2024 Marketing Predictions from Blackbird
Welcome to Blackbird’s first annual predictions post! Our experts read the tea leaves and share their thoughts on how the digital advertising landscape will evolve over the next 12 months.
There were (not surprisingly) a few major themes that emerged: creative formats, the role of automation and AI, and advanced data applications. Let’s dive in.
Automation and AI in 2024
Account Manager Alex Capurro: We’ll see more and more automated campaign/ad/bid management for the advertiser across platforms. For agencies, this makes it crucial to constantly introduce new expansion ideas and test iterations of what is working to achieve differentiation.
Account Director Flynn O’Brien: The big platforms are going to continue to lean into automation for bidding and targeting, which means advertisers will get less visibility into where their ads are showing and increasingly limited ability to customize campaigns.
Chief Client Officer Jack Stampfl: Generative AI is going to be put to work on a bunch of new use cases: landing pages, ads, videos, and copy.
CEO Jay Stampfl: You’re going to see generative AI in use for everything. Many of the functions will not work out, but I cannot see a world where we are not managing these tools as a primary part of our jobs. You’ll also see a bigger emphasis on using marketing automation tools to manage first-party data, which will become even more important in 2024 with ongoing privacy constraints.
Account Associate Rachel Trac: You’ll see more generative AI tools emerging and more functionality introduced to early entries like Dalle 3, Adobe Sensei, and Canva AI.
Creative in 2024
Account Manager Sandy Garcia: Along with short-form video and partnership ads, I see an added layer of personalization for creative where you might not expect – e.g. calling out industries and/or titles in creative on LinkedIn.
Account Associate Macy Lustig: As generative AI gets more and more accurate and refined, we’ll see it used for image expansion based on creative assets and text copy within platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Jack Stampfl: As targeting control gets more and more minimal, creative’s importance will increase. Short-form content like Reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts will truly become king.
Jay Stampfl: UGC, TikTok, and other short-form media will proliferate. Using AI for creative assets will introduce a ton of diversification and amp up the practice of personalized ads.
Rachel Trac: Creative storytelling will be a huge means of engagement for advertisers. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter will lean even more into short-form video to tell more engaging stories.
Account Associate Nathalie Vega: Live-streaming and interactive videos will gain prominence in 2024. Ads in general will lean more interactive – I think you’ll see more interactive shopping ad options to create a more engaging user experience.
Analytics in 2024
Account Manager Ethan Paasch: Advertisers will adopt tROAS bidding over tCPA bidding for full-funnel conversion weighting and optimization. We’ll also see a general trend of marketers actively aligning with sales counterparts to understand and incorporate data around down-funnel and back-end conversions.
Jay Stampfl: You’ll see a bigger emphasis on understanding CLTV and translating that into signals that platform bidding and targeting algorithms can use. We’ll also see the rise of full-funnel use of weighted conversions to bridge the gap between branding and direct response AND solve for data density issues.
VP of Analytics Ben Vigneron: Advertisers are going to double down on collecting first-party data and passing it to ad platforms to train the algorithms on how to work smarter. You’ll also see B2B and B2C marketers take a harder look at lead scoring to dial in the quality of the leads engaged by machine learning.
This wraps up our look back/look ahead series; don’t miss our take on 2023’s top advertising releases and a wish list for things we’d really love to see introduced in 2024. Cheers to a great end to 2023!
