5 Big Bets For the CMO
In 2024, we’re placing our chips on the Final Frontier of Measurement – Brand, Personalization Getting More Personal, The Return of the Commercial Break, The New Consumer is a Robot, and Taking the ‘E’ out of SEO. If you’re looking for more clarity on any of those areas in 2024, read on.
Happy New Year, and we’ll see you on the other side.
Dalton Dorné CMO, Tinuiti
P.S. GenAI doesn’t appear as its own standalone Big Bet because it’s already integrated across every piece of the digital marketing world. We therefore detail how AI affects each Big Bet, which we think you’ll find more concrete and actionable. We believe your most important task as a leader in 2024 is to adapt not just your marketing strategy – but redefine your very understanding of marketing – around the new reality of Gen AI.
Big Bet #1: Brand: The final frontier of measurement, brand, will get conquered
19th-century Philadelphia retail scion John Wanamaker once said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” We feel his pain. It must have been hard to determine ROI from newspaper ads, sandwich-men, and handbills.
A century after his death, things haven’t really changed that much – which is befuddling, to say the least. Given that all marketing has gone digital and all digital is measurable – all marketing is performance. So why is measurement of that historically elusive holy grail of marketing, brand equity, still stuck in the horse-and-buggy days? Surveys and questionnaires, brand recall tests, brand lift studies, PR coverage, competitor benchmarking: it all seems so, well, analog. None of these metrics actually answer the question, “How does your brand actually affect your business?”
You can think of brand equity as a cumulative set of perceptions held by many individuals that incorporate not just the value proposition of your product, but the positive and negative beliefs about a brand as a whole. These perceptions can significantly influence consumer behavior and, through that behavior, revenue over time.
Why hasn’t this been solved? Well, quantifying the impact of brand equity is hard. Really hard. It’s no exaggeration to say it’s THE MOST challenging marketing concept to make quantitatively tractable. And as a bunch of quantitative wonks, tech wizards, marketing scientists, and creative people who care as much about performance as we do brand, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.
“When it comes to measuring brand equity and quantifying its impact on performance, the goal is not to reinvent the wheel. Rather, it’s about integrating various components into a novel framework. Our brand equity measurement framework is pushing out the frontier of the possible in quantifying brand drivers and business value.”
Ravi Rajan
Director, Marketing Science & Econometrics, Tinuiti
The measurement challenges boil down to two issues. For one, brand equity is about perception, which does not leave digital traces in the way that actions do; outcomes are therefore not queryable the way one might add up the number of app installs. Second, inferential analysis is technically challenging. That’s a fancy way of saying longer-term brand equity does not lend itself as well to small-scale, prospectively designed experiments the way one-off, action-oriented campaigns do.
Now, this is where we expect to see some serious progress in 2024. It will soon be possible to get answers to the two burning and interrelated questions that old John W. was referring to: “What is the impact of paid media spend on brand equity? What is the impact of brand equity on revenue?”
Arguably, brand equity matters more than ever given the current challenges – economic uncertainty, ever more critical and cynical consumers looking for a reason to believe, privacy protections, walled gardens, and the quickening speed of the consumer journey. The final frontier of measurement is coming at just the right time.
Ok, so now what?
- Identify the one source of truth or central authority in your organization who can confirm the accuracy of your daily revenue and spend by channel and platform. If your organization has multiple sources for this data, it’s time to appoint one czar to oversee and validate, as these will be the critical inputs for your brand equity model.
- Bring in your CFO now so she buys into the model before it launches. Once she sees quantifiable, credible evidence of the incremental impact of brand equity on ROAS, she’ll be much more likely to invest in the longer-term strategies you’ve been trying to sell in.
- Talk to us about how we can help you build a model to assess your brand equity.
Big Bet #2: Audience: Personalization just got more personal
Consumers are human. And humans have a universal desire to feel valued and unique. Guess what kind of marketing addresses this primal need? Marketing that’s personalized. We know; marketers have been using (and abusing) that word for a while now. But this time, it’s different – we swear.
