Inferior quality and non-differentiated creatives on social media will trigger fatigue with social media and brands will find it hard to drive either engagement or transactions using social. 2024 will be the year when creative excellence will take center stage and brands that create better content will win the battle of attention. With smaller attention spans and huge commercial message overloads, the platforms have become peddlers of sameness. That one trending soundtrack, or one transition isn't going to make the brand. Long term traction is a function of insights and consistency, and we will see 2024 drive distinctiveness.

2024 will be the year of Generative AI and with software brands making it democratized almost every creative person will be depending on AI. However this is both good and bad. Good as there is a possibility of automating a lot of mundane work on digital, but bad as this will give rise to undistinguished creatives. The biggest threat though will be the adfrauds that brands will have to fight. The ability of software to create deep fakes and mimic established commercial messages is scary, thus making it important to brands to ensure that they are fake and troll proof. The only way to beat AI is to lead the way and be really intelligent. When you have the power to create, AI is a tool that helps.

Deepfake technology poses specific risks in the context of sports advertising, as it could impact the integrity of the sports industry, athlete endorsements, and the overall fan experience. Deepfakes could be used to create videos or audio recordings that make it appear as though athletes are endorsing products or making statements they never did. This misrepresentation can harm the athletes' personal brands and lead to confusion among fans. If fans become aware of the prevalence of deepfake content in sports advertising, it could lead to a general sense of distrust. Fans may question the authenticity of interviews, endorsements, or other content, which can negatively impact the overall fan experience.
The real challenge will be for the entire sports eco system to protect the fandom. If you into sports marketing, ensure that you are on your toes.

Last few years have seen brands not investing in a singular tone of voice and wanting to be everything to everyone. It is believed that the new GenZ consumers distrust advertising and so the brand messages have to be non-advertising like. This has led to hundreds of brand messages that are straight, do not have the ability to charm the audience, and thus fail to create a long term impact. That is not really true with even the GenZ consumers wanting to listen to right brand messages. We will see GenZ looking at brands that have a sharp position and enagage with consistent messaging that are full of fun and charming. Brands will have to go back to being focused, dependend less on mindless celebrity associations, look beyond vanilla content to stop being generalists. Brands like that never abandoned sharp positions will continue to be in vogue.

Livestream commerce is an emerging trend in India. In the last few years, we have seen a lot of start-ups with the help of micro influencers or the founders selling their products through live stream. Amazon has already started pushing for it in 'Great Indian Festival Sale' in India With livestream, it's easy to create a show and tell effect and the brands don't need to depend upon influencers. It helps them imagine how it will look on them and gain unbiased trust on the product. Features like colors, size and quality can be well seen in the live stream videos and hence there is a quick purchase rather than just adding to cart and buying later. With Instagram now becoming a loop of videos, the brands will look at creating shoppable videos.

The days of brands being polite and diplomatic about their competitors is over. Before social media drove awareness for brands, trust was earned through visibility. In the era of influencers, education built trust. The audience is tired. They don’t want to be educated every time they scroll about every product out there.
So how do you get this skeptic audience to trust you?
You feed that skepticism.
We are going to see more and more brands pivot to takedowns of their competitors through WhatsApp forwards and influencers. It’s also a time where we're going to start - slowly but steadily - questioning the importance of influencers in this process.

The millennials are Gen Z are far more into meaningful consumption and want to do away with non-sustainable solutions. Brands will have to tap into this meaningfulness that our audience seeks. This is specially true for fashion brands as they cannot sustain themselves only with discounts. Every new garment the audience buys, they look at increase in carbon footprint, the rise of consumption that can be done away with, making them think of what they are buying. We have seen inflation driving consumption down, and cutting down cosnumption has become an ingrained habit: mindfulness and sustainability will be the new sought after values. The whole EV category is likely to further this trend with rapid absorption of both two wheel and four wheel EVs.

An intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA), is more than just a chatbot or voice-bot, It is AI-built and trained to solve specific problems end-to-end. Pandemic drove us to conversational chatbots and brands were happy automating the process. IVA and humans can make the partnership that will be the harbinger of big change and 2024 will trigger the big post-COVID behaviour change.
Now when AI is taking centre stage, IVA can transform the customer experience for business support and drive sales.
It can replace landing pages to generate leads, can replace e-commerce apps to improve transactions, and can replace call centres to amplify customer services.
It is 24x7 available and can handle unlimited customers simultaneously, unlike human resources.
If there is one thing that will define the future, this is what it will be.

Videos, videos, videos and videos is what people will consume in 2024. Blazing fast internet on mobiles, superior sound quality through headphones, better streaming through apps will drive the younger generation to be constantly on video binge. Brands will have to become content producers and be far more intrusive to drive engagement. It’s time for brands to think like publishers and not just those who fulfil needs.