The next 6-to-12 months present marketers and brands with a potent concoction of phenomena that are sure to, at a minimum, cause shifts in media economics and, at a maximum, completely upend entire advertising programs and their measurement models. Add to the mix the emotional instability these events cause in us as consumers, and we’re now presented with one of the most challenging and opportunistic years since the height of the pandemic.
The challenging aspect is the easier outlook to address because we all share that experience by default. It’s the opportunistic aspect that takes prowess and willpower to capitalize on, and only a minority of marketers will dive into the opportunities. So, how do we partake in these opportunities and be among the most successful set of practitioners? Experimentation.
Employing creative and systematic experimentation this year acts as the goggles and windbreakers that give as few as 15% of us the courage to step into the headwinds while our competitors step aside to safety.
First, take solace in adopting a balanced innovation approach to your experimentation pipeline. This approach simply alludes to balancing less bold, less risky iterative experiments with bolder, riskier transformative experiments; what is bold and risky depends on your business, but in this model, we are all subject to criteria like financial exposure, risk of market backlash and clarity in measuring success. Score your experiments based on these criteria (perhaps on a spectrum of 1-10) and seek an average score as a monthly, quarterly or annual goal. If there is a charter from leadership to be bold, target a higher average (more explorative) or a lower average (more iterative) if there is a call to be conservative. Honoring the balanced part of this framework by targeting an average experiment score of 4-6 on a 1-10 spectrum is the best bet.
The biggest election media year ever
Unprecedented Saturation + Participation = Higher Costs
In the 2024 U.S. elections, GroupM estimates a staggering $17 billion of media dollars will be deployed across all media channels, a significant 31% increase over the 2020 election cycle. My firsthand testing with a global technology enterprise (with both B2B and B2C targets) during the six weeks leading up to the 2020 election reported a bended-average 33% (up to 65% in Meta) increase in CPM and CPC across programmatic deliveries (paid social, CTV). Costs will continue to rise this year.