2024: The year marketing tried to do even more, with even less
2024 has undoubtedly been a tough year for marketers with cost-cutting, decision paralysis, and more. Wingmaven's co-founders Laura Wilson and Jennifer ten Seldam have closely kept watch, and here, they share the biggest observations they made this year.
2024 was a year of survival for many businesses in Australia. Companies and consumers felt the strain in ways that are hard to ignore and given the nature of our business, Wingmaven were closely monitoring the impact on marketing teams.
As businesses navigated this ‘economically tricky’ period, marketing teams were faced with an age-old challenge on steroids: How to deliver high-quality results with shrinking resources.
We’ve witnessed some diamonds made under pressure- but we’ve also seen some coal start to form. So what made the difference? We’ve captured some observations below.
Where did everyone go?
Redundancies and hiring freezes that have been an unfortunate hallmark this year for many Australian companies. In a bid to cut costs and streamline operations, businesses have regretfully let go of great marketing people — like, some serious talent!
This has been painful for both the individuals affected and for the teams left behind, many of whom were already stretched wafer thin. Because guess what wasn’t cut back? Delivery expectations.
Alongside shrinking teams, CMOs were asked to perform Edward Scissorhands manoeuvres with their budgets. What was once a workable allocation suddenly felt like ancient history, yet the desire for delivery of award-winning marketing topiary remained.
The upshot – the ROI of every dollar and every team member felt like it needed to double.
In an attempt to relieve pressure on their people, and maximise budget returns, we saw savvy marketing leaders take a giant, objective step back to review what activity was actually delivering the greatest (long and short term) value, and undertake some brutal prioritisation.
Those that continued to cling to passion projects and nice to haves, rather than stepping up and making the hard calls, copped their fair share of sick leave and ‘death by a thousand cuts’ to their budgets across the remainder of the year.
Decision paralysis
As companies braced for uncertainty, decision-making slowed to a crawl. Many business leaders played it safe, hesitant to take big risks or make bold moves.
For marketing teams, this has felt like wading through molasses. Campaigns that once took days to approve took weeks. Strategies that were once executed in a matter of weeks were delayed, leaving teams scrambling to adjust.
In some cases, entire initiatives were put on ice, which lead to missed opportunities in fast-moving markets and diminished team engagement.
This highlighted a key capability gap in strategic storytelling- one that is ever-widening as a result of remote and hybrid working. Back-to-back Teams calls have made many marketers’ stakeholder engagement more transactional.
And the opportunity to observe senior leaders build and deliver compelling arguments for why a course of action should be taken, are few and far between. Those who shifted their internal pitch to really target the hot buttons of the business and the decision-maker got things done. Those who couldn’t, didn’t.
Plug the gap: square pegs and round holes
With the squeeze on resources, and pressure on delivery, marketing leaders got necessarily creative with how they filled key gaps in experience and bandwidth.
Sometimes this lateral thinking paid off and they solved for development opportunities at the same time as getting the work done.
But we also saw some solutions that walked a fine line between risky and downright dangerous, such as:
Agency scope creep – What was once a clearly defined scope became blurred, with agencies expected to pick up tasks that went far beyond their true calling, resulting in lower-quality work as they scrambled to meet briefs it wasn’t in their wheelhouse to tackle. Failing to draw a line between ‘build the brief’ work (that requires client-side strategic marketing skill), and ‘answer the brief’ work (that needs creative, media or technical expertise) resulted in disappointing outcomes, with agencies largely (and often unfairly) taking the brunt of the blame. A lose-lose outcome all round.
Premature promotions – More and more marketers were asked to step up and take on permanent responsibilities well beyond their experience. While this might seem like a people-focused way to fill gaps in the senior bench, it creates significant risks. As these team members took on a greater leadership challenge, often at the same time as technical stretch, they were dropped in the deep end when it came to knowing how to lead senior technicians (often their prior peers) at a functional or enterprise level. Without the necessary leadership development support in place, this approach resulted in seriously debilitating bouts of imposter syndrome, as well as micro-managed and disengaged teams.
Forced shapeshifting – surely marketing is marketing, right?… Wrong! While breeding all-rounder generalists that can ‘do it all’ seemed like an efficient response to having less people in the team, it failed to consider two key obstacles to success. Firstly, the ever-expanding breadth of what constitutes marketing, and the uphill battle in trying to get one person with sufficient technical depth across it all… when the outer limit of ‘all’ has continued to push outwards. Secondly- it’s not just about skill. It’s also about will. Marketers are built differently, often with preferences for facets of marketing that play to their strengths. Yes, there will be some people that are comfortable going wide- but we’ve found these are far outnumbered by those who enjoy their technical sweet spot and don’t want to stray too far. We’ve seen businesses set the ‘generalist’ expectation- and then be surprised when engagement scores have suffered and key talent has walked out the door. Clever use of short-term outsourcing was the smart play.
We expect those who resisted the temptation to make long-term changes to org and role design in response to short-term economic pressure will be better off in the long run.
The sun will come out tomorrow.
2024 may have been a year of trials, but it also showcased the resilience, creativity, and adaptability of marketing teams across Australia.
Those who thrived found ways to do more than simply survive — they learned, evolved, and emerged stronger.
Here’s to a brighter, bolder 2025!
Laura Wilson and Jennifer ten Seldam are co-founders and directors at Wingmaven.
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
