2024 digital marketing predictions: TikTok, AI, and the new metaverse

Trapeze Media

Jan 2

The online world continues to change at breakneck speed, and though predicting what happens on the internet next week — let alone for an entire year — can be a futile effort, thinking about and preparing for the big-picture shifts is vital for ensuring your marketing strategies stay ahead of the curve. Here are the broader strokes we’re anticipating in 2024 — our twenty-twenty-fore-cast, if you will.

TikTok takes nostalgia marketing to new heights

Nostalgia marketing has taken on an intriguing new form in the era of TikTok, sending old songs back to the tops of the music charts, bringing aesthetics of decades past back into the trend cycle, and even reviving centuries-old traditions for new generations.

Just this New Year’s, for example, eating 12 grapes at midnight on 31st December — a tradition that’s been around for more than 100 years in Spain, Portugal, and parts of Latin America — did the viral rounds on TikTok, not only giving it a renaissance in its countries of origin, but inspiring people from all over the world to take part in the tradition, too.

Just before Christmas 2023, the movie Saltburn released on the streaming platform Amazon Prime. The film is set in the mid-2000s, and has a soundtrack filled with aughts bangers like Murder on the Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Perfect (Exceeder) by Mason ft. Princess Superstar. Those songs are absolutely everywhere again. Some TikTok users even uploaded videos of the tunes being played in clubs on New Year’s.

The same thing happened with Kate Bush’s 1985 song Running Up That Hill when it was featured in Stranger Things back in 2022. TikTok is making old stuff cool again in an unprecedentedly organic way, and younger generations are embracing it as their own.

It’s delightful to witness, and also a powerful opportunity for any legacy brand that has struggled to present its history in an engaging way. Microsoft’s marketing team, for instance, have dusted off the tech giant’s image by commenting on hundreds of TikToks showing how Windows computers looked in the decades before many of the app’s users were even born. A brand that previous generations dismissed as uncool in Apple’s shadow now has a bit of edge and equity to it in the eyes of younger people.

In 2024, with the right strategy, narrative, and video editing, decades- and centuries-old companies have the chance to flip their heritage into an asset in an exciting new way, through the gears of the TikTok nostalgia machine.

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AI continues reshaping the internet, for better or worse

From the Turing test to IBM’s chess-conquering Deep Blue to ChatGPT, the decades-long race to AI crescendoed in 2023 with an explosion in popularity that has ignited debate around the nature of creativity, metamorphosised countless job roles and workflows, and perhaps even threatened the future of Google.

AI vs. creativity

Using AI and other methods of automation to complement creative processes is certainly nothing new, but in 2023, systems like DALL·E and Midjourney became more egalitarian than ever, and nearly every app in the digital marketer’s toolkit, from Photoshop, Canva, and Hootsuite to Squarespace, Buffer, and WordPress, implemented some flavour of AI.

In 2024, marketers will continue reaping the benefits and grappling with the consequences of AI. Consumers and creators will settle into their stances on generative ads and artworks, and brands and agencies will have to be agile in how they respond to the zeitgeist.

2023 saw Hollywood halted by a 148-day writers’ strike, for which a core motivator was securing guardrails against overreaching use of AI in film and TV production. Such human-vs-machine labour clashes will no doubt shake the marketing industry in 2024 and beyond, too. Using AI to support — rather than devalue — marketers’ ideas and expertise will be key for the industry, at every level.

AI vs. information and authenticity

Left unchecked, AI could catalyse the already-disastrous rise of online misinformation into an unmitigated catastrophe. Marketers — particularly those working in sectors where factual communication is vital, like medical fields — should implement safeguards to counter these risks.

At the end of 2022, we noted that a significant percentage of younger demographics were using TikTok to search for answers and information, instead of Google.

In 2023, the search giant’s dominance crumbled further under the weight of AI-powered SEO tactics pummelling their algorithms with low-quality articles churned out by ChatGPT-fuelled content generation models.

The degradation of Google results has been palpable, so much so that a popular meme in 2023 highlighted how everyone has started adding ‘reddit’ or ‘tiktok’ the ends of their searches to find better answers.

It’s clear, then, that audiences crave the community structure of platforms like Reddit and the shortform video format popular on TikTok — both very human forms of media. Ultimately, it all comes back to one of the few consistent stalwarts of good marketing: authenticity.

Even though AI has started coming for TikTok influencers now, it’s a lot harder to fake a video of a human with a personality than it is to generate an optimised-for-Google blog post. For many brands, it’s the harder-to-imitate stuff that’ll score the loyalty of consumers.

Newsletters and podcasts: is 2024 too late to start?

This decentralisation of search from Google to TikTok speaks to a bigger shift in the shape of the internet. Notice how everyone and their pet cat has a newsletter or a podcast nowadays? A few years ago, everyone realised focusing solely on social put their content at the behest of increasingly merciless algorithms. Hence the trend towards more platform-agnostic media, like direct-to-inbox newsletters, or direct-to-app podcasts.

These channels have been thwarted in their own ways, naturally. Gmail has sorted newsletters into their own separate inbox for more than a decade, and this filtering will only get smarter with the evolution of AI. Newsletters have also borne newer platforms like Substack, which, yes, does maintain the direct-to-inbox advantage, but also offers an app with an algorithm that presents the same problems as the ones that govern social. Podcasts are the same: subscribers get notified of new episodes, but algorithms will have to start sieving the noise. Especially as AI-generated content muddies the waters.

So, is it worth starting a newsletter or a podcast in 2024? We still vote yes. Though the spaces are more saturated than they’ve ever been, they’re still relatively calm compared to the untameable tides of social feeds. If you’re sharing good-quality, highly-engaging content in each mail-out and episode, a single subscription can be more valuable than 100 new social followers. It’s often a higher-intent, middle-of-funnel commitment, which likely signals firmer interest and, when it comes down to sales, more chances of conversions.

