The 6 Digital Marketing Trends to follow in 2023 who are important and essential to know
6 Digital Trends That Marked 2023
He’s here to share the six trends in the digital Digital Marketing Trends, according to him, defined the year 2023. And needless to say, it’s been an exceptionally eventful year! At a time when AI is shaking up the norms of creativity and virtual objects are multiplying in the metaverse, traditional channels like e-commerce are reinventing themselves to remain appealing. And as gamification of campaigns multiplies brand engagement with their audience, the digital world is emerging as a new source of truth, proving that its impact goes beyond virtual boundaries to extend into the real world. Buckle up; we’re taking you on a 100% digital ride!
1. Entertainment Commerce as a Digital Marketing Trends
No, e-commerce isn’t just about Amazon, eBay, and Leboncoin. “E-commerce is becoming a full-fledged marketing channel,” confirms Jean-Baptiste Burdin. “With social shopping, real-time e-commerce, e-commerce as media… E-commerce has never been this fun!” There are countless ways to approach e-commerce, and its major players have understood this well. Google’s 2022 Black Owned Friday campaign is a great example. This campaign aims to promote businesses owned by African Americans, and for its third edition, the search engine chose to feature American rapper Ludacris in a fully interactive video. In this music video where Ludacris visits various black-owned businesses, viewers can choose the rapper’s next destination by selecting one of the options on the screen and even order the items, clothing, or accessories that appear in the video directly online via the Shop this scene option. In total, more than 100 products and 70 businesses are highlighted throughout the video. A clever and enjoyable way to support a very serious cause!
On the retail side, there’s also the campaign “The Golden Number” who is a Digital Marketing Trends created by the agency Nord DDB for McDonald’s Sweden. Here again, interactivity is key. After a cryptic print and digital campaign that simply invited people to “call” the restaurant chain without further details, clues scattered physically in restaurants and on the mobile app revealed the secret: one had to find a ten-digit number that, when dialed on a phone keypad, sounded like the famous brand jingle. All one had to do was call this number to get various rewards on the app and also participate in a drawing to win the famous golden card, which grants the right to eat for free at any McDonald’s in the country for 50 years. Some phone calls are worth their weight in gold!
IKEA also knows how to turn e-commerce into a playground. Ogilvy Taiwan & IKEA Taiwan launched the Dollar Catalogue campaign based on the observation that the catalog of the Swedish company is rich, very rich, and that one sometimes forgets that it contains items of various sizes and prices. To remedy this, IKEA Taiwan created a digital catalog to flip through with a very simple concept: 200 pages, 200 items, from $1 to $200, the price of the page corresponding to the price of the item. Backed by an impactful advertising campaign, including creative outdoor advertising, the campaign was a resounding success with over 21.5 million impressions and a website conversion rate of 264%!
Finally, “historic” brands can use e-commerce as a medium to evoke their heritage and use the nostalgia surrounding them to create attachment. This is the niche masterfully exploited by the agency Razorfish France for Renault and its museum “The Originals.” By exploring this virtual museum, you can admire the most beautiful cars produced by the iconic Renault brand and even purchase merchandise from the dedicated shop. The perfect opportunity to (re)discover the brand and its history and even buy a piece of it.
2. Creativity Boosted by AI as a Digital Marketing Trends
Two small letters hiding endless possibilities: AI (Artificial Intelligence) who is a really crucial Digital Marketing Trends clearly made its mark on the year 2022. “The computing power of AIs allows for the creation of new worlds, new possibilities, recreating what doesn’t exist. This is just the beginning of a revolution,” emphasizes Jean-Baptiste Burdin. While some fear that the many AI-powered tools may threaten various creative professions, others see it as a new source of inspiration.
