As the year starts to wind down and we take stock of what we achieved (or didn’t achieve) over the last 12 months, it’s only natural to start asking what we’d have done differently if we could do it all over again. Well, thankfully a new year brings with it a chance to start afresh and that’s why resolutions are such a common theme we all tend to gravitate towards in December.
But we’re not talking about resolutions to finally start using that gym subscription or cutting back on our booze; today we’re talking creative resolutions. So, to see the year off, lets ask some of the smartest minds in the creative industries to tell us how they plan to ensure next year is the most creative year of their lives.
Raj Davsi, Creative Director @ FutureDeluxe New York
In 2024, one of my creative resolutions is to make the most of technologies like VR, AR and new scanning tools to bring my motion design work to life in a more immersive way. But, crucially, I don’t want to lose sight of the core fundamentals, such as storytelling. As immersive tools become more and more accessible with every year that passes, designers need to be mindful of falling into the trap of being seduced by them to the point that the content loses its connection with the audience.
I’m also setting myself the challenge of reflecting more on design’s past while considering its future. As we get enraptured by new technologies and techniques, we can be guilty of forgetting some of the more basic yet more beautiful techniques of the past. So in 2024, I’m on a mission to merge older, simpler design with flashy new approaches.
Because we’re living in an era where everything is becoming increasingly screen-focused, people are craving more tangible and analogue ‘things’. So, I’ll also be using 2024 to translate my motion design knowhow into IRL objects. How? By using 3D modelling software and then bringing my designs to life as physical, 3D-printed objects.
Sara Jane Gonzalez, design expert at PA Consulting
Make it a year to seriously question if we need more stuff. In 2024, people and companies would do well to question if we really need to buy or design new things to solve problems. We need to come to terms with the idea that sometimes 'great design' means 'less design'. To be truly sustainable, organisations should also look at improving and optimising existing offerings.
Root design and creativity efforts in conscientious decisions. Even when it feels hectic, individuals and companies should still find the time to pause and reflect on design in 2024. Only in doing so can we decide which challenges are worth spending time, energy and resources on, and those that should be parked.
Move beyond the human-centred paradigm. In 2024, let’s see designers and companies embracing a more life-centred approach, looking at things not only from the human lens but considering the impact of design on the environment and all other species.
Listen and amplify new voices. A New Year’s resolution for everyone in the creative and design community should be to challenge themselves to listen to different voices. It is important that we keep working towards a design community that is less homogenous: a community with a rich and seasoned design discourse.
Stop calling design dead when we're just starting. Those who practise design would benefit from worrying less about when the era of Design Thinking will end and whether Gen-AI will replace jobs. Let’s not forget that in comparison to other disciplines, design is still relatively young and that it is OK for the industry to take time to mature in its mindset, process, and methods. There's scope to elevate design while embracing new technologies.
Diana Ellis-Hill, Co-Founder and Director at Be the Fox
2024 will see the rise of the Ad Funded Programme. While AFPs have existed in various forms for decades, this type of brand collaboration in content production is now coming into its own, and to mutual benefit. The rapidly growing streaming industry is creating huge competition amongst broadcasters and streamers themselves to create quality TV with limited budgets.
Programme makers are increasingly pursuing top-up funding from brands to make shows. Even the BBC hired a dedicated Head of Branded Entertainment for its commercial arm, BBC Studios. And brands are realising the power of entertainment to forge a deeper connection with their consumers, piggybacking the neatly parcelled up eyeballs that TV can offer while using the creative collateral to make companion social content for further online engagement.
Creating entertainment formats, documentaries, drama or comedy shows that align with the brand’s values and proposition will leave the viewer with a feeling of warmth for that brand and offer hours of brand immersion - rather than the usual collection of seconds. This is gold dust for brands with pressure to fill social platforms and the increased appetite from consumers for choice.
Recent successes in this area include Tui/Amazon Prime’s cooking and travel format World Cook, Google/Channel 4‘s four-part premium Black British ‘docu-ality’ series Highlife, Ancestry.com/Apple TV’s genealogy series Secrets In My Family, and Adobe/Sky Arts photography documentary series My Greatest shot.
Creatively, a move towards more investment in AFPs is a huge and exciting dive into authentic storytelling and true entertainment, using long form craft to land something meaningful and memorable. For creatives, it's an opportunity to create content the brand's audience chooses to engage with. Win, win!
Neale Horrigan, Executive Creative Director at elvis
Dry Humour January
The need for a bit of humour back in advertising has never been greater. So maybe we should all make a concerted effort to bring back ‘funny’. I’d drink to that.
Exercise those creative muscles
It feels like 2023 was not the year for achieving much creative definition. So, 2024 has got some work to do. Cue a Rocky style training montage lifting lions and pencils.
Cut down on video calls
I’m sure I speak for us all when I say we need to be a bit leaner on meetings and take a fresher approach to video calls. And try going camera off as one of your five-a-day.
Quit pitching
Maybe slightly unachievable this one, but it’s a nice thought anyway.
Opt for a healthier planet
This is the big one. There’s enough destruction going on in the world as it is, it doesn’t need any of us making things worse. So why not spend a bit more time each week trying to improve it.
Carlo Cavallone, Vice President of Creative at Our LEGO Agency (OLA), the LEGO Group
AI, AR and digital experiences were front and centre of creative marketing predictions in 2023, with marketers forecasting that connecting with consumers would become more automated, interactive and create a holistic experience. And from what we’ve seen to date, they were right.
