Insights from Advertising Week NYC 2024

Last week, I had the chance to attend Advertising Week New York, and it was full of fresh ideas 💡, as well as powerful reminders of evergreen principles 🌳 we all need to keep in mind. From post-privacy measurement to AI 🤖, it was exciting to see how brands are creatively adapting to today’s marketing challenges.

After three days of sessions, workshops, and conversations, three key takeaways really stood out. 

Let’s get into it!

1. Few Brands Nail the Balance Between Brand and Performance

In Initiative’s session ‘The Funnel Fallacy’ the panelists explored an alternative to the traditional marketing funnel, focusing instead on a ‘fame and flow’ model. Fame involves brand-building through awareness, familiarity, favorability, word-of-mouth, and emotional engagement, which in turn smooths customer ‘flow’ toward conversion. This model quite rightly encourages us to see these as essentially interconnected processes and highlights the importance of brand awareness. 

If brands only chase short-term performance from ‘flow’ and neglect ‘fame’ by investing in long-term brand-building strategy, they end up trapped in a ‘doom loop’. Also called the ‘bottom of funnel trap’, this refers to when brands only focus on converting existing demand rather than generating new demand with brand-building. Eventually, they exhaust this convertible audience, can no longer acquire customers profitably, and efficiency plummets. 

The session really hit this home, highlighting that any given time only 5% of the audience you're reaching with ads are ready to convert, while the vast majority are developing brand awareness. Despite this, most measurement systems focus on and overvalue this conversion activity at the expense of brand-building efforts. As a result, brands end up spending 90% of their budgets on this 5% audience, missing out on the opportunity to drive long-lasting profitable customer growth.

2. Full-Funnel Measurement is Essential to Avoid the ‘Doom Loop’

Why do so many brands fall into this doom-loop? 

The success of awareness and brand-building activities can be challenging to measure, particularly with Last Click attribution, which attributes value only to the last click actioned prior to a conversion. This disregards the impact of impressions-based channels like Paid Social, which can be instrumental for brand awareness as well as conversion activity. As marketing teams report to senior stakeholders like CFOs and CEOs, they can feel pressure to invest disproportionately into conversion activity to gain short-term quantifiable performance. This triggers the doom-loop, as they are only converting existing demand and without creating new demand. 

How full-funnel measurement helps:

In order to avoid falling into this doom-loop, effective measurement is key. Brands need to start with a good mental model of what they need to do to grow their brand sustainably, consisting of both short and long-term goals and distinct metrics to track each respectively.

With a clear strategy in place, full-funnel measurement is essential to measure the success of the impact of both of these activities respectively and communicate the value of brand awareness activities to internal stakeholders. Overall, the session really reinforced just how important our mission is at Fospha, to empower marketers to spend their budget with confidence to drive full-funnel profitable growth. 

3. Brands Need to Future-Proof Their Measurement

In Mozilla’s session ‘Embracing Privacy to Drive Performance’, the speakers discussed the challenges of marketing measurement in a post-privacy landscape. With third-party cookie deprecation, fingerprinting restrictions, App Tracking Transparency, and more, tracking user-level data is no longer feasible. 

The resounding message of the panel? Brands need to accept these changes and go on the offence to build a future-proof marketing tech stack, rather than passively watching their data deteriorate. Brands need to start by considering the problems they want to solve and work backwards to the solutions that can help to future-proof their measurement, rather than expecting existing their existing tech to do this for them. Instead, they should adopt technology solutions with a long-term lens, choosing providers that put privacy-centricity at the core of their offering.

AdWeek NYC 2024 highlighted the growing need for brands to balance fame and flow in an increasingly complex marketing landscape. As privacy regulations continue to reshape how we track and measure performance, the ability to invest in full-funnel measurement and future-proofed, privacy-centric technology is no longer a nice-to-have —it’s essential for long-term success. In this context, Fospha’s mission feels more relevant than ever, as we continue to provide the tools that help brands navigate these changes, spend with confidence, and achieve measurable and future-proof results.