This is the case with Ogilvy Paris, which, in partnership with Nestlé France and the artificial intelligence DALL-E, imagined the “outpainting” of the famous painting “The Milkmaid.” This painting, created around 1658 by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and later becoming an icon of the Nestlé brand, was virtually “extended” by artificial intelligence, imagining what could be happening outside the original frame of the painting. A surprisingly realistic rendering that immerses
the viewer in the brand’s universe and emphasizes its message: It’s so good to take your time.
In a similar vein, the beer brand Michelob Ultra, in collaboration with the production company UNIT 9, offered a new kind of tennis match on the ESPN+ streaming service: a match between the legend John McEnroe and… former versions of himself. This technical feat was made possible by AI, which, through machine learning, learned, imitated, and modeled McEnroe’s playing style at different key moments in his career by visualizing and analyzing hundreds of matches. A real-time hologram is then projected onto the tennis court, and several ball-throwing robots complete the setup, creating the illusion that the virtual avatar is returning balls thrown by the real McEnroe. “You can’t be serious!”
3. New Objects for New Worlds as a Digital Marketing Trends
The metaverse opens up new possibilities, and brands are quick to embrace them to expand their fan bases and play with the codes of web3. “With virtual worlds who is a Digital Marketing Trends come new desires, new possessions,” analyzes Jean-Baptiste Burdin. “Brands are seizing them to expand their fan bases and play with web3’s codes.” The agency Berlin Cameron, in collaboration with the American brand Under Armour and basketball player Stephen Curry, created the first “Meta-Sneakers.” To celebrate the 2,974th three-point basket scored by the Warriors’ point guard in the NBA, Under Armour sold an equal number of virtual pairs as NFTs, each priced at $333. Replicas of the pair he wore on the day he set this record, these shoes can be worn in three different metaverses: Gala Games, Decentraland, and the Sandbox.
In the same spirit, a whole section of the Adidas brand’s website metaverse is now dedicated to selling virtual clothing to wear during your virtual adventures, which you can then purchase on the NFT specialized platform Opensea. Going even further, Nike, a competitor brand, decided to launch its own platform dedicated to virtual creations: .SWOOSH . It’s a Web3 marketplace where everyone can collect, resell, and even co-create pieces adorned with the iconic Nike swoosh.
If Nike and Adidas are too mainstream for you, Balenciaga launched its own collection of clothing in the game Fortnite . By becoming the first luxury house to sign with Fortnite, the Spanish brand made a big statement by gaining prominent visibility among millions of players worldwide. And in case buying virtual clothes isn’t your thing, don’t worry! Fortnite has also entered the real world through a collaboration with the Ralph Lauren brand . You can dress your virtual avatar in Ralph Lauren-branded clothing like with Balenciaga, but you can also purchase real clothing through a capsule collection that incorporates key elements from the video game. As the boundary between the virtual and the real becomes porous, the brand with the polo rider ensures engagement from its community on both sides of the screen!
4. Digital as a New Source of Truth(s) as a Digital Marketing Trends
Can digital be a source of truth in a world where fake news proliferate? Like any medium, it depends on the intentions of those who use it. “In a world where information is everywhere and nowhere, digital can be a weapon of truth,” asserts Jean-Baptiste Burdin. The “Unfiltered History Tour,” conceived by Vice World News in collaboration with the agency Dentsu Webchutney India, perfectly illustrates the idea that digital can offer a different truth from what we know. Starting from the sad realization that the British Museum in London exhibits some artworks stolen by the British Empire from its colonies, Dentsu developed an Instagram filter that allows augmented reality to “scan” 10 of these artworks and tell their secret history. Far from the official museum guide’s discourse, the filter puts the artifact back in the context of its “theft” and tells its story from the perspective of the colonized. A daring guerrilla information operation that tells a story from a completely different angle.
So, digital allows us to discover another facet of history… Or even save it from the very real danger of disappearing. The charitable organization BlueShield Denmark partnered with UNESCO and the 3D scanning app Polycam for a project as salutary as it is ambitious: Backup Ukraine . The idea is to preserve and archive Ukraine’s symbols (monuments, buildings, works of art…) by having people on the ground scan them with their smartphones to protect them indefinitely from the terrible consequences of war. Ultimately, the goal is to establish a true digital museum, forever safe from bombs.