In the past, personalized marketing hasn’t always lived up to its promise, owing to some formidable constraints: insufficient data, limited access to sophisticated tools, and difficulties in tracking the customer journey. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that GenAI is changing all that. What once qualified as “personalization” (e.g., dropping a recipient’s name in a subject line or recommending a product based on past behavior) will now seem slightly charming or utterly archaic depending on what mood you’re in.
Here is a taste of where AI-powered personalization is headed:
- An email, social post, or blog post personally matched to the writing style and tone that matches a user’s unique communication style.
- Completely intuitive voice and visual search integration where consumers can simply describe or show an object they want to buy, and AI interprets the request accurately.
- Chatbots that not only perfectly interpret customer queries but also detect subtle emotional cues in chat.
- Video interfaces that analyze facial expressions and voice tones during virtual interactions.
Personalization won’t just power Lifecycle and Social content but will bleed into the post-click experience onto the website. As a person navigates across your site, the entire experience dynamically adjusts, providing hyper-personalized product suggestions, language style, imagery, and promotions. Localized and tailored landing pages will become places that grab and maintain audience attention – places users actually want to engage with.
We are also going to see conventional Influencer Marketing get upended by User-Generated Content (UGC) Creators, who will play a critical role in personalizing brand marketing efforts. We predict their creative will usher in a scalable (and affordable) way of developing authentic, believable, cost-effective content that speaks to all levels of the sales funnel in a personal way by showcasing products through the lens of a wider variety of consumers. Brands will hire these creators to produce quick-hit videos featuring specified products, investing their own media dollars to promote the content via Paid Social. Additionally, from what we’re seeing, UGC and reviews are increasingly impacting Search rankings (see Bet #5), owing to their perceived authenticity.
And as privacy prevails and the cookie goes away, we know that humans are willing to hand over personal data if it means the way you market to them becomes more human. The emphasis on transparency and user consent will become a standard in personalized marketing practices.
“TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are the primary channels where brands and UGC Creators are finding success. Investing media dollars behind the UGC content is critical as it allows for scale, targeting, and mass reach.”
Kelsey Abell
Vice President, Influencer Marketing, Tinuiti
Ok, so now what?
- Brands should view UGC Creators as extensions of their team. Start small. Identify two to three creators to develop and test content in paid media efforts. Determine what content is working, what needs tweaking, and continue the cycle. Over time, you can add more creators to help add diverse, authentic, and personalized voices to the mix.
- The time of thinking about AI and first-party data separately is over. 2024 will be about getting closer to striking a healthy balance between the two that honors humans as customers while also leveraging tech to create tailored messaging.
- Brands should start thinking of an ad and the landing page it leads to as a single consumer journey. Run experiments that include both facets, testing content, interactive quizzes, and other unique experiences to personalize the value of the product based on the individual consumer.
Big Bet #3: Streaming: After a break from commercials, the commercial break is back
Before Streaming eliminated them, TV commercial breaks were an ignorable (and ignoble) part of life: two and a half minutes to refresh your drink, run to the bathroom, or check your answering machine – remember those?
In welcome news to marketers (and audiences, believe it or not), after a short commercial break, commercials are making a big-time comeback. And this time, they’ll actually hold viewers’ attention and deliver measurable results.
To what do we owe this resurgence? The surging popularity of Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST) like Pluto TV and Tubi, along with ad-supported subscription services like Netflix, Hulu, and, the latest entrant, Amazon Prime Video (which vowed to show “meaningfully fewer ads” than other linear and streaming providers).
The game changer here is that, unlike ye olden-timey Linear TV, these streaming platforms have so much data on the viewers sitting on the couch, their ads are becoming more relevant and targeted than ever. The commercial break (streammercials, anyone?) is morphing to fit the needs, interests, and attention spans of modern audiences. Shorter commercials (no time to even run to the loo!) are reaping higher video completion rates.
“Larger brands that continue to have a big linear presence should be thinking about the factors hindering them from diving head-first into streaming, and creating a plan for how they can use the more granular streaming data and targeting to their advantage.”
Stefanos Metaxas
EVP, Streaming+, Tinuiti
Facilitated by programmatic platforms, streaming ads are also going to become even more interactive and commerce-focused. Roku’s partnerships with Walmart and Shopify exemplify exactly how checkout is coming to Streaming. As cord-cutting on Linear TV continues and consumers ditch the dial, marketers should ensure they’re taking advantage of the new-age commercial break that consumers are actually watching.
