The brands that won at marketing in 2024 were master entertainers.
Fashion’s love affair with sports continued, seen most obviously through the Olympics. A number of brands benefited, most notably official sponsor LVMH, which was able to have its logos appear everywhere from the trays that held the medals to a dance sequence during the opening ceremony.
Beyond sports, pop culture provided plenty of fodder for brands. Charli XCX’s album “Brat” kicked off a swell of interest, with retailers highlighting the green items in their assortment, while brands including Acne Studios, Converse and H&M — which hosted a Charli-led concert series — tapped the musician as an ambassador. Labels from mall mainstay Gap to footwear label Aldo rolled out collections in honour of the “Wicked” movie this November, while other films, like “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” saw brands from discount retailer Primark to beauty players Nyx and Lush creating themed collections as well.
Social media also provided endless opportunities for brands to engage in more niche cultural moments, leveraging humour to provide a bit of escapist fun. Old Navy, for example, partnered with comedic creator Delaney Rowe, who wore the brand’s clothes in one of her TikTok videos, while Coach dressed comedians Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone for their “Ride” podcast tour.
In a world of short attention spans, where shoppers are likely to tune out or swipe past traditional advertisements, 2024 proved that entertainment — whether latching on to a larger moment or creating your own — may be brands’ best bet for connecting with consumers.
“If you want to break through … you need to think about entertainment,” said Kenny Mitchell, CMO of Levi’s, which recently rolled out a capsule collection in honour of the Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” “You need to think about places where you might show up, but it’s still helping to tell your brand story.”
But measuring the results of these marketing efforts remains a challenge for brands when they extend beyond the realm of trackable social-media posts due to the longer-tail ROI of certain types of activations. Looking ahead to 2025, brands will continue to iterate to figure out how best to measure their culture-centric brand-building efforts.
“People want to be entertained. That is actually a way to keep the relationship going,” said brand consultant Ana Andjelic. “If you keep people engaged with your content, even if they’re not buying your products for a minute, that is your strategy.”
Cultural Crossover
There was no shortage of cultural events this year, but brands still gravitated towards the biggest moments, like the Olympics or “Wicked.”
But with so many brands jumping onto these big-ticket events — likely in hopes of capturing the most impact — it was hard for one to really own a moment. LVMH was joined by a chorus of other high-profile brands, like Ralph Lauren and Nike, at the Olympics. And after the games ended, more brands took advantage of the Olympic shine by casting top athletes: the viral South Korean shooter Kim Ye-ji, for example, landed a Balenciaga campaign in December.
There’s opportunity for brands to look to smaller events, like a TV show with a cult following or an artist with a popular album — even if it’s not top of the charts. Womenswear label Free People partnered with the hit Hulu series “Tell Me Lies” on a capsule collection. Brands should also look to what’s rising in popularity: Glossier, for example, took advantage of growing interest in the WNBA, extending its sponsorship of the league.
And of course, social-media stars also offer an easy way to integrate with viral content. Marc Jacobs partnered with creator Nara Smith, who is known for her elaborate recipe videos, on a video where she “made” one of the brand’s signature tote bags “from scratch.”
“In previous years, creators were used as product mannequins or mouthpieces for brand messaging. But more and more, people are really leaning into the specific style of that specific creator,” said Louise Yems, strategy director at creative agency The Digital Fairy. “That juxtaposition and that novelty is what wins people’s attention in the first place.”
One sure way to stand out is through creating your own moments. Though this involves some risk — you’re not attaching yourself to a pre-tested asset — it can offer big payoff.
E.l.f. Cosmetics, for example, has been unafraid to experiment with its marketing, sharing unexpected, humorous content that spans a multitude of cultural spheres, from a Super Bowl ad starring Judge Judy and the cast of Netflix favourite “Suits,” to a short true-crime parody that played in AMC cinemas, to a partnership with water label Liquid Death for a heavy metal-inspired campaign. The strategy has helped it to become the number one mass-beauty brand in the US by units, with 23 consecutive quarters of net sales growth and market share gains.
Staying nimble is key. “Our strategy is never etched in stone,” said Laurie Lam, E.l.f.’s chief brand officer. “We just [allow] ourselves to stay in this constant state of daring each other, challenging each other, pushing the idea further to the point where we become a little bit uncomfortable, and that’s when, for us, it becomes something that we need to put out there.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean jumping on every trend that pops up, however, which Chemmie Squier, creative director at The Digital Fairy, said can be a “race to the bottom,” crowding shoppers’ inboxes or feeds with similar messaging.
Instead, brands should use microtrends as a “litmus test for culture” and think about what they are “actually telling me about culture right now,” said Yems.
Monetising Cultural Engagement
While entertaining consumers was a key form of brand elevation and community-building this year, the ability to eventually monetise and track the impact of that content is key, said Andjelic.
This can be achieved by ascribing “hard KPIs,” like store and website traffic and conversion, to cultural products in order to better understand which parts of a brand’s creative universe are doing the heaviest lifting. That said, certain activations do take longer to pay off, making them harder to track but still essential to building a brand’s cultural clout.
Ideally, the two efforts work in tandem. Affordable cashmere brand Quince, which leans heavily into paid social-media advertising, is seeking out more brand-building opportunities. It has integrated user-generated content from creators it gifted into its performance ads, as well as hosting more events. For a recent holiday dinner in New York City, the company teamed up with influencer Chrissy Rutherford.
“We’re starting to realize, if we only do performance marketing, we almost become an AI brand that doesn’t have a real heart and soul,” said Quince’s head of brand, Antonieta Moreland.
Still, there are results to look for. For activations like the holiday dinner, looking at the performance of content shared by attendees is an indicator, but “in the sense of true return on investment, immediate payback, we know that it’s going to take more of these things in combination with your everyday, evergreen performance marketing engine to slowly build the brand,” said Moreland.
Figuring out how to create larger-scale activations that can be shared and have an impact more broadly is key, but the brand is taking “baby steps” to be able to do so efficiently.
For Andjelic, closely “connecting marketing and merchandising, product design and brand” can enable brands to build a full suite of interconnected activities that play together to drive both immediate and longer-term results.
