The (inevitable) bad news
In 2024, the outlook for the global economy remains weak. The OECD is forecasting that the global economy will face the combined challenges of both low growth and high inflation, leading to economic slowdown. The result? Consumers will continue to cut back on discretionary spending, as their income continues to not go as far as they would like. Businesses will cut back on innovation and spending, as borrowing remains expensive and growth remains a challenge.
Performance, performance and more performance
As a result, CMOs will be increasingly focused on a return to the basic brand values of quality, value for money and easily digestible brand experiences, with a reduced focus on less measurable brand values from ESG and cause- related marketing. As a result of an increased focus on the results of marketing activity, performance marketing, rather than brand building will be a focus for marketing investment, compared to brand building initiatives. CMOs will need to see clear results from their marketing activity, and performance marketing will increase in importance across both B2C and B2B activities.
Get it together
This growth in the need to account for every pound generated will also lead to businesses seeking to reduce marketing silos, with an increased emphasis on consolidating functions across the marketing department, rather than reducing the number of agencies and other marketing communications suppliers they work with.
Get tech in the game
Tech-driven approaches to marketing will continue to gain traction, driving higher levels of personalisation for customers and consumers, and enabling understanding of not just what works, but how all marketing touchpoints work together, driving flexibility, productivity and new understanding of how each touchpoint or message influences across the conversion journey.
Take it next level
What’s most exciting, not just for our clients, but also for us at Amigo Partnership is the opportunity that AI and especially generative AI offers in 2024. Over the last 12 months, Generative AI has rapidly changed from an innovative idea to a practical reality. It’s expected, according to Forbes, that in 2024 20% of marketing job descriptions will include Generative AI.
The revolution is here – viva la revolution
AI in all its forms, from generative AI to machine learning will, without any doubt revolutionise the way that we work, and drive brand relevance. Here at Amigo Partnership, we’re excited by the opportunities that AI represents, to drive even greater business value from our work. Not just in driving better agility and quicker turnaround of our work across strategy, creative, performance and measurement, but also in elevating the quality of our work, by freeing up the amount of time spent on routine tasks (so everything we do is value/benefit-oriented). Since 2022 we’ve been highly active experimenters in the AI space, for example through recommending personalisation through image-related Generative AI for one of our clients.
2024 will see an even deeper embedding of AI into our work, and we are committed to carefully choreographing the relationship between our AI tools and platforms and our human intelligence. We’re already experts in the sophisticated prompting of Generative AI and believe that human specialists working with AI opens up the possibilities of unleashing more human lead creativity (driving the human connection) with epic performance enhancements. For us, AI is a new toolbox to harness and further improve marketing efficiencies and effectiveness.
The (inevitable) good news
We think that despite the challenges, 2024 will be an exciting year for us and our clients, and we embrace the opportunity of what lies ahead.