Integrate’s Q2 Marketing Insights and Outlook

With this year predicted to set the new highwater mark for political ad spending at  more than $12 billion, competition for online ad space will be fierce. This influx of ad spend will heat up the market, and businesses will have to spend more than usual for online advertising real estate. Because of these factors, businesses should keep their brand marketing tactics–creating messaging around core values–in balance with performance marketing spending going forward this year.

Whichever side of the aisle a company’s core values tend to fall on, taking sides politically in a marketing campaign is risky business. At best, your campaign could alienate roughly half of your potential customers right out of the gate.

At worst, it could go too far toward one end of the political spectrum and speak to only the most extreme outliers of your target audience, eliminating a huge swath of the potential customer base.

"If a brand takes a specific position, it ends up creating a lot of acrimony,” Vikas Mittal, a professor of marketing at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business, told ABC News in 2022. 

In fact, many consumers crave a break from the stress of political discourse during election season and will look favorably upon advertising content that entertains or otherwise distracts them from the extreme polarization online.

On the other hand, driving too close to the middle of the road can also be a risky approach. Some consumers want to see their values reflected in the businesses they support, so completely ignoring social issues in your marketing messaging can also alienate a segment of your audience.

Integrate’s advice:

• Stay true to your business’ core values in your marketing messaging while taking the high road above election season mudslinging. Consider leaning into a more lighthearted, relaxing tone in your messaging during this stressful time.
• Prepare for increased ad spending in your budget as political advertising drives up costs.

Prediction #2: Sports-themed marketing will dominate Q2 as the Summer Games captivate consumers

As the 2024 Summer Olympics kick off in Paris this July, we predict that sports will impact Q2 marketing plans in several complementary ways.

Influencer marketing has long been a powerful tool in marketing playbooks, and that tool recently got stronger and perhaps more accessible with the passage of the NCAA’s NIL (name, image, and likeness) rule, allowing college athletes to earn income for endorsements and appearances.

The loosening of these restrictions is good news for small businesses hoping to market around the hype of the upcoming Summer Olympics, which attracted more than three billion unique viewers globally during the 2020 games in Tokyo.

In the past, only larger businesses with big advertising budgets could afford to advertise on national broadcasts or pay for established professional athletes with household names to serve as spokespeople. 

But now, even small, local businesses with limited advertising budgets can buy locally targeted ads to air during the Olympics live stream on Peacock. And with the potential of a U.S. TikTok ban still looming, many student athletes could soon be looking for new outlets to share their name, image, and likeness.

It bears mentioning that brands should vet the student athletes that they decide to work with just as they would research any partnership.

Here is a collection of resources that businesses can use to find student athletes to partner with.

Integrate’s advice:

• Take advantage of the Summer Olympics excitement by leveraging recognizable college athletes for influencer marketing campaigns.
• Consider combining popular college athletes in your area with locally broadcast OTT (over-the-top) ads to really align your advertising with this summer’s Olympic excitement.
• Look for athletes and former athletes in your region who have Olympic experience to strengthen this seasonal messaging.

Prediction #3: Marketers will find fertile ground for new campaigns on rapidly evolving platforms like TikTok and even Walmart

In the previous prediction, we mentioned a potential TikTok ban in the U.S. But the reality for now is that TikTok has one of the fastest growing user bases among social media apps, and brands must include it in their marketing plans.

As TikTok’s user base grows, the company is also expanding its feature set, and we predict that this will make it a more attractive destination for marketers in Q2.

For example, TikTok’s expanding search and shopping features are designed to convert existing TikTok users into customers. With more than 60% of 18-29-year-olds already using TikTok, this is a very valuable demographic for marketers and eCommerce retailers to target.

TikTok Shops: BIGGEST Opportunity In Ecommerce Right Now (youtube.com)

While TikTok’s limited in-app search function was once considered a major weakness for the app, developers have been steadily improving that feature in an effort to make it the go-to search destination for GenZ users. And their efforts seem to be working.

“"If I'm trying to see how something fits or where I should go for dinner or what to see in a new city, I'm looking at TikTok first," Clay Lute, a 2023 graduate of LIM College and Associate Merchant at Calvin Klein, told the audience at the recent Shoptalk 2024 conference in Las Vegas.

