At the beginning of 2024, I penned an article exploring key forecasts for 2023 that either missed the mark or were only partially accurate—namely, the extent of the AI-powered marketing revolution and the next era of context-led advertising.

Now, I’m taking something of a gamble by revisiting a couple of my predictions and arguing why 2024 is the year they'll actually come true. A year late is better than never, right?

We'll finally have clarity on the impact of AI and its use cases.

Soaring expectations of limitless advertising possibilities powered by artificial intelligence (AI) seemed to deflate through 2023 as expectations met reality. There was a growing realization that progress was advancing at a faster rate than business leaders could keep pace with, while at the same time, many AI implementations felt like a solution looking for a problem. Such confusion impedes progress.

 
Uncertainty around AI’s impact wasn't limited to business leaders either, and anxieties spread throughout the workforce. A study exploring creative workers’ views on generative AI found that over two-thirds worry about its impact on their profession. The truth lay somewhere between a new era of productivity and doomsday, but no one could agree where.

However, there have since been major leaps forward in developing better guardrails for responsible AI use. The U.K.-hosted AI Safety Summit and subsequent Bletchley Declaration, as well as legislation from the EU and the U.S., have placed the industry in a much more robust position to start leveraging the potential of the technology. We're starting to have the reassuring sense that adults are in the room.

 
Moving into 2024, there's now a better understanding of areas in which AI can be tapped as a creativity enhancer—not a human replacement—which will power widespread experimentation and adoption. In particular, key implementation areas will include automated video generation and adjustments and the use of machine learning models in predicting, understanding and responding to human gestures, intents, emotional states and speech patterns. The capacity to produce highly tailored and engaging creative assets at scale and speed also enables marketers to concentrate on more business-critical strategic tasks, as well as harness their creative skills and human insight to develop compelling master creatives for AI tools to work from.

AI is potentially the most powerful technology of our generation but, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. Last year, the focus was on establishing systems and awareness around the responsibility element. This year, we'll see how these systems affect the market and witness concrete, industry-specific use cases prove their worth. This brings us to my next prediction.

Contextual advertising will undergo an AI-powered generational leap.
Cookieless experimentation needed to take off in 2023 to support innovations in privacy-first targeting and addressability and establish a new paradigm for digital advertising. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. Instead, advertisers largely stuck with what they knew and seemed intent on clinging to third-party cookies as long as possible. Market-ready solutions that have been waiting in the wings—such as contextual advertising—remained stuck in limbo.

This year has kicked off with Google demonstrating to the industry that third-party cookies are in their final days and, this time, they mean it. Now that it’s clear cookie deprecation will be the key focus for the industry in 2024, advertisers that should have had familiarity with a full suite of cookieless solutions are scrambling to test and invest.

The fact that so few were ready has much to do with continuing doubts about alternative solutions, which are not entirely unfounded. The transition to a privacy-first focus—of which cookie deprecation is just one factor—will see some functionalities improve, some worsen and some disappear entirely. Individual-level precision, in particular, is simply not compatible with today’s regulatory environment.

A loss of precision is making advertisers hesitant to favor contextual solutions as an alternative to behavior-based approaches, which are seen as a more direct replacement for cookie-based targeting. But I believe that contextual advertising is an area where AI hype is well-deserved. Anonymized usage data and other first-party signals can be fed into contextual solutions to improve the engine’s capabilities, extrapolating targetable audiences from a wealth of insights.

The result is ads that feel tailored to the user without requiring any identifiable information. So, it’s increasingly clear that AI-powered contextual advertising solutions are emerging as a viable alternative to cookie-centric targeting, which means that they will likely see increased uptake in 2024 and break out of their niche. And the forecasts back up this prediction: The global market for contextual advertising is projected to grow at a CAGR of 13.8% from 2022 to 2030.

Or maybe the forecasts have it all wrong? Although it’s possible to predict broad trends in digital advertising, there’s always a chance some innovation will emerge to take us all on a radically different course. This year, we need to break down barriers to AI experimentation to open the door to further development and widespread implementation.

It's definitely an exciting time to be alive due to the blend of technology and AI-fused creativity. The dynamic landscape offers endless possibilities for innovation, making it a vibrant field for professionals and brands alike.