2024 Marketing Predictions from the #SliceSquad!

Dana Schmidt
Chief Strategy Officer

I think AI social video will take off next year. It’s shockingly affordable to turn a recorded Zoom interview into a produced clip with b-roll, music, subtitles, etc. by running it through an AI service. The final product may not win an Oscar, but I can see how a lean organization would want to take advantage of a tool that simplifies content creation in order to dip a toe in the video production space.

Marissa Bruette
VP of Digital Marketing

Agreed! AI Video will be the highlight of 2024 as more users begin to experiment with its capabilities. Making reels will become easier, TikTok creation can become AI-generated, and your video strategy can become more complex with AI assistance. Even if you are a small business that hates being on camera, you’ll be able to create videos made for social media.

Anika Edrei
Director of Project Management

This being said, I think AI for SEO purposes is going to become astronomically popular. AI is really good for summarizing large portions of text and peppering text with keywords… But notably, at least ChatGPT 3.5 doesn’t understand how to respect character or word counts, yet. Let’s see how Bard and Jasper catch up!

Tiffany Nguyen
Project Manager

I agree! I think content automation will become even more important to ensure consistency and efficiency. Not 100% related to AI but I also think video content will become even more dominant and influential in 2024 to engage and attract audiences.

Joseph Forsthoffer
Content Writing Consultant

AI will provide endless opportunities for marketers small and large — from your local car dealer on up — to create highly targeted and “personalized” messaging. Bought a car with all-wheel drive? Is snow forecasted in your locality? Enjoy outdoor activities with your family? Have a dog? It can all come together via an AI-generated message. Whether recipients will see that as a more authentic and relevant communication is yet to be seen.

Adrian Heredia
Director of Growth and Revenue

As technology around AI expands and advances, so will marketers who want to remain agile, effective, and impactful. Teams are going to have to reconcile with the fact that AI is not going away and truly dig deep to determine how they fit into the evolving ecosystem. AI can be a tool to enhance efficiency but this must not be mistaken as a means to develop final products. How are teams going to ensure that projects developed using AI contain the all-important human element?

Austin Griffith
Director of Marketing Technology

AI will emerge as an essential piece of the marketer’s toolkit. Notice the emphasis on “piece” – AI will help the marketers of skill flesh out their work and accomplish tasks quickly and more effectively – but it will remain a tool to be used by skilled hands.

Elizabeth Roan
Director of Content Marketing

I think our biggest hesitation against AI as creatives is losing novelty. Generative AI is, after all, generic—so why bother? We can, however, turn it on its head. As marketers, we can also take on the role of a “prompt engineer.” This additional hat allows us to prompt our module to formalize and organize an idea, where, as Austin states, AI can truly serve as a toolkit. After all, we are not reinventing the wheel, but we are always finding new ways to turn it.

Jesse Draham
Content Manager

I predict the malicious use of data poisoning attacks against AI. There are already new tools being released for artists to use in their work to add invisible changes to pixels that can break AI training sets when scraped for use in new image generations. I find the entire notion of data poisoning fascinating, especially as I see the major potential AI has to steal intellectual property and put people out of work.

Joseph Forsthoffer
Content Writing Consultant

Likewise, I predict increasing calls for digital watermarking of AI-created/altered content. (Leica has integrated this into their new M series cameras.) There’s the obvious — distinguishing reality from fakes, identifying AI content in academic settings, etc. But I think some segment of the general population will want to know — and claim the right to know — if the content they receive has at least some human touch. Is that a real performance? Did a person put their soul into that book? Is that customer service response genuine or just some bot that doesn’t care a digital flip/flop about you? Is that telemedicine diagnosis reviewed by a doctor? Did my landscape designer put their thought into the proposal for my yard, or am I paying that firm for what they assigned to AI?

Austin Griffith
Director of Marketing Technology

If AI chatbots can further break into the folds of social media, we may see a complete destruction of “organic conversation” on social media, as every “organic, random conversation” you think you’re having may well be with an AI chatbot who subtly, or not so subtly, wants you to make a specific purchase or think and feel a specific way.

Jesse Draham
Content Manager

Also increasing debate over how copyright laws pertain to AI. If AI steals your work, who do you sue? Can AI iterative work be copyrighted? What if it creates very similar content for two different users — who has the rights to it?

Elizabeth Roan
Director of Content Marketing

As marketers, exercising caution when using generative AI is something to instill into our practices this year. One way of doing this is to “prompt wisely.” Avoid including personal or proprietary information, as well as misinformation. In the past, impulsive tweets and Facebook posts have caused PR nightmares and widespread false information. Similarly, we must be mindful of what we prompt AI to do. In other words, don’t prompt your model to write something, but to better format an idea that is yours. Our goal is to leverage AI to help us improve content, but where we come in as humans is adding a sense of relatability to ensure our content is effective. For the record, my input was edited by AI.

