2023: The Year in Marketing

Q4 is a strange time for marketers. As we make our mad dash to the finish line, we’re determined to finish strong and set ourselves up for success in the coming year. It can be a dizzying experience, to say the least. But despite that end-of-year excitement, it’s worth taking the time to reflect on all we’ve accomplished—and what’s in store for us after the ball officially drops.

So what did 2023 mean for us? And what will be top of mind in the new year? Our team weighed in on both.

Kim Allen, CEO

After two years steeped in uncertainty and survival, I began 2023 with a sense of both hopefulness and trepidation. The tension in the space between became my roadmap for the year ahead. And I knew we could survive anything after the important lessons we learned in 2020-2022:

Lean on your most historically reliable sources: Yourself. Your team. Your community.

An incredible amount of technological change has come upon us in the past decade—not to mention the past 18 months with generative AI. My community of agency CEOs through Mirren Roundtables and the 4As Forum provided a grounded, comfortable space to cross-pollinate thinking, receive generous advice from my peers and bring that wisdom into our agency. These two resources on ethics and responsibility when it comes to AI helped frame my thinking when guiding our team on my expectations for the use of this booming technology in our business.

Jessica Savage, President

In 2023, our DEI journey at DS+CO focused heavily on perspective-taking. If you’ve ever heard the phase “standing under someone’s umbrella,” you know exactly what this means—the act of considering or understanding a concept from an alternate point of view. Sesha Yamanchili, president of On The Mark Consulting and facilitator of the 2023 Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce DEI Leadership Exchange Program that DS+CO participates in, helped us better understand that becoming a more diverse and inclusive organization requires greater perspective-taking capability.

With our goal of making perspective-taking a habit at both the individual and team level, we spent this past year deeply exploring ageism, intersectionality and stereotypes versus authentic representation, and we learned a new approach through a methodology called Equity Sequencing developed by Tidal Equality. If you haven’t heard of it, we highly recommend learning more. You won’t regret it, and your organization and work will greatly benefit.

In 2024, we’re set continue our DEI journey by investing in the work and building habits around the work we do, opening courageous conversations, fostering a culture of belonging and continuing to evolve roles, like that of our senior editor, who is now our senior editor and inclusive language specialist.

Marshall Statt, Managing Director, Creative

No two letters occupied as much space in marketing conversations this year than AI. And while we’ve all scrambled to make sense of it, find smart ways to implement it and place guidelines around its use, one truth remains constant: Real people—their stories, their imaginations, their life experiences—remain the best set of tools we have to emotionally connect with our audiences.

AI offers a cheat code for many creative tasks—time-consuming photo comps, content research and ad versioning, to name a few. All of which free up talented brains to do what they do best: solve problems in new and creative ways. What AI has yet to replicate is the power of speaking directly to a young family buying their first home, a child fighting to retain their vision, a new mother, a cancer patient, a first-generation college grad.

So what’s AI’s impact in the coming year? For our creative team, we’ll continue to do simple things much more efficiently, saving our team’s time and clients’ budgets. What’s more exciting is AI’s ability to remove the barriers around our thinking—quicker access to industry trends and audience behaviors, the spark of an idea we might have missed without the volume of input AI can provide. The only limit remains the crazy imaginations of our people.

Malorie Benjamin, Managing Director, Media

While most of 2023 has been focused on ensuring DS+CO and our clients remain ahead of the curve, I expect 2024 will be filled with continued changes and challenges for marketers when it comes to technology and media. As we continue to manage loss of data integrity, data privacy concerns, reduced audience information and the final stages of the depreciation of cookies, we know this will bring significant change to the way we build successful marketing programs for our clients.

As we move into 2024, the top three areas I’m monitoring for impacts to our business are:

• Cookieless reporting solutions and attribution models. There’s a significant opportunity for solutions in this space that allow marketers to have more granular information about tactical performance and audience insights. There’s a desire for solutions that aren’t reliant on Google, Meta or any other walled-garden provider.

