2024 & The Road Ahead (part 2)

Welcome to the tough industry love section of the 2024 Road Ahead. Like in Star Wars, it’s the one in the middle of a trilogy where Luke Skyywalker loses a hand, finds out his father is Darth Vader and has to come to terms with some terrible truths. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch the best Star Wars movie – The Empire Strikes Back – and you’ll realize, once you search your feelings, you know what I’m saying to be true.

The terrible truth of which I speak is I know you generally do not care, and apathy is the last thing our industry can afford to have in abundance right now.

STOP GIVING IN TO APATHY

Apathy has taken over advertising & marketing. $20 billion+ in waste referenced in the ANA report says everything that needs to be said about an industry that doesn’t care enough to push back on harmful business practices and wasteful execution methods.

Every month since the ANA report came out, there’s yet another release about how some tech company used their power to cloak the shadiness of their self-serving practices from not only advertisers, but also their users. Search on any of the big companies + privacy + lawsuit to see what’s hiding in plain sight. If you need an antitrust summary, here is a quick glance.

But let’s go back to the ANA report. The 2019 ANA report years ago brought with it a peek into business models that were driven by and through a lack of transparency. The second ANA report brought with it a peek into business models that were scaling fraud & waste at new levels, driven by and through a lack of transparency. In other words, 2023’s report is familiar territory. The difference is that in 2023, all that waste has led to the bleeding out of our industry with hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. In both cases, no one knew where the money went, no one was held accountable, and nothing materially changed in seven years.

What It Means:

The great redistribution of waste would stimulate competition, and competition breeds innovation which is sorely needed after years of stagnation. Think of all the growth initiatives among creators, content, CTV, DEI and innovation you’ve been trying to fund. Well, they would have been if 25% of your budget was suddenly available to reinvest. Here are all the other things your millions in found monies would fund:

-       Governance, oversight & accountability tools, process & people

-       Data interoperability & consent-based infrastructure

-       Measurement of the cross-channel kind (hello MMM!)

-       Retail Media testing, PDP optimization, cross-RMN measurement (MMM again!)

In people terms, it would mean:

-       A deeper, more talented bench

-       A stronger, more inclusive culture

-       A task force to define Responsible AI for your company

-       A measurable lift to improving advertising sustainability

$20 billion could get so many people who were laid off in our industry back to work where they belong. 2024 could be the year your teams are finally fully staffed, and your business is back to profitability.

Maybe it really is as simple as removing the apathy that’s keeping us from caring enough to act and be the change you want to see. But one thing we definitely can change immediate is our industry's relationship with technology.

STOP HANDING ABSOLUTE CONTROL OVER TO TECHNOLOGY

Not that long ago, a Ronco infomercial made a countertop rotisserie oven all the rage. It was so easy – just put a chicken in, set it and forget it! Easiest dinner you could make. In digital ad land, we set it and forget it all the time. Upload a few images, a touch of copy, a dash of landing page links, a spoonful of budget and let the system optimize it from there.

Every time a campaign is launched without having any visibility into the decision engine at the center, you have ceded 100% control over to the machine. By doing so, your budget is the chicken when you set & forget a machine-only, non-transparently optimized campaign. The reason is that Google and Meta will always optimize towards their business outcomes, not your brand’s or your client’s, until you guide the machine to learn a different way.

The misaligned incentives are exactly why every company must require some standard level of visibility into the sausage-making to not only understand, but to also give risk & compliance teams information to properly evaluate partner platforms algorithms, data sourcing methodology and consumer consent practices, at minimum. Through that lens, you can understand why it’s not media buyer work.

What it Means:

These minimum criteria for visibility are no longer nice to have, but mandatory as government turns privacy and consent frameworks into laws at the state (and hopefully Federal) level. And most importantly, if we do not require it now, then it will be too late in 2025 to require it of AI’s large language model providers like OpenAI, Meta and Alphabet.

