2024, As Told in Ads

What's weirder, AI or reality?

Every year I publish a review of how advertising tells the story of the year. This year was a strange one. AI fears and fails, TikTok ban rumors, hypermasculinity, the resurgence of the movie press tour, and one very adorable hippo all clashed in a Presidential election year like no other.

January

The year kicked off softly, but tellingly. You know how Hollywood keeps doing sequels and remakes? Well, that energy is entering into the ad industry too. Cadbury was the first ad of the year that showcased that. A graceful remake of a famed heart-warmer where a young girl spends her favorite buttons to get her mother a birthday bar of chocolate, it celebrates Cadbury’s 200 years. It won’t be the first time this year we see a rehash.

Calvin Klein also dusted off its old playbook of hot-person x hot photography; their campaign with Jeremy Allen White melted the internet, with a raw sex appeal.

February

The Super Bowl is always giving, and this year there were a few bangers. So many Super Bowl ads are their own contained universes, putting their all into 60 seconds of airtime, flooding the screen with celebrity, song, shock—anything to maximize the minute of time they have in front of half-drunk football fans who usually use the breaks to fill their plates or pee.

But the smartest advertisers know that those 60 seconds serve up the most value when they can expand beyond the game. Cerave won TikTok fandom with little leaks before it went big with its Michael Cera-led spot, as one of the increasing number of beauty and skincare brands in the Super Bowl.

March

Collabs continue to flourish, but it takes more than just a partnership to truly stand out. My favorite of the year was between two of the best marketers of the year, Liquid Death and e.l.f. cosmetics. Fearlessly weird and perfect.

McDonald’s taps into the anime subculture that’s existed for decades and continues to fascinate.

April

TikTok ban talk riles up, while TikTok Shop takes off, logging half a million sellers in three months. On the one hand, TikTok’s a financial lifeline for hundreds of thousands of people who create and monetize content, and an entertainment lifeline for everyone else. On the other hand, China. More to come in 2025, as the incoming administration has waffled on how to manage the popular social media site.

Meanwhile, Dove continues its long-running Real Beauty campaign with a stand against AI, committing to never using AI in its advertising.

On the flipside, Velveeta and Julia Fox commit to the fakest of all beauty campaigns, with Fox debuting Velveeta hair dye the color of the notoriously not-real cheese.

May

It’s an election year, which means disagreements are in full display. Heineken has had a history of painting its beers as a space to come together. This year, it hopped on the Deadpool/Wolverine hype, but in a nation where political differences felt starker than ever, it felt flat.

However, Ryan Reynolds maximized the franchise not just as a lead and producer, but as an advertising juggernaut. The film had $135mm of brand deals, perfectly suited to Deadpool’s meta humor, and to help Reynolds rake in the dough, as most of the deals were executed through his ad agency Maximum Effort.

Apple did manage to unite people. In anger, that is, with its ad called Crush! that showed a massive crushing machine squish musical instruments, paint, and other tools of human expression into one little iPad — basically personifying present-tense fears of technology destroying human creativity. The company publicly apologized, and pulled the ad.

In one of the few overtly purpose-driven campaigns of the year, e.l.f. champions its predominantly female board and leadership team by pointing out that there are so many Dicks on corporate boards— and not just anatomically.

June

June was pride month. For the past decade or so, brands have piled in to Pride to showcase their commitment to their LGBTQ consumers, but this year’s brand activity was markedly subdued. After the 2023 Bud Light partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney drove boycotts from both the anti-trans right wing and people on the left upset with Bud Light’s bungling of the fallout, brands have become cautious. e.l.f.’s so many Dicks campaign from May almost felt like a throwback to a different era, when brands were more uniformly celebrated for being outspoken.

July

Pop, however, became more outspoken than ever. The summer belonged to the ladies. Chappel Roan had everyone doing the HOTTOGO, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ‘n’ Sweet album burned up the charts, and Charli XCX built a near-presidential brand. Her lime green Brat album put the color on the map, and with her simple statement “Kamala IS brat,” she helped legitimize the Presidential nomination of Kamala Harris with a young generation.

August

Paris was on full display for the Olympics, the Seine clean and glorious, the skies blue, and the Olympic athletes glistening, winning, and meming under the Paris sun. Omega caught the energy and the optimism of the most-streamed Olympics in its ad celebrating the city.

Google tried to tug at the heartstrings with an Olympics ad, but misfired with its ad, Dear Sydney, which showcased how a child might use AI to help write a letter to an athlete she admires, track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. In the anti-AI fervor, it pulled the ad.

September

Beyonce’s second Renaissance album, a mix of country, disco and more, got a ton of attention, and for what it’s worth Levii’s is one of my favorite tracks. So in another refresh of an older ad, Levi’s put Beyonce in the laundromat.

But we’re not done with Queen Bee. Pepsi also remade Gladiator, an iconic ad starring Beyonce, Pink, and Britney Spears. But it muddled the corporate feminist message, and replaced the three rebellious women with Travis Kelce and other football players as the gladiators, and the emperor who got booted with Meghan Thee Stallion.

October

The 2024 Presidential election heightened in the final months, as the nominees for president, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, found their footing in a new playing field. Billions were spent on political advertising, but one ad stood out. Trump’s anti-trans ad that ends in “Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you.” dominated the airwaves during sporting events, and localized anti-trans ads aired in Senate races throughout the country. Although an October GLAAD study found that the ad wasn’t moving the needle on voting, anti-trans sentiment effectively nudged swing voters. According to The Independent:

Democratic polling firm Blueprint released a widely-shared report that appeared to suggest that trans rights were a major factor costing Harris the election. "Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class" was the single top reason given by both swing voters in general and swing voters who chose Trump for rejecting his Democratic opponent.

But one thing the world could agree on; Moo Deng, Thailand’s star baby pigmy hippo was super cute. She soaked up the airwaves and captivated the internet, but as brand marketers hopped on the pigmy hippo train, she also became shorthand for short-term marketing thinking and being overly reliant on the cultural moment du jour for relevance.

November

November proved incredibly contentious.

The month started with the US convulsed around the elections, and the fallout of that election subdued half the nation. While Trump is picking his cabinet and changing the culture, another comparison started getting attention.

Jaguar’s rebrand looks like it came straight out of Emily in Paris, and got immediately panned. Volvo, on the other hand, won hearts with a lovely ad.

Meanwhile Wicked borrowed from Barbie’s playbook with hundreds of brand collabs to pave the way for its big opening weekend. Pink and green was everywhere, from fashion to booze to Crocs to Starbucks—and some very on-brand cast interviews during the press tours.

December

Coca Cola caused a stir with its remake of its iconic holiday polar bear ad…in AI. It received backlash, but unlike Google and Apple earlier in the year, it made no apologies and continued to run the ad throughout Christmas. Will this pave the way for more AI-generated ads with less human-generated backlash?

Netflix found a new way in to subscriber count by going live, with Christmas Day football, augmented by a Super-Bowl-level Beyonce halftime show.

All in all 2024 showed that whether AI was coming or not, the ad industry was losing some steam on creativity, rehashing and recasting older ads. And while politics dominated, purpose had left the building. The bright spots were from other parts of culture, where live moments and human magic found places to flourish, whether it was the power of the Olympics, pop music, or truly pushing the creativity of collabs. 2025 will find us consolidating on What It All Means, whether it’s AI in advertising or how we as marketers function in a rapidly changing political environment or whether we’ll even have TikTok in our arsenal of tools.

Happy New Year!