• Practical use of generative AI. Reducing time spent on data entry, manual practices like uploading/downloading, improving personalization, improving testing outcomes and accelerating campaign learnings can all be done using AI. Plus, using prompts to deliver code that can enable connectivity of disparate tools, improve tracking capabilities and improve automations is probably one of the most underused opportunities for gen AI.

• The rise of the people-based identifier. If this can be delivered successfully, the media online and offline addressability challenge would finally be solved, allowing every touchpoint to be personalized and consistent. If done right, this could finally allow advertisers to deliver on the fully integrated campaigns they’ve been striving for.

Rosi Statt, Managing Director, Strategy + Accounts

In 2023, our account and strategy teams team focused on challenging ourselves and our clients to always think customer-first. This isn’t a new trend by any means, but with brands more focused than ever on sales, conversions and engagement numbers, our team dug in on why those things were lacking in the first place. Why are we where we are? And how do we reengage and capture our audience? It’s by connecting with them, speaking with them, knowing them. Regardless of the project size, we pushed clients to think about why their customers would care and to focus on the insight: the unspoken human truth that needed to be unearthed.

Our team’s second focus was on comms planning, specifically to bridge the gap that can exist between a creative idea and media execution. Our creative ideas are built from customer insight to provide the depth the work needs to make an impact, but what comes first: the placement or the thinking? Our team worked to build bridges between creative and media to understand how an idea shows up in the wild and can best be absorbed by the audience. The end result is creative that has much more impact for our clients and is much more fun to make.

As we move into 2024, we’ve been exploring generative AI tools that support the research and customer insights phases of the work. This will have a profound impact on how quickly we can speed up the data-gathering stage to allow more space in developing marketing and creative strategies for our clients. Lastly, we’ll move from the defensive zone to the offensive zone to support DEIB at the briefing phase.

Randy Zajonczkoski, Director of IT

For years, DS+CO has worked on being a good steward of our clients’ data—and our own. These practices continued into 2023 with an increased focus on securing our mobile workforce, creating a security-first mindset and monitoring how data flows through the agency. We understand that most of our workforce now works outside the secure perimeter of our building and network firewalls. With that in mind, we continue to make sure our workstations are patched consistently, that they have the right blend of security software, and that computers are encrypted and email encryption is available.

But all the security tools in the world can’t help employees who don’t know how and when to use them—and how to identify threats. We’ve developed a culture of security awareness. Every employee not only reviews our information security policies, but also goes through a base level of security awareness training.

Marketing is generally an unregulated industry, but DS+CO knows our clients need to meet their own regulatory and compliance requirements. That’s why we voluntarily undergo an annual third-party NIST CSF compliance and business risk assessment. We want to make sure our customers feel comfortable entrusting us with their information. And we’ll remain committed to this cause in 2024 and beyond.

Connor Dixon-Schwabl, Managing Director, Studio Production

We saw a shift in conversations surrounding video in 2023—and the brands who welcomed it benefited. Video remained king for yet another year, but as the need increased, it became more difficult to connect with your customer. The main reason for this is what I call status-quo work: productions littered with clichés that are founded on legacy approaches and need to be thrown out.

It all comes down to strategic storytelling. It isn’t the logistics of how the video is made, but the heart, that makes the video. Stay tuned for a new edition of Provoke in January where we’ll be sharing the five steps of strategic storytelling.

In 2024, I expect to see something I’m calling stacked productions. This has been brewing, but it’s about to be the new trend: Your next production is a multi-layered asset collection. In essence, several productions overlap, and the production itself becomes one, too. In the past, we’ve been told to work in silos: your video shoot is separated from your photo shoot, your content shoot must be separate from your brand production. Well, that’s no longer.

A stacked production will have a primary production (most likely brand) that attracts a higher level of effort. On top of that production, we’re going to stack a photographer to shoot between breaks in production and micro-pockets of time to capture stills. Next, we’ll have content production in the background jumping in for candid interviews, scripted one-liners and fun moments. Finally, the very production itself becomes a production, with a behind-the-scenes ride-along for your social platforms. Four productions, with strategic storytelling infused into each. Strategically-Stacked-Storytelling-Productions, trademark pending.

Do you know what 2024 has in store for your brand? Either way, we’d love to talk. Get in touch with us today.