Looking at the year ahead, I expect interactive digital experiences from brands to grow– in size, frequency and use of technology – however, at the heart of this remains the need to authentically bring brand values to life.
Essentially, incorporating the creative use of technology in marketing or brand campaigns, without authenticity or brand identity at the heart, is not the way to engage consumers and it will see your activation fall through the cracks.
Consumers face sensory and innovation overload with marketing bombarding them across every touchpoint, app and channel they experience on a day-to-day basis. Which means that your brand must have a recognizable DNA, voice and point of view to cut-through and engage audiences. Also, what you create needs to entertain them, it needs to add value to their day, and not just distract them or, even worse, bore them.
At the LEGO Group, we’ve experimented this year with OOH 3D billboards to launch our latest IP for LEGO DREAMZzz, bringing to life larger than life dream creatures in fun experiences. We used Unreal Engine, the most powerful real-time 3D creation tool which allowed us to build these incredible 3D anamorphic billboards to mark the launch across New York, London and Tokyo.
Just recently, we activated our LEGO Fortnite launch with our partners at Epic Games across New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney that connected and amplified our engagement with consumers, reaching them in all-new digital spaces designed with kids in mind.
We took the public through an immersive journey with interactive touchpoints, inviting audiences into the world of Fortnite while bringing a bit of the game to real life. Bringing LEGO bricks to life in new immersive ways that connects us authentically with our customers remains the cornerstone of our marketing success.
So, for the next year, I’m mostly excited about new creative experimentations with all the opportunities in the pipeline for the LEGO Group, and there will be many of them. It’s a good challenge to create the new, and newsworthy, while you try to stay true to brand values.
I can foresee that we will be playing and creating using an interesting blend of technology and human-centric approaches, and I expect other brands that do the same to thrive in the year ahead.
Wander Bruijel, Senior Partner at Born Ugly
2023 has been the year we’ve seen generative AI take flight, develop and start to be adopted as a tool across the creative industry across a number of applications.
This is only going to progress further and faster next year. However, I predict 2024 will be the year we’ll start to discover the limitations of AI. Whilst it will continue to disrupt the industry, I think we will start to understand that it won’t replace original thought.
When it comes to AI, the thing that matters most is still the question we ask it. With AI as an aggregator of the lowest common denominator, what it creates is built on what’s already out there. It doesn’t replace the creation of insight or the creation of distinctive ideas.
My hope is that we start to give AI its proper context – as a tool rather than an end result. AI isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Yet…
2024 will also be the year where we move away from brand purpose and go back to the purpose of brand. Throughout 2023, we have started to see brands slowly move away from purpose, and I predict more of the same in 2024. Purpose has been misappropriated by marketers and mistakenly been used as a source of differentiation.
With brands like Unilever reviewing the role of purpose within their brands, I think that more and more brands will go back to being brands, i.e. being clear about why they exist uniquely within the context of their customers and the world, whilst recognising that being good is simply table stakes of doing business. The danger will be that brands will forget to be the latter.
We’ve increasingly seen a growing sense of optimism among the younger generations too. A feeling that yes, we can tackle some of the world’s biggest existential challenges.
But this optimism is fragile.
World tension, the danger of the misguided demotion of purpose by brands, dampening down of environmental targets by the political class will eat away at this optimism. More concerning, however, is that current trust placed in brands over governments by people could easily be eroded by those recent brands, like Boohoo, that are proving to be less than transparent and true to their stated benevolent purposes.
These missteps will erode trust in all brands. So, when what we need is a generation of hopeful pragmatism, the danger is that they too will become disillusioned by the brands they trust.
OJ Deady, Founder & MD at TwelveA.M.
I have two resolutions for 2024. Consciously be more open to inspiration - what I probably mean is seek this out more. Secondly, find more sustainable rituals that support our work.
In the agency world we can often get pulled into a project, or we need to fly to a different time zone at short notice, and as exciting as these projects often are, it lacks any consistency in our identity as an agency or team. These rituals came and went this year and some just weren’t fit for purpose anymore but finding new ones that meet the needs and empower our team to create the best work is most definitely top of the list when thinking about creative resolutions.
A new calendar year makes it easier to hopefully adopt new rituals as a team but realistically we need to be able to adapt and pivot constantly as the start of next year looks busier than the end of this one, which has allowed for very little other than client work. At the very least the break will allow time to reflect as it often does, and I might get divine inspiration for Christmas as to what these new rituals will look like.
Robert Wollner, VP Agency Partnerships at VidMob
With ongoing economic struggles and falling advertising spending, many marketers are looking at viable short-term gains to maximise ROI, which will inevitably continue into 2024. This has been exacerbated by a recent explosion of AI tools and solutions, which has created a series of point solutions that brands have leveraged to deliver “quick wins”. Unfortunately, this isn’t a sustainable strategy in the long run.
Instead of focusing on the point solutions, where each department – Creative, Marketing, Production – works in silo to optimise their role in the business, brands must unify their teams to promote company-wide collaboration. To do so, brands should look at solutions that allow creative insights to be elevated to the entire organisation, allowing every part of the business to join forces and drive creative performance as a unit.
Combining creative and media performance data in a shared platform enables teams to work towards the same goal. Moreover, measuring and optimising content based on in-flight analysis and scalable learnings from past campaigns ensures every available penny of spend is maximised to create unique and impactful campaigns. This will lead to better performance on optimised budgets and ensure the creative is fit-for-platform, making their marketing approach sustainable beyond short-term gains.
