2024 Brand Survival Guide: Creativity, AI, and the Rising Latino Influence
Change is the only constant. And this year is no different.
You don't need to be an economist or have a crystal ball to know that global tensions are rising ahead of two massively marketed events:
- The Paris Olympics, which are forecasted to attract 4 billion TV viewers.
- The 2024 US presidential election, which expects a record-breaking $15.9 billion in ad spending.
So how does this affect how brands show up in 2024? They will force brands to take bigger risks, form stronger partnerships, and search for new audiences.
In this article, we'll take you through how to capitalize on the changes ahead and navigate ambiguity.
Key Takeaways:
- Creative risks will help you get the most out of your budget as political and Olympic campaigning eat up ad space and drive up costs.
- Working with AI and having partners with a deep understanding of how it can supplement the absence of the third-party cookie will be paramount in the final days of the third-party cookie and its immediate aftermath.
- The Latino community is significantly driving commerce; have a plan on how your brand can reach them in an authentic and relevant way.
Creativity will be an economic multiplier
It’s hard to be hated, but easy to be ignored.
You might think cancel culture has made it difficult to take risks in with your brand. But the reality is, you need to seriously mess up with your audience in order for them to bring down the axe.
Creative doesn’t mean uninformed. Everything starts by knowing who you’re talking to and who you are as a brand. Identify your audience and ask yourself what they like. And more importantly, what don’t they like? Leverage demographic data and social listening to fully understand your customers.
But knowing your brand will ultimately guide your creativity. Create partnerships and unexpected offerings that speak to your brand and resonate with your audience.
Think of the Tums (yes, the indigestion tablets) and their Super Bowl partnership with DraftKings. You might think, “that’s a weird pairing.” But in reality, it makes perfect sense.
The Super Bowl is a foodie holiday; wings, pizza, and sliders galore. For those struggling with indigestion, Tums helps them enjoy the game instead of suffering with the painful repercussions of extra spicy wings. DraftKings also wants to help people enjoy the game by enhancing their experience with betting. Tums and DraftKings stayed true to their brands while also getting creative with their partnership.
The importance of unapologetic creativity cannot be understated.
The sandbox you’re comfortable playing in will shrink in 2024. During an election year, digital and physical space will be congested with campaign ads driving up CPMs for CTV and CPC. There may not be as much room as last year for your brand out-of-home or online.
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Enter: bold, unconventional ideas. When talking about how her agency plans on tackling clients’ challenges, Emma Armstrong, CEO of FCBNY, put it this way: “We use creativity as an economic multiplier.”
Creativity will be your growth driver; your fuel to propel your business forward despite everything else happening in the world around you. It will be the two elbows you use to make room amongst the crowd to take in the spotlight.
AI will create a need to refine and evolve your brand’s positioning
The death of the cookie: A nightmare to bakers and marketers alike. (Hopefully, 2024 will be the end of bad cookie jokes as well)
When Google announced they planned to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome back in 2020 people rolled their eyes. For years, brands relied on third-party cookies to track and target customers, so this announcement was a big change for marketers. As a result, brands began moving towards alternatives, like collecting first-party and zero-party data.
In early 2023, OpenAI took the world by storm by releasing advanced AI models that demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text.
As a result, their AI opened up a host of opportunities that would change the way we searched forever. Since then, finding new ways to leverage AI technology has been keeping business leaders occupied.
This year, brands are going to use AI to refine their targeting strategies; moving from demographic advertising strategies that rely on third party cookies to contextual profiling. Companies like Resonate and Dstillery, who spoke at Adweek’s Outlook 2024 conference, have already started synthesizing audiences based on the content they consume.
Refining audiences through a new lens with AI will ultimately determine your brand’s approach to attracting and retaining customers.
Agencies, in turn, are being called up to bat to understand AI and use it to reach their clients needs. Brands must find partnerships with agencies that have strong grasps on AI so that, together, their efforts keep pace with the fast-changing marketing landscape.
Agencies and brands alike will benefit from AI for their targeting capabilities. In 2024, the power of AI will reshape marketing and lead the charge into the cookieless future.
The Latino consumer will no longer be ignored
When Steven Wolfe Pereira, Executive Vice President and Chief Client Officer at TelevisaUnivision, took the stage at Adweek’s Outlook 2024, it was hard not to be charmed by his enthusiasm and charisma.
He had a message for us: the Latino consumer will not be ignored in 2024.
The numbers alone speak for themselves:
- Latinos accounted for 19% of the total U.S. population in 2020
- Latinos are the the second-largest ethnic group, behind White Americans and ahead of Black Americans.
- 1 in every 4 children in the United States were of Hispanic origin in 2020.
What does that mean for brands? It means marketers need to ask how their brand is relevant to the Latino community and strategize how they can reach them through authenticity.
The only way for brands to do this is to invest in creating content relevant to Latinos.
This opportunity is not exclusive to large brands with the ability to create multilingual content. Pew Research found that two-thirds of all Latinos living in the U.S. are born here and of that 91% speak English proficiently. On the grand scale, 72% of all Latinos living in the U.S., both foreign and domestically born, spoke English proficiently.
What this means is that the content could speak to Latinos as a culture for small brands who may not have the capabilities to produce content in Spanish.
What it comes down to is that the content needs to be authentic to Latinos but also to your brand. Ask yourself, “how does my brand represent the Latinos? Are we a part of their celebrations? Are we present at their events? Do we fulfill a common need that transcends ethnicity?”
Latin culture and creators will be more important than ever to make impactful brand content. For major brands like Volkswagen are already starting to make original content the Latino market; advertising in Spanish around significant Latino events like soccer matches. Additionally, brands are working closely with Latino creators to reach their audience.
Pulling this off successfully comes down to telling a story that is authentic to your brand and to the Latino community. Consumers can tell if a brand is pandering or if they have a superficial understanding of their culture. It is important for brands to truly get to know the Latino community and speak to them in a way that is authentic and relevant to them.
Let’s wrap this up
This year will see brands competing fiercely for visibility on platforms that are already packed with political, Olympic, and economic congestion. Marketers will have ample opportunity to drive creativity through brand in order to compete with the external noise. As AI continues to revolutionize the industry, it will lead the way to a cookieless future, offering new, more efficient ways of targeting which will ultimately effect how your brand presents itself to nuanced cohorts. Moreover, the increasing influence of the Latino community cannot be overlooked; brands that succeed in authentically engaging this demographic will reap significant benefits. As marketers, we must remain adaptable and innovative, leveraging these insights to navigate the turbulent yet exciting times ahead.