Plus, newsletters and podcasts are the kind of large content pieces that can be atomised into social posts, making them an incredibly efficient starting point for your broader publishing schedules and strategies.

Apple Vision Pro, and the surprising return of the metaverse

Within hours of Apple unveiling their mixed-reality Vision Pro headset in June 2023, online discourse had settled into two camps: the marketers writing thinkpieces about how Vision Pro might be the ‘next big thing’ in digital marketing, and consumers expressing concern about a future in which ads float around in their peripheral sight.

Of course, Apple wouldn’t let something quite so dystopian blemish their tightly-regulated ecosystem, but marketing agencies will have the opportunity to explore ways of promoting brands through a new kind of immersive experience.

In some ways, it’s a cleaner retread of what Meta attempted with the ‘metaverse’ during the pandemic, but with better hardware and a stronger developer community, led by a company with a more trusted reputation for protecting user privacy.

Apple Vision Pro is set to launch in early 2024. Though the extravagant price tag will prevent it from becoming a household device for a while, we’ll start seeing the successful (and not-so-successful) ways brands position themselves in the mixed-reality environment which may finally, after years of unfounded promise, cement AR/VR headsets as part of our everyday lives.

The metaverse that’s still growing

When we wrote about the tepid public response to Meta’s ‘metaverse’ in our 2022 social media predictions, we said:

“[Some people] have pointed out that virtual realms [similar to] the Metaverse have already been highly successful. The countless pop-culture collaborations that pop up in Fortnite are worth millions, and world-renowned musicians like Ariana Grande and Marshmello have held live concerts within the video game. Whether this counts as being part of the ‘metaverse’ is widely-debated.”

Terminology aside, the continued growth of Fortnite as a marketing powerhouse is astounding to behold. New brand collaborations appear in the game every few weeks, from every corner of pop culture. Cars modelled on Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Outfits designed by Balenciaga, Moncler, Ralph Lauren, and Nike. Playable ‘skins’ based on countless real-world celebs (sports stars like Naomi Osaka, John Cena, and LeBron James; musicians including Bruno Mars, J. Balvin, and The Kid LAROI) and characters from every form of popular entertainment (franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, DC, and Indiana Jones; horror icons like Michael Myers, Ash Williams, and Alien/Predator; cartoons and anime series like Futurama, Dragon Ball, and Attack on Titan). The list is endless.

Towards the end of 2023, Fortnite held their biggest virtual show ever, headed by Eminem, and then nonchalantly announced an enormous expansion of their game, including a racing mode (featuring some real-world car brands), a rhythm mode (upping the frequency of their virtual festivals, starting with The Weeknd), and an entire game mode based on a partnership with LEGO, flipping thousands of elements from the main game into a child-friendly, gun-free world.

It’s a marketer’s paradise. And the most impressive thing? Very few of the collaborations have drawn backlash. Players welcome the chance to engage with their favourite characters, celebrities, and brands without feeling like they’re being advertised to, because the game at the centre of it all continues feeling fresh and fun with each new update.

If Fortnite’s new modes thrive in 2024, it could start looking like an ‘everything game’ — something agencies will want to keep in mind when representing famous stars, fashion houses, car brands, toys, media franchises, and so on.

The state of Twitter/X and Threads

In the summer of 2023, we opened an article about the state of Twitter (now known as X) by saying:

“Within six months of Elon Musk taking over Twitter in October 2022, more than half of the social networking platform’s top 1,000 advertisers, who represented more than 90% of the company’s revenue, had paused spending on the site.”

Since then, Musk’s relationship with advertisers has degraded to the point where he got on stage at a business conference and, in response to questions about Disney’s decision to pause Twitter/X ads after Musk tweeted something antisemitic, he said: “If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”

So, the public perception of Twitter/X and its volatile leader is certainly quite shaky, but will it still be a place for marketers in 2024? Though the platform is plagued by bots and spam, and Musk’s vision for its future seems vague and directionless, what we wrote in our summer article still holds true:

“If your brand’s content and purpose aligns with the things Twitter/X does best — real-time information, fandom/hyperlocal communities, frictionless communication — then it still might be a powerful cog in your marketing machine.”

Threads finds its footing

Interestingly, one of the things that‘s a curse for Twitter/X is proving to a boon for its budding rival, Threads, and that thing is AI. The spam problem on Twitter/X is largely being driven by AI-generated accounts and ads, which are pretty much unavoidable for users at this point. For social media marketers, it can sometimes turn community management into a nightmare.

Instagram, meanwhile, saw how TikTok’s AI-powered algorithms were serving users just the right content, and have managed to turn the dwindling popularity of Reels around by implementing a similar suggestions engine into their app. This has trickled down into Threads, which, as we head into 2024, is surprisingly good at surfacing interesting, relevant posts, and nurturing the kinds of nested discussions that once felt unique to Twitter/X.

Threads, then, may very well have a place in the 2024 social networking line-up, but do brands have a place on Threads? There aren’t really any standout examples of companies killing it on the app just yet, but it’s relatively early days, and many social media managers are simply approaching Threads the exact same way they approached Twitter/X, which is a logical starting point. If a brand does pop off on Threads in 2024, it’ll likely be for the same reasons it would have popped off on Twitter/X.

Unless Threads introduces dramatic changes to its functionality in 2024, it‘ll likely just continue growing at a gradual pace, pulling in users from Instagram and providing safe haven for Twitter/X escapees. Bottom line: if you already tweet for a brand, mirror the same posts and community management guidelines onto Threads, but be prepared to adapt if the culture of the platform becomes more distinct.