The Marketing Moments That Made Us Go "Wait, What?" in 2024

Ever have one of those years where everything you knew about marketing just... stopped making sense? Welcome to 2024 🙃 

This week, instead of our usual brand deep-dive, we're looking at the moments that made us question everything we thought we knew about marketing. Buckle up – it's been weird.

The Year Marketing Lost The Plot (In The Best Way)

Remember when marketing was about carefully planned campaigns and focus-grouped messaging? Yeah, 2024 said "nah" to all that.

Here's what actually worked this year:

👉️ The Stanley Cup Fire Saga: A Stanley cup survived a car fire. Instead of running from the viral video, Stanley gifted the woman a new car. Cost of campaign: One car. Value of earned media: $5M+. Number of marketing textbooks this broke: All of them.

👉️ Duolingo's Unhinged Era: Their owl mascot went from teaching Spanish to threatening Taylor Swift's ex on TikTok. Somehow, this resulted in 6M new followers and a 22% increase in app installs.

Lesson- Sometimes letting your social media manager go feral is actually a strategy.

👉️ The AI Chat Wars: ChatGPT started writing everyone's tweets, and suddenly every brand needed an AI personality. Some were brilliant, most were cringe, all were fascinating to watch.

Best moment- When an AI chatbot roasted a user so hard they had to issue an apology. We live in interesting times.

What Actually Mattered in 2024

1. Speed Beat Strategy: The brands that won weren't the ones with the best plans – they were the ones that could jump on trends fastest.

2. Weird Beat Perfect: Polished marketing lost to authentic chaos. The more "professional" the content, the less people trusted it.

3. Communities Beat Campaigns: The best marketing wasn't marketing at all – it was brands building actual relationships with their audiences.

The Death of "Professional" Marketing

The biggest shift? We all got tired of perfect. Perfectly curated feeds, perfectly crafted messages, perfectly planned campaigns – they all started feeling fake.

Instead, we fell in love with:

• Brands that could laugh at themselves

• Real responses to real moments

• Content that felt human, not corporate

What This Means For 2025

As we head into 2025, one thing's clear: the old marketing rulebook is dead. The new one? Still being written, probably by an AI, definitely with more memes than we're comfortable with.

What we know for sure:

• Speed will matter more than perfection

• Authenticity will beat production value

• The best campaigns will be accidents

• The worst campaigns will be trying too hard

Here's to another year of chaos, creativity, and maybe a few more Stanley cups surviving unlikely scenarios.

Until next year..

P.S. This is our last newsletter of 2024! Thanks for riding this chaotic marketing wave with us. See you in 2025, when everything we just learned will probably be irrelevant again.