Also in this effort to shed light on a truth that we may not necessarily want to see or hear, the agency Taxi Vancouver, in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Human Rights Foundation, created the campaign “The Uncomfortable Truth.” By copying the advertising codes for the collaboration between the brands Yeezy and Gap (a blue jacket with a simple QR code), the agency redirected attention to a much more important issue: the situation of the Uighurs in China. Anyone who scanned the QR code next to a blue outfit, thinking they were discovering a new trendy piece, found themselves confronted with the harsh reality of workers exploited in labor camps. A powerful diversion that raises awareness about the conditions in which some of our clothing is made who is consired as one of the important Digital Marketing Trends.
5. Gamification as a Source of Engagement as a Digital Marketing Trends
What better medium than video games to actively engage your audience on a specific topic? “To demonstrate their commitments and actions, brands make people experience them concretely,” explains Jean-Baptiste Burdin. “Gaming platforms have become the new experiential stunts.” To alert young Australians to the dangerous reality of bushfires, NRMA Insurance partnered with the agency Thinkerbell Richmond to create a bushfire simulator in the video game Minecraft: Climate Warriors . Children could experience the concrete reality of a city threatened by a fire and learn the right actions to take to combat these bushfires.
In the same vein and on the same platform, EDF collaborated with the Minecraft creators’ association Endorah to create a virtual world: Carbon Fighters . This world takes a different approach to Minecraft by removing a key element from the game: coal. Faced with the absence of this normally essential resource for progress, players must manufacture low-carbon energy production means, such as solar panels or wind turbines. It’s a simple and impactful way to raise players’ awareness of a sustainable future by involving them directly in its construction.
Still, with the aim of raising awareness among an audience about an important cause, Carrefour and Publicis collaborated on a campaign aimed at raising awareness of the harmful relationship that can exist between junk food and gamers: “The Healthy Map.” On this map specially created for the occasion in the Fortnite game, it is mandatory to eat fruits and vegetables to gain health points! It’s a quirky and engaging way to shed light on the importance of healthy eating.
6. Campagnes digitales pour impacts IRL as a Digital Marketing Trends
If digital allows you to raise awareness among your audience about a cause, it can also have a concrete impact in real life. “Beyond awareness campaigns, brands use digital to have a real societal impact,” confirms Jean-Baptiste Burdin. Combining the useful with the enjoyable is the goal of the “Chillboards” campaign launched by the beer brand Coors Light in partnership with the agency DDB Chicago. To combat the increasingly strong and frequent heatwaves in Miami and raise awareness about climate change, Coors Light had a simple and brilliant idea. They covered rooftops, which are particularly sensitive to heat due to their black color, with white-painted advertising messages, all with a simple mantra: “cooling the inhabitants of these buildings as much as with one of our beers!”
The Decathlon brand also has a very strong vision: making sports accessible to all. To illustrate this philosophy concretely, they created the “The Breakaway” campaign in collaboration with the agency BBDO: the first virtual cycling race for prisoners. On the Zwift virtual cycling platform, six inmates from the Oudenaarde prison were able to compete against thousands of participants from around the world, offering them a breath of fresh air in their everyday prison life.
The campaign “The Bread Exam” also follows the principle of raising awareness through digital means to alert people to the situation of Lebanese women affected by breast cancer, due to the tradition that makes this disease a taboo. In partnership with the Lebanese Breast Cancer Foundation, AUBMC – American University of Beirut Medical Center, and the supermarket chain Spinneys – Lebanon, the McCann Paris agency has therefore imagined, as part of “Pink October,” the distribution of a video of a bread recipe that freely teaches breast self-examination gestures to women in Lebanon.
