Three massive digital issues for 2024
Your digital insights newsletter from Edmonds Elder
Hello hello, and welcome to your April edition of the Edmonds Elder digital insights!
In this edition, find out why thought leadership matters, how to make your sustainability comms cut through and how the major platforms are using AI.
If all that wasn’t enough, there’s even a special guest spot for the Edmonds in Edmonds Elder in Politics Corner…
Thought leadership, leading the way
Did you know that 54% of C-level executives spend an hour or more per week reading thought leadership content?
Or that 7 out of 10 decision makers think more of companies that regularly produce high-quality thought leadership content?
That’s just one of the helpful headlines in Edelman’s 2024 Thought Leadership Impact Report, surveying 3,500 execs across seven countries and really underlining the impact that high-quality thought leadership has at the top level of organisations.
Definitely food for thought for your content strategy and a really interesting report to read up on.
A quick note from ‘98
If you’re wondering why this month’s edition of your insights looks like it came from 1998, wonder no more. Our favourite discovery of the month has been this beautiful corner of the internet commemorating old-school Geocities animated GIFs, which we’ve scattered liberally throughout to take certain older members of our team back to their early internet heyday 👴
Welcome, then, to your Insights…
This headline brought to you by generative AI
2024 is very much becoming the year in which AI goes mainstream, and is at the centre of every major platform’s strategy for the months ahead, so it’s well worth keeping an eye on developments.
AI-generated ads are already here, with Google’s new generative AI-powered creative features coming to some ad platforms. In theory this will allow for more advertising variations to be created and tested much more easily, but very obviously there are reasonable concerns at one end of the scale about fake and misleading adverts, and at the other end, well, the death of creativity as we know it. Or a bold new era for creativity, depending on your perspective.
Elsewhere, LinkedIn will be packing in AI content production tools along with a brand new premium-tier company page, which will also give firms that cough up a lovely golden verification badge, as well as other features that may raise the profile and presence of that company in newsfeeds. Definitely one to track closely.
For those of you who (like us at EE Towers) use Slack, AI tools are here for you too, with auto-generated channel conversation recaps and more advanced natural language searches. No news yet as to whether it will make your custom emoji reactions automatically funnier as yet.
How to - ahem - sustain your followers’ interest
Do you ever get the feeling when you’re faced with various sustainability posts in your newsfeed that they all start to feel a bit samey? Revolt London’s excellent new Dull Green Report goes under the bonnet of sustainability comms over the last decade to reveal some fascinating insights.
Tl;dr? Go on then:
Sustainability campaigns need to punch hard, but too often they’re lightweight and unmemorable due to a range of factors, like low budget, legal concerns around greenwashing or a social backlash, or the inherent complexity of arguments.
The best campaigns inevitably involve organisations that can stack up their claims with concrete action, because you can’t deliver emotional storytelling if you don’t have something to say. Secondly, sustainability has to support the reasons why you’re the best in class, not be the sole reason why - it needs to reinforce what you’re already doing better than anyone else.
Elections corner: “I need your full attention, <TOM>”
In our last edition we promised to keep you on top of all the digital trends defining democracy in this Year Of Global Elections™, and never let anyone call us liars. This edition’s political roundup kicks off with none other than our very own Tom Edmonds of Edmonds Elder talking to the Guardian about political ad spending and how digital political ads could end up on your TV screen:
“The spending limits have doubled and most of that extra spend is going to go on digital, as you can’t actually spend it any other way. I don’t think anyone comprehends how much is going to be spent on advertising in this election.” - Tom Edmonds
Next up is Politico’s analysis of British political fundraising emails taking a leaf out of the Obama/Trump playbooks. It’s an interesting rundown of some of the main techniques you’ll be familiar with if you’re on a political party’s email list, and how even donating £1 can bring so much more value than just the financial in terms of the trust, engagement and commitment it generates.
PoliticsHome has a more controversial take on political comms, asking whether the Conservative Party are deliberately posting “terrible” social media content as part of a grand plan to drive hitherto-unseen levels of engagement, or whether it’s, well, just not very good. Read the piece and decide for yourselves. John Elledge, meanwhile, is more concerned about dirty tricks in video content from political parties, as spending on digital advertising will hit unprecedented highs in 2024.
Unhelpfully (or helpfully depending on your perspective) in such a Big Year For Democracy, Instagram is limiting proactive recommendations of political content in feed, which has caused quite a bit of controversy. It is a feature that users can turn off on an individual basis (here’s how to do it), but there’s some debate as to the wisdom of this move - on both sides of the argument.
TikTok, conversely, though it doesn’t allow political advertising, is taking a more proactive approach by setting up online election centres to help people (especially younger people) to get access to verified and accurate information around elections.
Around the platforms
Feature of the month - we’re loving this new feature from Instagram that allows you to clip out elements from your own photos and then use them as stickers in your Stories and Reels. A whole new world of creative approaches suddenly opens up with this simple feature.
Staying on the ‘gram, GRID ZERO is a developing trend across social platforms, in which users from top celebs down to regular schmos like you and I delete all of their existing posts and start again from, well, zero. Is it about spreading an air of intrigue and mystery, claiming back privacy, or simply a reflection that Stories, rather than the feed, is where the action is this days? A little from each column, we think, but definitely a trend that continues to be on the rise.
We love a new targeting option here at EE (in fact, some of us get quite excited by them 🤓), so we’re all ears to learn that brands can now target specific content categories within YouTube Shorts. So if a brand wants to sell food or beauty products, they can now insert a short, punchy video ad right into the Shorts mix next to all the other food and beauty content.
Since its launch, Threads has been an ad-free zone for users as Meta tries to build up its audience levels to X-killer levels, but it now looks like advertising might be coming to the platform sooner than expected. We don’t know what it’ll look like yet, but in-feed advertising with the same sophistication of targeting of Facebook or Instagram (after all, it’s using the same data) is a pretty reasonable assumption.
That’s all for your digital insights for this edition - please do send it around to friends and colleagues who might be interested in subscribing in time for the next one!
See you soon,
Stuart.
P.S. In other news that makes us feel as old as the hills, can you believe that hit mobile game Monument Valley is ten years old? It’s had 160 million downloads, and if you’re not one of them, it still stacks up so get to it. And here’s a surprisingly moving interview with the game’s sound designer.