Elections, Olympics, Cookies, Oh My! Approaches to Experimentation in 2H 2024

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.

So, how do we “experiment about it”?

Curiosity > Performance

For most brands and marketers—those that don’t represent nonprofits or NGOs relying on politics to drive engagement—this is a choice time to act out of curiosity rather than pure performance goals; ask the question, “How does my brand fare, and how do my targets behave, during a gargantuan election period?”

Develop creative hypotheses that offshoot from this driving question, quantify how your run-of-business advertising performs amid election saturation, and understand that performance at as many levels as possible: industry, market, segment, product category, audience category, channel, etc. And even more importantly, extrapolate the deltas from these and less remarkable times in the market.

The more layers of circumstance that you quantify and normalize, the more you equip yourself to effectively strategize in the near and farther future. Empower your agency and technology partners to aid you in defining these research-spirited experiments.

Experiment with politics reprieve

Big elections in the U.S., namely the presidential, are deeply passionate and truly exhausting, often with contentious and negative sentiment. They affect consumers as humans and citizens and thus affect brands no matter the segments they cater to.

We all have an opportunity to be a source of reprieve and to create a neat set of hypotheses around it. Calm, the meditation and wellness app, nailed a channel-level test back in 2020 when they ran advertising on CNN on election night of the presidential race; this drove their ascent to the 68th most downloaded iPhone app (a 51 spot increase) and the most downloaded in its category. Calm’s relevance as a reprieve from politics was very high, and its value prop even higher, so this wasn’t a stretch for their brand.

This said, beware of being kitschy or forced, as this is more likely to produce net-negative brand sentiment than anything else. Make sure your most experienced creatives, brand marketers, community and customer care leaders, and agency partners are intimately involved if you experiment with politics reprieve for your brand.

The 2024 Paris Olympic Games

Experiment into the void

Billions around the world will be tuning into the Summer Games in Paris, from linear TV to clips, recaps, memes and more across channels and screens. In addition, NBCUniversal is set to easily break its Olympic Games advertising bookings of $1.2 billion. A variety of experiential, TV and streaming programs will be delayed, reduced or canceled in 2024 to defend against diverted attention to the Olympics, but these entities are likely overshooting their forecasts out of financial and performance caution. If you can find an opportunity in the void—the participants of canceled programming who likely won’t be glued to the Summer Games—experiment within it.

For example, Bravo’s popular BravoCon (and the bevy of TV and online coverage) will be canceled in 2024, leaving a deeply engaged, female-skewed audience with a bit of attention to spare this summer, even if momentary. A successful BravoCon advertiser like Allergan (maker of Botox, Juvederm) might use this as an opportunity to further experiment with owned experiential activations with “Bravolebrities” versus a sponsorship. What unique void might you be able to test into this summer?

Amplify the positivity the Games already offer us

The Olympic Games are a perfect foil to the election. While the election purposefully puts us in an anxious headspace, the Olympics purposefully puts us in a motivated and positive headspace. So, rather than provide relief, attach on and provide an extension of the positive conversation, fitted to your brand and your customers’ journeys.

The potential experiments are vast and industry-agnostic, from high-investment athlete sponsorships for sizable consumer brands to weekly motivational quotes in your organic social calendar for the start-up DTC brand. A more explorative test might be with the product-led B2B SaaS brand, for example. In this instance, the Olympic Games can be a signal to test higher-order benefits—the emotional benefits—of your brand, when you’ve historically relied on product benefits.

The cookieless future present

The ubiquity of third-party cookies makes their deprecation a tough transition, where many will be reacting to technology, processes and benchmarks breaking as a means to learn and evolve in a cookieless world. This is anything but strategic.

The starting positions of your competitive set in the race of advertising effectiveness are poised to shift, and the winners will have proactively experimented their way to the front. Consider again a balanced innovation strategy. You might label owned data approaches like consented customer data collection programs, front-of-site optimization and creative zero-party data campaigns as more iterative experiments. Meanwhile, commitments to new technologies and exchanges, from retail media networks to contextual targeting with generative AI, to Google’s own Privacy Sandbox, can act as more exploratory experiments. 

It’s not just the marketing teams—the executors—who need to find solace in a frenzied 2024. Cross-functional teams and senior leaders alike deserve to understand how the marketing practice is rationalizing and seizing opportunities from this unprecedented blend of headwinds. Experiment intentionally to communicate more persuasively: Cogent experimentation brings a high level of strategic reasoning to the marketer’s recommendations and spoken word and a greater level of respect and understanding from colleagues. This year is an opportunity for your marketing program—and an opportunity for you and your role, too.