts with an AI+Creativity Update containing news and insights I find intriguing and useful. That will continue. See below.

And once May rolls around, I’ll scale back to posting once per week.

I’m going to write a lot more about strategy and creative briefing. I have opinions forged in the lands of freelance.

And I’m sure I’ll have posts about cultural events like Super Bowl advertising. This is also an election year, and there will be an Olympics. And the world is changing. Lots of creative disruption to discuss for sure.

Oh look, predictions!

Creativity Crystal Balls

Back in late September the Cannes Ad Fest released its 2023 Creativity Report. This past December Dentsu published its 2024 Creative Trends. Digiday just posted its 2024 Advertising Anti-Predictions list. AdAge offers 80 crystal ball projections. My friend Andrew Eklund who founded his own digital shop (and still runs it 20+ years later) has some thoughts on 2024. I spent a chunk of the holidays reading those links and more.

💰Quote from Kellanova North America’s CMO, Julie Bowerman in AdAge: “Today, while many of the principles of marketing haven’t changed, the tools, skills and ideas that we need to succeed and have cut through for our brands are vastly different and continue to change at a rapid pace.”

I’m an indifferent Gen Xer. We’ve been blathering about the pace of change since the Internet. And yes, there have been speedier moments (Flash standardizing, Twitter in 2006, the iPhone arriving, Social 1.0). But generative AI in 2023 was dramatic and transformative and historic. As VML’s CEO Jon Cook put it: “Today is the slowest rate of change you’ll experience the rest of your life.” So let’s caveat AI is in everything, is everywhere, and will continue to impact great swaths of strategic and creative practice.

I’m going to summarize two other realms I think will will have a noteworthy impact on marketing strategy and creativity in 2024. They’re both rooted in significant change to decades-old systemic thinking.

1) Retail Media, First Party Data and “The MrBeast Playbook”

Its highly likely 2024 marks the true end of the Internet cookie notes Eklund, but as Digiday puts it, “the industry needs to agree on what tracking without third-party cookies will actually look like.” We’ll see a significant rise in the efficacy of Retail (or Commerce) Media—think Target, Walmart, Kroger ad networks. And I believe we’ll witness an increase in turnkey media relationships with global influencers. This confluence speaks to the change Bowerman mentioned earlier. Specifically, I like this synopsis from VaynerMedia’s Nick Miaritis, “The idea that you can serve contextually relevant [TV] ads now to different audiences all watching the same program is going to proliferate at a scale that none of us can really fathom because TV’s never meant that to us.”

TV has never meant that to us.

The vast majority of today’s corporate leaders grew up with black and white, network TV. Their families received newspapers on the front step each morning. Mine did. How marketing and advertising creativity works in their minds is affected by those frameworks. Now let’s ask what happens when the majority of creativity practitioners, like Miaritis, manage, spend, hire, delegate, strategize and create with radically different mental models? The definition of “how do we define TV?” (by which Boomers mean a centralized water cooler and non-Boomers don’t) lies at the heart of the friction. The shift won’t be binary of course. But the water is coming to a boil and we’re all soaking in it.

The hardware, software and most important—the humans ready for something different—are tipping in 2024.

I am not a media technician or analyst. But I am curious what happens to marketing messaging and creativity when the media model shifts significantly. As Anthony Hamelle at TBWA/Chiat/Day predicted, “we’re going to see big mega-influencers become even bigger because now they can reach worldwide audiences without any respect for language barriers with the help of AI dubbing tools. And that is going to put those creators in an even better position for global deals with brands, and those brands are, for sure, going to want to work with an influencer not just in one market but everywhere.” The individual becomes the broadcast network.

What happens when we shift from monolithic, third party, non-targeted, mass media to diverse, first party, highly-targeted, focused media? From, “give us an idea that works everywhere for a broadly conceived audience” to “give us multiple interconnected ideas which work (in aggregate) across specific psychographic and media scenarios.” I think you create very differently under the second scenario.

What might McLuhan and Gossage make of this moment? I suspect old Howard would revel in building ideas alongside a global influencer, and would make the case for highly-focused media. Remember, he was the fellow who coached (and I’m paraphrasing), “run one ad in one magazine…see how people react, then maybe run a second ad.”

In short, the generally recognized media model we’ve all RFPed, staffed, and briefed on for decades faces serious challenges in 2024.

Think different.

2) Old White Men, Diversity, Gen A, and the Olympics in an Election Year on TikTok

2024 comes loaded.

The youngest of Gen A are approaching high school, and they equal Boomers in total population size. “We see audiences increasingly identify as part of the LGBTQ+ Community (greater than 20% and rising amongst Gen Z and Gen Alpha) and the shift away from a binary understanding of gender (greater than 50% of Gen Alpha saying gender is irrelevant), we predict that this conversation will continue to gain even more velocity,” writes Happylucky’s CCO Ben Hennes in AdAge.

Whose voice matters? Who gets to speak? Why do you get to speak? It’s a hell of a battleground, if we let it come to that. One where, as Dentsu’s report put it, “joy is in short supply.”

I suspect Age—as litmus for control and power and legacy—is going to be a potent ingredient throughout 2024. While Gen A can’t yet vote they are technically empowered, versus older generations struggling to comprehend technology. And half of us are on TikTok. Then layer in a global event dominantly focused on youth, and vitality.

Again, we’re shifting from a singular, centralized, limited culture controlled by a few and frankly about the culture of a few to something else. Cheese is being moved. “Don’t trust anyone under 30” was uttered in 1964 by younger voices who are now the older voices.

Brands and ideas attempting to bend culture in 2024 have a lot more to contend with, especially when selecting media. Some suggestions:

The Cannes report noted a 70% increase in creative ads reinforcing “heritage” in 2023, setting a record. Awards for heritage-related work increased 42%; but tread lightly: Cannes notes a “light touch” makes heritage work.
Dentsu’s report suggests “optimism is not naive or self-indulgent” but a pragmatic means of affecting change. The trick, I suspect, is in connecting joy with relevant audience and/or product attributes. Joy in context has legs.

Here’s hoping society can keep it together.

AI+Creativity Update

🤔 It’s showing up everywhere, and sometimes it’s useful. For example, LinkedIn is now inserting prompts under employment listings, i.e. “Am I a good fit for this job?” Perfect. What more could you ask of a careers website? I’d rate this result as informative; saved me time exploring further.

👩🏽‍⚖️ The New York Times v OpenAI lawsuit gives us a lot to chew on and consider, a year into all the new capability. One analogy—we built steam engines which enabled all kinds of progress, but firing those engines with coal turned out to be problematic. So much yet to unravel. I appreciated Alberto Romero’s perspective on, “the relationship between morality and progress.”

🛍️ OpenAI’s GPT Store launches next week. My Creative Brief Coach will be available. A huge thanks to Howard and Henry from The Brief Bros for discussing CBC and the future of briefing GPTs in episode 148 of their podcast.

🎶 Wharton prof Ethan Mollick used Suno AI to create music. His point: This is getting really easy, and the output is, well, you decide. Like generative images, you no longer need fundamental skill to create music—just the ability to type words.

🧑🏽‍✈️ Microsoft says it’s adding a new button to PC keyboards to launch its Copilot AI, a first in 30 years. They also extended Copilot into their Bing app for iOS and Android. AI tech is becoming ubiquitous.

Curiosity+Courage

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