Measuring effectiveness, retail media, AI and first-party data will dominate 2024
The acceptance of new tools for measuring media effectiveness, the activation of new media strategies, a boom in retail media and the move towards developing new first-party data strategies in light of the cookie-less world were all key themes for senior marketers at The Drum’s Predictions 2024.
Dunnhumby's Ed Sellier talks about the rise of retail media
As panel sessions raged in the main studio at The Drum Labs in London, our reporters pulled senior marketers from brands such as Google, HP, IBM Consulting, Skyscanner, Kingfisher PLC, Dunnhumby, Dentsu and Deliveroo aside to ask what they felt would be the critical drivers for brands, tech and media in the year ahead.
Naturally, artificial intelligence – its past, current and future uses – was a prevalent theme as marketers continue to consider how AI will impact their jobs, responsibilities and status in the C-suite.
Sharing their thoughts with The Drum were Adam Taylor, UK privacy lead at Google; Hannah Walley, head of media insights UK at Kantar; Zuzanna Gierlinkska, chief solutions officer at Group M; Jana Eisenstein, senior vice-president of sales for EMEA at Seedtag; and Ed Sellior, client strategy manager at Dunnhumby.
Gierlinska said: “There’s a lot of interesting stuff ahead of us this year. We’ve just talked about some huge buzzwords like retail media and AI, but I also want to throw cross-channel into the mix. I think that’s going to be an area of accelerated growth as brands look to move away from single siloed channel buying and embrace the way that users are consuming media and face into that cross-channel approach themselves.”
Seedtag’s Eisenstein spoke of her excitement about how AI will speed up the whole creative production process, meaning clients can do more. “There’s a huge opportunity in creative production to be able to apply technology, to allow it to scale and to allow us to become quicker and, actually, to allow us to become a bit more flexible in terms of how we’re handling the production. Marketers are going to need to reach their audiences and be relevant. And we strongly believe using AI tools will be an extremely important part of that.”
For Dunnhumby’s Ed Sellier, 2024 is when retail media grows up and starts to be taken very seriously by brands. He said: “Media and shopper marketing has started to move up the funnel and connect elements of e-commerce performance and brand media. Effectively, what we’re seeing now is the joining up of different touch points and experiences across those through the application of first-party data. I think there’s a great opportunity to be more efficient, both in creative and the content supply chain, by taking out unnecessary work. So, more time is spent actually doing the work that we love and that is more valued by clients and that they pay for.”