Now, just imagine how AI, with its mind-blowing ability to analyze billions of bits of data in the blink of an eye, will further accelerate the analytical capabilities, the creative process, and programmatic buying. When you put it all together, the result is that the biggest screen in the house will not only be measurable but within reach of emerging brands.
AI has, of course, always been a part of programmatic. However, GenAI is transforming how marketers programmatically buy Streaming (and all other) media. Harkening back to Bet #2, hyper-personalization will be further unleashed as GenAI allows brands to avoid redundancy, target contextually, prevent ad fraud, bolster ROI, and – perhaps most critically – speed up the ability to make the most profitable buys in real time.
Ok, so now what?
- When it comes to your streaming dollars, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate (or let us do it for you). More inventory plus competition between publishers for advertisers’ business is going to mean more value for your investments.
- Test streaming commerce ads to shorten the purchase journey and capitalize on impulse buying habits that historically only social networks could benefit from.
- Make the case to your CFO that, as adtech (powered by Machine Learning, GenAI, and robust historical data) becomes even more sophisticated, brands can measure both top- and bottom-funnel impact with more granularity than other marketing channels, and pinpoint the optimal level of investment to maximize impact and efficiency of your streaming dollars.
Big Bet #4: Consumers: Say hello to your new target consumer: AI
We’ve said (and screamed and shouted) that the almighty cookie will soon go the way of the floppy disk. As its last bits crumble, GenAI is closing the circuits it leaves open.
GenAI marks the start of the end of tiresome (re)SEARCHING. Customers have already discovered and embraced GenAI as the perfect personal shopping assistant. People are much more willing to share their zero-party data in an interaction that feels like a friendly conversation rather than the impersonal data collection techniques employed by search engines and social networks that feel transactional. Consumers are equipping their robotic sidekicks to make personalized recommendations fueled by a deep understanding of the customer rather than recommendations powered by third-party cookies, as they have historically been.
As consumers relinquish the keys to their shopping journeys, GenAI-driven machines are rapidly emerging as the next wave of consumers. CMOs who don’t evolve to serve these logical and algorithm-driven customers will risk significant revenue loss. Let’s be very clear about this: GenAI is fast becoming the mainstream way we all interact with the web.
With 42% of the US population covered by a privacy law by 2025, brands are going to need alternative ways to reach customers – befriending their audience’s bot friends is going to be key.
Generative AI will reinvent commerce with a conversational approach and superhuman abilities backed by data willingly provided by a human. Need deals? AI will find them. Looking for a birthday present? GenAI will find the perfect gift. Website doesn’t have your size? It’ll go out and find one that does. Which color will look best on you? It’ll tell you – and recommend a few fun accessories to make it pop.
These GenAI-driven interactions will become more nuanced and context-aware, capable of handling complex queries and providing solutions in real time. These advancements will facilitate finely tuned recommendations and savvy transactional strategies, making every customer interaction an opening for enhanced engagement, increasing retention, and leading to stronger loyalty. This potent combination of data and tailored AI will yield a competitive edge that is difficult to replicate – increasing conversion rates and boosting customer satisfaction – and signaling a new frontier in customer intimacy and market leadership.
As we effectively hand our wallets to AI, these robo-consumers are poised to reduce any last bits of “buy now” friction… and we ain’t seen nothing yet. With more than 7 billion smart devices worldwide constantly improving how they anticipate our needs, brands better add a new robot persona to their mix. (Their hobbies include algorithms, fuzzy logic, and neural networks – a real hit at cocktail parties.) And with 42% of the US population covered by a privacy law by 2025, brands are going to need alternative ways to reach customers – befriending their audience’s bot friends is going to be key.
“If there’s one adage that’s withstood the test of time over the last two volatile decades of digital marketing, it’s the phrase: ‘Content is King.’ While that may remain true, the GenAI era is going to turn this into a two-person job. Hence, ‘Context is Queen.’ As we start conversing with the web vs. typing in cave-speak, content alone is not going to cut it. Instead, it will be about the synergy of content and context. Context means understanding the user’s intent, preferences, and the subtleties of their query as the AI delves beyond keywords to grasp the fuller meaning and intent behind queries.”
