Some service industries are built on cultivating this behavior. Go on to the website of a leading consulting firm and you will no doubt find endless content about whatever the latest trend happens to be.

In marketing, we’ve seen many of these trends. For years I found the discussion about “in-housing” maddening as there were so many variables that impact how a marketing team should operate, and it was plain as day that most of the content being published was largely biased toward businesses that benefited from pushing businesses to in-house elements of their strategy.

We’ve also seen many “years of mobile”, a lot of ballyhoo about the “metaverse” and bizarrely a period where non-fungible tokens “NFTs” became something that big business seriously looked into… That one seemed to go away fast.

So what’s the new shiny object now? AI. People have been awakened by a chatbot called “ChatGPT” and suddenly they understand what AI might mean for them. At this point, I want to pause and say that I do in fact think that AI is a big deal for society. It is a shiny object, but it is one that might not go away as fast as some of the fickle ones that have come about in recent years.

That being said, AI has actually been around for  quite a long time. It’s helped us navigate our way around cities, it’s helped to keep our banking secure and it’s used to monitor on platform  content such as Instagram and YouTube.

Up until recently, some businesses tried not to use the words “Artificial Intelligence” to describe how their solutions worked out of fear of spooking their customers. Now the cat is out of the bag there is a race to stick those words onto as many items as possible, even where the link between the product and AI is tenuous.

To this point AI, and its use, isn’t something that is new, it’s more that people have become aware of it, and they’re starting to understand how it could be used to change the world, both for the better and the worst. 

This has led to lots of theoretical debates about what AI could mean for society. What would happen if a terrorist group was able to use AI to help them construct a nuclear weapon? What if AI could be used to create a deep fake of well-known public figures to mislead the public? What if AI becomes smarter than humans and we end up with a real-life terminator situation?

These debates are fun, and not without purpose. People should be conscious of the impact that AI might have. They should be informed about how drastically it could change the world.

So, if I am admitting that AI could in fact change the world, then why have I called this article “Why the big trend in digital marketing isn’t AI”? It is because, in my opinion, at least for this year, it isn’t.

The big trend in digital marketing is a rebalancing of budgets and focus from so-called “performance” initiatives to brand. This is evident when you look at the growth of channels. Spending on performance channels, like search, continues to rise, but the growth of channels focused on driving awareness, like social, is over 3X that of their performance counterparts.

Yet there is very little being said about this trend, despite it being an incredibly important change in the digital marketing space. Businesses are now focusing on understanding how they can use digital to build their brand and change perception. This wasn’t the case a few years ago, the brand and consideration channels were much more focused on traditional channels, especially TV.

There are a few reasons for this trend, the first is the most obvious. Consumers are spending more time engaging with digital channels and less time engaging with traditional channels. It, therefore, goes without saying that advertising spend will follow where the consumer is.

The second reason is something that doesn’t get spoken about enough. Performance marketing can only help a business to grow when overall market demand is growing. From 2020 to the end of 2022 there was a boom in digital growth, it meant that all brands had to do to be successful online was ensure that they were effectively reacting to demand.

When demand starts to slow, or even contract, performance marketing won’t help a business to grow, because it is focused on responding to demand, rather than creating it. Therefore businesses have to look beyond performance channels to find strategies that will help them to build awareness among new customers.

The third reason focuses on advertisers gaining a stronger understanding of what is driving growth for their business. Changes to how cookies can be used to measure performance have prompted businesses to explore different ways of evaluating the impact of their marketing investment. In doing this many have added a degree of sophistication to how they understand their marketing that wasn’t there before, and for many, this has demonstrated that their brand investments were undervalued, whilst their performance investments were overvalued.

This trend will continue, not only will each of the three factors listed above only become more prominent in the coming years, but they will also be coupled with more digital inventory becoming available to advertisers as OTT providers add ad-supported tiers and traditional channels become increasingly “digital”.

The result of these trends for 2023 and beyond is that digital marketing looks far more balanced than it ever has before. This change sees other knock-on consequences. The return of genuine planning to our industry is a long time coming, and creative teams are starting to understand how different (and exciting) building a brand through social channels is compared to static traditional channels.

There is still some way to go, but without a doubt this year has represented an inflection point for digital marketing. As an industry it really feels like we’re moving away from the basics of performance marketing into a world that is much more balanced and brings the principles of great traditional marketing into the digital world.

It might not prove to become the shiny new object that AI is, but I for one, am just as excited about this change to our industry as anything else.