As we enter the era of microtrends, how are marketers keeping up?

The Drum Network gave it a shot anyway, gathering together some of the brightest and best from the marketing industry to reflect on the trends that defined 2024 for them.

Happily, the challenge of responding to the ever-faster pace of online change seems to be pushing marketers back into the real world.

‘Everything is influence’

It’s hard to ignore the role played by short-form content this year. In talking about trends that appear and disappear faster than a literal snowflake (not the supposedly fragile younger demographics who consume much of the content), as well as the rapidly changing pace of social media culture, you could do worse than look to TikTok and the new breed of influencers born from the platform.

​​Ann Lipatova, head of client excellence at HypeFactory, says 2024 was the year influencers really earned their stripes in terms of shaping customer buying journeys. “Influencer marketing was traditionally divided into two directions, brand awareness and performance,” she explains. “Now, influencer marketing plays a vital role in the whole customer journey, from awareness to acquisition and even retention. This enables businesses to achieve more sustainable growth and to make deeper connections with their audiences – and these connections are becoming more rock solid.”

In a period defined by change, it’s important to remember we’re discussing human behavior, says Jamie Klingler, chief communications officer at Found, who says that, now, “Everything is influence”.

“I think that the psychological parts of why we consume, the way we consume, or why we relate to brands, the whole thing about transformative relationships, is about the emotional attraction and the emotional [aspect] from somebody that we trust,” Klingler says.

So? Zoom out and take in the big picture – along with core decision drivers. “The reasons, and what those levers are, have really changed,” Klingler explains. “Dialing into what the important structures are is important, along with the things that are behind us making decisions.”

Micro-trends

For the trend spotters, all is not lost, says Franziska Gregor, managing director of Serviceplan Culture, for from the ashes of trends emerge micro-trends.

“When I look back at the last year, I can totally see that trends are becoming micro-trends,” she explains. “It's super challenging for every brand that we are working with, for every client to react in this short timeframe, especially when we have local clients, and they have a production time that's a few months or six months or a year, at least.”

Entertainment-heavy storytelling ‘points’ are replacing traditional linear storytelling, thanks to the dominance of short-form video that works to capture audience attention for little more than a moment, she adds. Furthermore, big brands now have less of a sway in creating trends.

“When I talk to our clients, I try to make them understand (whether it’s Coca-Cola or Netflix or whoever) that they are no longer the people who make the trends. They have to focus on their communities long-term, and on the tastemakers, to understand which trends are coming.”

Cultural intersectionality

This speaks to a more collaborative, flatter marketing hierarchy in which brands, agencies, communities, and tastemakers work together to forge cultural moments. Even if these moments last for less time than a glass of sherry left next to Aunt Debbie on Boxing Day.

Tim Walsh, head of strategy at Momentum, says for him, this year saw the shift from sponsorship to partnership, requiring a shift to a marketing approach defined more by ‘cultural intersectionality’.

“The big thing this year we’ve seen is this sense of cultural intersectionality. The computer will always spit out the traditional stuff. But actually, when you start to look at the intersectionalities and some of the subcultures in culture, you're seeing this rise of these digital natives. Very much smaller communities of deep and specific interests. Brands are starting to commit more investment confidence into backing some of the more niche communities but with higher relevance.”

Accommodating this changing landscape has led to a notable tonal shift, says Brendan Brown, senior vice president and head of strategy at George P. Johnson (GPJ). “Moving from formal to informal, public speaking to conversational, scripted to spontaneous, and seeing that style of communication resonate more with consumers today,” he explains. “I think if you backed up to 5-10 years ago, you'd see much more polished, scripted sound bites.”

Gone for now, at least, he adds, are the days of: “You're going to sit here for 120 minutes and watch some dude in a suit talk at you.” Thank fa-la-la-la-la for that.

Reactive marketing

How to get traction in this fragmented landscape? Brands have to be ready to react, says Edward Ogunrinde, senior creative strategist at MG Empower. To this end, his agency this year ran more workshops for clients to build their reactive strategies.

“Brands need to adopt more of a strategic approach to when they jump into trends or when they need to have these conversations online,” he says. “I think we've seen as well that most brands are looking to be influential and have influence, but it's about understanding how to identify trends, and then also, most importantly, when to jump into these trends.”

Reflecting on starting her cultural marketing agency after four years of working at Tiktok, Gregor says the main issue she found brands faced was how to build communities.

“It was very, very hard for all the brands that I was working with to understand how to actually build a community within the social media or entertainment media environment. And so, for us, cultural marketing was the answer to that question. But when I talk about communities, I think it's not only about social or entertainment media, but… is a shift to more reality-based communities.”

This point resonated with panelists. Gregor pointed to brands running book clubs, Ogunrinde to dating app Bumble hosting pub quizzes, and Klingler to the roaring success of fan fests held by TV channel Bravo.

All of which leaves us to ask, is 2024 the year that marketing went offline?