Each year, InternetRetailing starts to look ahead to the coming new year in a series of predictions. Charlie Bowes-Lyon, co-founder & CMO at sustainable natural body care subscription firm Wild looks forward to 2024.
I expect to see acquisition costs start to gently rise as CPMs rebound higher after their 2023 drop. Combined with this, customer demand may fall as the effects of inflation start to trickle through to customers pockets and take their toll. Typically in times like these, unsophisticated advertisers, or those without proper knowledge of how to optimise the platform tend to lose out as their costs increase beyond what they can stomach.
Conversely, advertisers who are focused on making effective creative, in varying styles and optimising each style to the different stages of the funnel with proper test and learn approaches, should be able to seek out strong results at high spend levels.
With the ever increasing lack of individual data accessible within the platforms, creative will continue to play a more and more important part in the success of businesses’ advertising capabilities compared to ad structure and in-platform audience optimisation. It’s likely we will see more “AI generated” ads although the effect of this may quickly become stale and I suspect UGC will continue to reign supreme thanks to the continuing popularity of TikTok & Reels.
More mid funnel channels such as TikTok will continue to refine their ad platform offering and become increasingly important to a brand’s channel mix and we may start to see a serious resurgence from the likes of Snapchat who will also be offering much cheaper upper funnel traffic.
However, all these things tend to be somewhat circular and as CPMs rise, advertisers will likely spend less, eventually leading to CPMs dropping again but the macro impact of consumer sentiment and the wider economy will be the biggest factor in deciding how pronounced these changes are.
Hear more from Wild in the SubX podcast episode dedicated to refillable solutions.
Harry Symes-Thompson, director of marketing at Wild tells the panel how the natural deodorant company aims to transform the bathroom and help consumers ditch the plastic.
Origin Coffee also describes how physical stores (or coffee shops) can play their part in a refillable revolution.