Nirish Parsad
Practice Lead, Emerging Tech, Tinuiti
Ok, so now what?
- Learn how to speak bot. In other words, brands must make their product information AI-accessible and market to them accordingly. This language will first take off on social, apps, and – of course – chatbots.
- Resist the urge for hasty plug-and-play solutions. Generic glossy AI ain’t gonna cut it, since the web is getting more personal (see Bet #2). The successful implementation of generative AI will necessitate GenAI czars dedicated to overseeing the consistent and strategic application of AI across all brand channels. The risk of a fragmented customer experience looms large without such oversight, which could dilute brand identity and diminish customer trust.
- Amid the rapid zero- and first-party data use by these GenAI systems to create experiences and recommendations, remain vigilant about privacy to avoid potential pitfalls and stay ahead in the evolving regulatory landscape. In other words, do not use the information consumers have entrusted you with to train your model.
Big Bet #5: Taking the ‘E’ out of SEO
One day, in the (pretty far away) future, we can imagine a world where someone has to ask: “What does the phrase ‘just Google it’ mean?” Exactly where they will begin their search for an answer, well, we don’t know just yet. The point is that modern search journeys are increasingly starting outside of search engines. In fact, we’re thinking it might make sense to rebrand the ‘E’ in SEO to stand for ‘Everywhere’ instead of ‘Engine.’
With its contextual awareness, understanding of natural language, and knack for delivering personalized results, Gen AI will dramatically upend how people search.
The search for alternatives to search engines is driven by Gen Z, who are distrustful of Big Search and intolerant of the optimized clutter that tops their results. More than half of this digitally native crowd now start their searches on TikTok (with Reddit also picking up speed) because they view these platforms as authentic sources for human-to-human answers. (A popular hack is to add the word ‘Reddit’ to the end of any Google search.) Reddit, seeing they have market share to gain here, recently launched a series of updates to make search faster and easier. Feeling the winds of change, Google launched “Perspectives,” a function that delivers results from people on forums and social media sites. Last, do not sleep on YouTube as a search vehicle, with 68% of users hitting up the platform to help make purchase decisions.
“Although we’ll continue to optimize for the main search engines, we need to expand to any large platform that has a search function.”
Kris Wong
Senior Director, SEO, Tinuiti
And when it comes to straight product searches, Amazon is the place where half of all people kick off their shopping journeys. In the market for an Apple Watch? Crocs? Air fryer? The browsing begins (and often ends) on Amazon. We expect to see the big players in Search – Google and Bing – lean harder into Retail Media network inventory so their solutions stay competitive in a space that is trying to leave them behind.
The biggest disruption of all, though, will stem from the proliferation of GenAI in everyday devices like phones and speakers. Let’s be honest here: The search experience hasn’t fundamentally changed since Titanic topped the movie charts and the Backstreet Boys were blasting from CD players. Namely, type words into a box and get a bunch of results to wade through – some relevant, some not so much. With its contextual awareness, understanding of natural language, and knack for delivering personalized results, GenAI will dramatically upend how people search. And while the adoption of voice search has been bumpy, GenAI will grease up the wheels to overcome any remaining friction.
TL;DR: Goodbye, keyword. Hello, conversation.
We don’t anticipate any industry coming out unscathed. Your brand should be preparing itself for Search Everywhere Optimization.
Ok, so now what?
- It’s paramount that brands begin optimizing for the main search engines through the lens of Gen AI, whose “eyes” don’t see visual elements and SEO techniques manufactured for machine and human users. Comprehensive and contextually rich text is crucial for accurate information extraction and understanding. When crafting your future content strategy, the question you’ll need to be asking is: “Will the AI know my brand or product is the answer?”
- On the flip side, with more people looking for visual (read: video) answers to their queries, marketers need to be thinking ahead about how their brands show up in all these disparate video-driven discovery engines on social and beyond vs. a text link to a webpage just for Google and Bing.
- With retailers becoming their own miniature Googles (but many lacking the quality and capability of Google), brand’s product discovery pages must have strong titles, bullets, lots of details, stellar photos, and on-point categorization, since each retailer’s classification system is unique.
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