“Moving from cautious optimism to a year of abundance and opportunity” is how 2024 will be remembered. At least, that was the feeling of UK Chief Commercial Officer Zuzanna Gierlinska when she introduced MiQ’s keynote session at the NDA Live: A Year in Review, partnered by colleague and MiQ’s UK Commercial Director, Clare Beddow.
NDA Live: A Year in Review, held at London’s Soho Hotel in December, took a look back at 2024 to learn lessons about what technologies, innovations and marketing approaches will be most important in the year ahead.
By looking back at the successes of the preceding months, a stellar lineup of brand marketers discussed what brands have reason to be most excited about in the year ahead.
Our speakers also revealed what their secret santa present, opened at the start of each session, says about their brand’s marketing highlights in 2024 were what they meant for their marketing strategy this year.
The event featured speakers Tom Mills, Global Head of Media Development at Haleon; Amy Caven, Head of Media Strategy and Planning at Boots; Kerry Thorpe – Head Of Communications, Ben & Jerry’s; Patrick Zinga, Digital Media, Data & MarTech Lead, Heineken UK; Sandra Hughes, Head of Measurement, Strategy & Propositions, Tesco Media Platform; Ollie Shayer, Omnichannel Marketing Director, Boots; and Mays Elansari, Former Marketing Director at Subway.
NDA Live A Year in Review was co-hosted by NDA Editor Justin Pearse and Gemma Greaves, former Chief Executive of The Marketing Society and founder of Cabal and Co-Founder of Nurture.
And what was the first thing to happen that year to kick off all that abundance mentioned in the opening talk? The big news was that the cookie uncrumbled. Instead of sunsetting it, the sun rose on a potentially permanently cookieful future. “It was the industry’s biggest U-turn and yet product teams all around the glow persevere with testing the product sandbox. That’s perseverance if nothing else,” Gierlinska suggests.
Cookies aside, there were three main events that Beddow feels really stand out for her this year. One, retail media. “It’s huge – massive – and retail media networks are not going anywhere”. The second is a strong rise in audience growth on CTV – although advertising dollars are yet to follow suit.
The third, of course, is AI. “At the beginning of the year, we were expecting AI to take over the world,” she recalls. “But we’re still here, very much in a people-led industry.”
More specifically in the world of programmatic, perhaps perseverance isn’t the term. After all, it’s been what Gierlinska describes as “a pretty stellar year”. The figures agree, with three straight quarters of 10% year on year growth, which is predicted to extend to 26% growth by 2028. With retail media – “still rough around the edges” – accelerating “at a clip”, Amazon, Netflix and Disney opening up ad-funded tiers bought through programmatic and big AI investments taking programmatic to the next level, there’s every reason to be excited.
Time to commit to media – new and old
There’s a sense that marketers and advertisers have used 2024 to stop simply dipping a toe in the water and commit a bit more wholeheartedly to the newer concepts on the block. Patrick Zinga, Head of Digital Media, Consumer data and Martech at Heineken began activations in retail media with 10 of the company’s 26 brands. “This year was the first where we really scaled our efforts within retail media, merging [some of] our first party data with dunnhumby sphere’s first party data, using it as a measurement application to understand incremental uplift in all of our products.”
Ben & Jerry’s most notable success in 2024 was about going back to experiential interactions. It’s all too easy to get lost in digital, digital, digital but, Kerry Thorpe Head of Communications Europe, Ben & Jerry’s says, “Our scoop shop in Burlington, Vermont was the first place where we connected with people. Cookie Dough was a fan suggestion that was written on our store notice board. We just ran our third ‘Sundaes Festival’ a 5,000-person, full-day event, with our values baked in, which was amplified throughout our channels”
With all the talk of digital it is refreshing to hear that in-person and traditional media activations still have a place and, better still, it’s becoming easier to measure their impact as part of the omnichannel whole.
Amy Caven, Head of Media Strategy and Planning at Boots, notes: “We were early adopters when it came to programmatic out-of-home, probably thanks to the wealth of first-party data we have,” she continues. “But while ‘shinier’ data driven activity is still super successful, we’ve also gone back to good old special builds.” She notes that the big shopping destinations such as London’s Westfield or Oxford Circus are always going to see “massive traffic”.
Subway’s ads also perform well in OOH, and Mays Elansari, Former Marketing Director at Subway agrees that traditional is not to be sniffed at but that digital works well alongside. “Programmatic has been interesting, which we’ve used more for occasion-based campaigns like Veganuary. Being able to hone in on day parts, flipping products over from morning, to lunchtime and then evening, using high, visual identity and digital to really bring it to life. Balancing brand awareness and building consideration as they go along.”