Even more traditional, established platforms like Walmart are evolving quickly in an attempt to keep up with the tastes of modern users through influencer marketing and its retail media network, Walmart Connect.

For example, Walmart’s retail media partnership with TikTok has allowed the massive retailer to expand its reach and gain deeper data-backed insights into how its social media ads impact consumers' purchasing decisions.

Following this playbook, we predict that more brands will build retail media partnerships in an effort to make up for the continued crackdown on third-party data collection.

Integrate’s advice:

• Leverage retail media partnerships to create new data streams for valuable customer insights.
• Tag your TikTok ads with relevant hashtags to help your target audience find you while they scroll TikTok.
• Enable the TikTok Shop feature in your TikTok videos to allow your viewers to make a purchase without having to leave the app.

Prediction #4: Marketing’s increasing reliance on “miracle” AI tools will begin to wane as the value of human input and oversight becomes a differentiator

Most of us can vividly remember the first time we asked an AI tool, like Chat GPT, to complete a task, and then watched with amazement as the tool actually completed the task with an acceptable level of success.

While this technology is still largely unproven, digital marketers have not hesitated to embrace it. In fact, a recent Salesforce survey found that 76% of marketers use AI for basic content creation and copywriting.

But as the novelty of AI tools has started to wear off, their limitations have been revealed, and it has become painfully obvious to experienced marketers that AI text and image generators are nowhere close to replacing human writers and artists.

While AI tools are convenient and potentially time-saving, these benefits do come at a cost. Marketing copy and images that lean too heavily on AI tools typically feel robotic and lifeless, leaving the audience feeling stranded in the uncanny valley.

Marketing teams that carelessly use AI-generated content also risk publishing misinformation, plagiarism, and/or offensive material, which could lead to serious reputational damage or worse.

In Q2, we predict that the most successful brands will continue to use AI tools for time-intensive tasks like summarizing large datasets and automating workflows, and double down on investing in talented professionals for original, creative output and project oversight.

Integrate’s advice:

• Use AI tools as assistants for important but tedious tasks, and invest in human talent for new and exciting content that captures consumer’s attention.
• Ask your marketing software provider about any AI features that are included in your software, and how those features can be used to improve your workflows.
• If you do decide that you still want to let AI generate content for you, consider the AI output a very rough draft or outline that needs several rounds of extensive revisions prior to publishing.

Prediction #5: Businesses will invest more in analytics, online presence, and creative marketing strategies to enhance brand personality and memorability

While there is certainly a need in the modern marketplace for analytics-backed marketing strategies to maximize conversion rates and increase ROI, data can only take you so far. If good data was all you needed to connect with consumers, AI could handle the job.

In reality, there is an element of magic to every memorable marketing campaign, and that magic comes from authentic human connections through nostalgia-based marketing, experiential marketing, and influencer marketing, to name a few examples.

For example, just think of this year’s Super Bowl commercials: how many of those ads didn’t either feature a celebrity influencer or play off of the viewer’s sense of nostalgia? In fact, many of these ads–like the State Farm spot featuring Arnold Schwarzanegger and Danny DeVito–combine both of these tactics.

In Q2 and beyond, we predict that the most successful marketing campaigns will combine data insights with good, old-fashioned marketing fundamentals to evoke genuine emotions in consumers.

Integrate’s advice:

• Use the data insights you have to inform your marketing strategy, but never let data take precedence over the human-to-human connections that breathe life into the best marketing campaigns.
• Use your marketing analytics software to hone in on your target audience for nostalgia-based marketing. For example, if millennials are your target audience, your reference material should come from the late 1980s to mid-2000s.
• You don’t need to host a large conference to reap the benefits of experiential marketing. Smaller businesses can take advantage of this effective marketing tactic by sponsoring a trade show, posting tutorial videos to YouTube, or hosting a live webinar on LinkedIn, for example.

Marketing into Q2 and beyond

In this article, we examined how election season, the Summer Olympics, the ever-evolving social media landscape and more will affect marketing trends in the coming months.

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