By: Filip Jabbour, Regional GM, Advertising, MENA

With 2024 now well underway, we’re already starting to see the trends that will shape the year ahead. Technology’s role in the advertising landscape is constantly evolving and innovation is everywhere. This dynamic environment presents both challenges and opportunities for advertisers, who are constantly adapting to stay ahead of the curve. Here are just a few reasons it’s is an exciting time to be a marketer this year….

However the industry evolves, change should always focus on helping brands reach audiences in a meaningful and convenient way. Keeping this in mind and staying ahead of this year’s big trends is no mean feat as brands consider how to most effectively place their ad spend. Here are some of the more significant industry innovations we’re seeing that will help brands big and small deliver improved advertising experiences for their audiences and better results for their campaigns.

Advertisers will increasingly turn to clean rooms to help plan, optimize and measure the impact of their campaigns

Advertisers are always looking for new and better ways to help drive discovery and deliver better customer experiences. But planning, activating and measuring which campaigns and creatives are effective at reaching those customers continues to be a challenge.

The answer for many brands has been the use of clean rooms. Using clean rooms, advertisers have been able to uncover new audiences and insights that are helping them optimize ad spend. In 2024 we’re expecting adoption of this this technology to increase as advertisers seek to safely bring together and analyzeinformation from disparate sources, including their own and third parties’, with the flexibility to generate custom marketing insights. 64% of companies leveraging privacy preserving technology are already using clean rooms. In 2024, this number will rise with 85% already considering the use of this technology.

In practise, secure, cloud-based clean room solutions can enable advertisers to aggregate signals and create the queries most relevant to their business. We’ve seen brands achieve a 103% increase in new-to-brand purchases by using this technology to better understand whether products with high repeat rate were bringing in new customers to the brand’s Amazon store. Equipped with this insight, the brand could double down on the marketing of products with exceptional new-to-brand purchase rates and repeat purchase rates.

Reaching the right audience at home and abroad

How brands reach their audiences tomorrow will look completely different than it does today and advertisers need to focus on remaining relevant, while also preserving insight integrity and continuing to prioritize customer trust. This is true domestically and for brands looking at the international export landscape.

From a technology point of view, this might mean adopting model-based solutions that create an informed understanding of an audience while also delivering results. We certainly expect investment to accelerate in this area as advertisers work to remain relevant,potentially, without third-party cookies. Because of this, access to new, more advanced machine learning models and optimized campaign control systems to enhance bidding and pacing decisions and help advertisers reach previously unaddressable audiences will be essential to future success.  These models have the potential to analyze a range of signals to help advertisers predict and reach highly relevant audiences with optimal cost-efficiency.

Building a diversified marketing mix will also be crucial when it comes to serving audiences both at home and internationally. Streaming TV for example has the potential to open up a new world of opportunity for brands looking to reach audiences in the places they spend time every day to be part of the cultural conversation. While many brands will already have Streaming TV as part of their marketing mix, we’re expecting to see advertisers of all sizes embrace the format in 2024. Particularly here in the Middle East, gaming is having a real moment with 2023 research from the Boston Consulting Group finding that around 60% of the population in the Middle East consider themselves gaming fans. For advertisers here, channels like Twitch that provide access to this crucial and growing audience will take on greater significance in 2024.

So whether it’s access to the hottest TV show, a classic movie or livestreamed gaming, Streaming TV will increasingly help brands of all sizes reach new audiences at scale. For domestic brands targeting international expansion, Streaming TV in 2024 is particularly exciting.

Generative AI will redefine creative development

For the last 12 months, generative AI has been the word on everyone’s lips. Within the advertising industry, business leaders have talked at length about the potential of generative AI to revolutionize the way creative is developed, helping brands to deliver better results at speed. In 2024, we’ll see generative AI become a creative tool that advertisers utilize on a daily basis. Research from Gartner supports this, with 63% of marketing leaders planning to invest in generative AI solutions within the next two years.

In a March 2023 survey, we found that among advertisers who were unable to build successful campaigns, nearly 75% cited building ad creatives and choosing a creative format as their biggest challenges. As more solutions become available, generative AI will empower advertisers to efficiently produce brand-themed imagery at scale, enhancing their creative capabilities and streamlining the process.

But the successful application of this technology needs to be rooted in improved ad performance. We’ve seen brands use generative AI to remove some of the creative barriers and produce lifestyle imagery from standalone product shots that deliver improved click-through rates. One example saw an advertiser achieve a CTR 40% higher compared to ads with standard product images. For marketers looking to capitalize on the generative AI opportunity, demonstrating success like this will be crucial.