Marketing trends impacting brands and their agencies in 2022
Rapid evolution and the need for resilience has prompted many businesses to embrace digital transformation in the last 18 months. To help marketers build competitive strategies and optimise their resources for brand growth here are some of the trends we believe will be important in 2022 that will impact both client structures and the agency landscape.
- Convergence not just of creative and media, but also content creation, data and technology – enabling intelligent, efficient content creation
- Need for authentic purpose – specifically focused on sustainability and DEI
- Need to fully embed and optimise in-housing initiatives to demonstrate ROI
- Continuing centralisation to drive major brand strategies and initiatives and provide more ‘command and control’ in difficult times
- ‘Inside-out’ agency roster models with digital content creation as the hub and feeder of the communications process
- Capacity and talent shortages combined with burn out – having a direct impact on team morale and motivation, and an indirect impact on costs. But also agencies being more selective about new business opportunities
- Skills-gaps in critical areas – consumer insight and CJP, data management and analysis and ecommerce
- Tensions arising from effectively combining hybrid working processes from both an Agency and Client perspective in the day to day development of work
- Marketing budgets recovering slowly but not to pre-pandemic levels (yet) and with a clear shift to digital communications
- Potential for constructive roster collaboration to become more difficult as agencies are driven to optimise their revenues.