Therefore, marketers must lead the way with legal-led requirements and human-led governance to ensure that bias is removed, misinformation is not produced or weaponized, and there are consequences for bad acting. Take back control because your brand’s money is supporting every partner in the advertising chain. An example are companies who can build custom AI tools for you so you know model inputs/sources and can actively manage against unseen negatives like bias. Beyond that, if you need help or counsel or an audit, there are plenty of experienced tech & data domain experts on the bench to hire on a project basis.

Before we go, we need to talk about growth because growth, like winning in sports, solves a lot of challenges in any company.

STOP EXPECTING GROWTH

In our business, CEOs and CMOs expect growth. They financially plan for growth. They demand growth from Sales and Marketing. The piece that’s missing is that growth doesn’t just happen on its own for established brands. It certainly doesn’t happen for new ones either. Growth takes work. Growth takes effort. Growth takes more than a tech platform, a fingers-crossed promise and a few pushes of a button.

For advertising in particular, growth requires reaching new audiences at scale. Growth requires driving demand that didn’t exist before. Growth requires hitting on emotions or needs or delivering on instant gratification, among others.

I can guarantee none of the above happens in any of these consumer "impressions" that Performance and Deepening strategies rely on:

-       Site visitor retargeting

-       Customer remarketing

-       Cross-selling customers

-       Branded Search

-       Product Search

-       Category Search

-       Retail Media Search

-       Lookalike Display Ads

-       Personalization Tech

-       1P DMP / CDP audiences

-       Etc.

Now revisit that list without cookies. Or with AI chatbot UIs. Or without a usable, unified customer database. Or without data interoperability technology layers. Or…

The point I'm trying to make is that you cannot rely solely on tactics to grow your way out of a business problem, especially when you're working with half of what you need to do the job.

We’ve deepened ourselves into a deep, dark, narrow rabbit hole over the past 18-24 months. In 2024, we must climb our way up and out of it with different approaches, different tools and above all, a different mindset.

An industry-wide growth media mindset.

What it means:

For the love of advertising, embrace a growth mindset in 2024. We cannot rely on deepening- or performance-only advertising to meet growth objectives. Inside that statement lies the real problem. It's hidden in plain sight! Basically, we’re not setting growth objectives tied to growth goals that can be executed against in a connected fashion. Maybe it’s too many vanity metrics, not enough valuable proxies or predictive indicators of outcomes that correlate to growth, not just incrementality. Maybe, the game of KPI Telephone has our metrics too watered down at the end as it's too far away from the business in the beginning. I know media used to be planned using persona input but ended as a TV buying target of A18-49. Now, it’s not that all different as we start a persona input, but the buying metrics becomes viewability, click rate, view rate or even attention units. None of that indicates how well you're reaching that audience (composition) or if you've reached enough of the people you intended to.

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE...

We have forgotten there’s a real person on the other end of the digital screen. No email or display ad or search copy will ever strike a nerve or fulfill a need strongly enough to promote immediate, impulsive action at a scale to drive growth. It's a good reminder that our ads need to connect with people again, but on their terms, and in your way.

After all, while we humans are creatures of habit that happen to leave a worn data trail of where we've been, we’re also incredibly unpredictable in the future.

Without risk taking, we’ll never have wonderful, unscripted, breakout moments again. Those moments are us as an industry at our best.

To sum it up, our industry is unbalanced to an extreme.

So, may I suggest we go back to (some) basics, starting with comms planning of the real kind. The entire reason for communications planning is to build guidelines so that everything & everyone has a place, a purpose, an execution entry point, and a way to actively measure return on value (brand value, brand equity, sales growth) based on understanding the type of human you’re trying to connect with. By actively measuring, execution can adapt accordingly to how people are reacting over time.

It’s no secret that the brands that invest in this way have been rewarded with share gains. There’s a reason why P&G, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Apple and others are leaders in their categories, and a reason why performance-only brands are not. These leaders don’t always get it right, but they always stand out and they aren't fearful about trying something new in the name of growth.

Bottom line, our industry will continue to die by a thousand performance cuts without a more proper weighting of Performance and Growth Media. Better balance means that we align and design programs better with both the retention and growth goals of the business.

As you plan for 2024, if your Communications Plans only include the bottom half of the whole expectation, then go back to the drawing board.

It's either that or don’t expect growth.