Jenna Jenkins
Social Media Manager

I think Meta Business Suite will add the ability to connect Threads! With scheduling added, this will be an important update for social media managers! It’s not a huge prediction, but may get more businesses and people on the app, which will increase popularity.

Tony Sadowski
Vice President of Creative

The meme-ification of brand accounts will continue as they struggle to figure out how to create genuine conversation on spaces like Thread. But hashtags are already opening up individual users to new communities and connections just a few weeks in, so the true winners will be those who learn how to create strategies that harness what’s unique about the platform and stop trying to use the tricks that work elsewhere. I can only imagine more and more waves of Twitter X-pats will join competing idea-sharing platforms like Threads, so we marketers need to Git Gud at turning what’s essentially community management, playful risk-taking, and gut-instinct conversation attempts into strategies that make sense for clients asking about alternatives to the dead bird site. I find it fascinating, simply because it’s so different from the others in its early incarnation. Like Nintendo in the game console wars, I truly hope Threads remains a weirdo that does things its own way and creates an experience that rewards you in different ways than the rest.

Adrian Heredia
Director of Growth and Revenue

This is a highly exciting space with a lot of potential. Brands and businesses are going to have to start considering how they are going to play in this space and not whether they should join. They simply should!

Clara Mattucci
Chief Operating Officer

I bet the news media will continue to struggle – maybe it won’t contract this year since it’s an election year, but it will be generally toxic and highly segmented. I wouldn’t be surprised if the top media for 2025 establish their position and following based on election coverage.

Tony Sadowski
Vice President of Creative

I kept waiting for the Deepfake Election cycle, where fake videos of candidates made enough impact to sway voters’ opinions of someone…but the candidates and campaigns became so outlandish that pretty much anything is believable and nothing matters for a lot of them. A lot of politicians would probably embrace the fake clip and make campaign ads and t-shirts out of it now. Guess it never got a chance to happen. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Jesse Draham
Content Manager

We’re entering an age where it will take an incredibly critical eye to tell fact from fiction. Consider how much civil unrest recently was caused by conspiracy theories in the form of the vaguest posts on poorly designed date websites. It was enough to convince millions of absurd nefarious theories. You’ll never be able to convince some people what they’re seeing with their own eyes isn’t real.

Tony Sadowski
Vice President of Creative

Elon Musk will challenge someone to an actual duel in 2024. It’s only relevant if he does it like a WWE title thing and the winner gets to own Twitter. I’ll never call it that letter.

Jesse Draham
Content Manager

Elon Musk vs Jack Dorsey, ladder match, ownership of Twitter on a pole match!

Austin Griffith
Director of Marketing Technology

It’s up to the public to understand the difference between the broad-cast that is public media and the narrow-cast that is your personal Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn feeds. As we continue to self-segment ourselves into our personal bubbles, something or someone needs to introduce disruption. How can we all share one conversation, founded in facts?

Clara Mattucci
Chief Operating Officer

For internal comms, we’ll doubtless see a handful of great examples of “come back to the office” messaging, and a huge slew of not-so-great examples.

Elizabeth Roan
Director of Content Marketing

Hopefully people will finally realize how ineffective “business at the top, party at the bottom” is! If you’re going to show up, show up all the way!

Tony Sadowski
Vice President of Creative

Every brand account that didn’t prepare a Spotify Wrapped parody post in advance this year saw so many of them capitalize on the trend that it’s impossible to see a world where we aren’t flooded with them next December out of sheer marketing FOMO. I recommend finding a way to subvert the idea in some way now to stand out; find a unique hook that elevates your year-end list gag beyond another also-ran. Always dare to be different!

Elizabeth Roan
Director of Content Marketing

I think brands will have a higher demand for less, but better, content. Gone will be the days of content for content’s sake but a higher standard for video, transcripts (and other forms of ADA-compliant content), as well as experiential content. In a nutshell, audiences will want all the feels!

Tony Sadowski
Vice President of Creative

Always on board with “do less, better.” Saves energy for truly cool ideas.

Jenna Jenkins
Social Media Manager

I think we’ll see an increase in short video content that first begins as a super niche topic. One recent example is the “this is me if you even care” meme, where younger influencers took 3-5 second videos of random objects and their audiences were able to relate to the joke. This trend slowly morphed into objects shown having pink bows on them, with the caption or hashtag being “coquette.” Most recently, CAVA’s “this is me if you even care” Tiktok is at over 415K views with a 3-second video. The video? CAVA food with pink bows wrapped around them. Chipotle is another brand that hopped on the trend on Instagram and received much higher engagement than normal. I believe we will continue to see an increase in content like this, where a brand’s best content is a short and silly trend that started as niche content by a small influencer.

Cass Bailey
Founder and CEO

Make 2024 the year you really tap into the huge marketing opportunity that is strong employer social media advocacy! Business leaders should have a plan in place to encourage employees to share updates with their networks regularly.