Advertising Trends 2023: What Shifted and What Was Just Noise

The advertising landscape in 2023 moved in two directions at once: genuine structural change underneath, and a lot of surface-level noise on top. The brands that performed well were the ones that could tell the difference between a trend worth acting on and a trend worth watching from a safe distance.

After two decades managing ad spend across dozens of industries, I’ve learned to be suspicious of the word “trend.” Most of what gets packaged as a trend is either a technology in search of a problem, a rebranding of something that already existed, or a shift that matters for some businesses and is completely irrelevant for others. 2023 had all three.

What follows is a commercially grounded read of the shifts that mattered in 2023, why they mattered, and how to think about them without getting swept up in the hype cycle.

Why 2023 Was a Reckoning Year for Performance Marketing

I spent a good chunk of my earlier career overvaluing lower-funnel performance. It felt rational. The numbers were clean. You could see the click, the conversion, the return on ad spend. The problem is that a lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. You are not always creating demand. Sometimes you are just standing at the exit of a decision that was already made.

2023 was the year that argument stopped being a theoretical one. With rising CPCs, tightening margins, and post-pandemic normalisation of consumer behaviour, a lot of brands found that their performance channels were delivering diminishing returns. The audiences they were retargeting had already bought. The search terms they were bidding on were being contested by more competitors at higher prices. And the growth they had attributed to paid search and social was, on closer inspection, partly just the tide coming in.

Think about it like a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. Performance marketing is brilliant at reaching the person already in the fitting room. But if the fitting room is getting smaller, and more brands are fighting over the same small group of people who are already ready to buy, you have a structural problem that no amount of bid optimisation will solve. Growth requires reaching new audiences, not just capturing existing intent.

This is part of a broader conversation about go-to-market strategy and how brands build sustainable growth rather than just harvesting it. If that tension is familiar to you, the thinking at The Marketing Juice’s Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers it in more depth.

Retail Media Networks: From Interesting to Important

Retail media was not new in 2023, but it crossed a threshold in terms of strategic seriousness. Amazon had been building this for years. What changed was the number of major retailers with credible, scaled advertising products, and the increasing sophistication of the targeting and measurement they offered.

For brands with meaningful distribution through large retailers, this became a genuine consideration rather than an experimental budget line. The proposition is straightforward: you are reaching people at the point of purchase decision, with first-party data from the retailer’s own transaction history, in an environment where the retailer has a commercial interest in your success. That is a structurally different proposition from a third-party audience segment on a social platform.

The complication is that retail media networks are not all equal, the measurement methodologies vary significantly, and the margins on retail media spend can erode quickly if you are not clear on what you are optimising for. I have seen brands treat retail media as a pure performance channel and miss its role in share-of-shelf and category visibility. And I have seen the opposite: brands spending on retail media for brand reasons without any accountability for commercial return. Neither extreme serves you well.

The practical question for most brands in 2023 was not whether to be in retail media, but how to integrate it with the rest of the media plan without creating internal attribution fights between the retail media team and the broader performance team.

AI in Advertising: The Production Layer Shifted. The Strategy Layer Did Not.

The conversation about AI in advertising in 2023 was everywhere, and most of it was either breathless enthusiasm or defensive anxiety. Neither was particularly useful.

What actually happened was more specific. AI moved meaningfully into the production layer of advertising. Copy generation, image creation, ad variation testing, audience segmentation, bid management. These are real applications with real efficiency gains, and any agency or brand team that was not at least running experiments in this space by the end of 2023 was behind.

What did not change was the strategic layer. The question of which audience you are trying to reach, what you are trying to say to them, why your brand deserves their attention, and how that connects to a commercial objective, that remained as human as it has always been. AI is excellent at producing many versions of a thing. It is not good at deciding what the thing should be.

I spent time early in my career in rooms where the brief was genuinely unclear, but the pressure to produce something was intense. The solution was never to generate more options. It was to go back to the brief and make it sharper. AI amplifies that problem. If the strategic thinking is weak, AI will produce a large volume of weak executions very efficiently. That is not an upgrade.

The brands that used AI well in 2023 were the ones that had strong strategic foundations and used AI to accelerate production and testing within those foundations. The brands that struggled were the ones that hoped AI would compensate for unclear positioning or an undifferentiated message.

The Fragmentation Problem Got Harder

Audience fragmentation is not a new problem, but 2023 made it more acute. Streaming continued to pull audiences away from linear TV. Social platforms continued to splinter attention. New platforms continued to emerge. And the cost of reaching a meaningful percentage of any given target audience continued to rise.

This has a practical implication that does not get enough attention: when reach is expensive and fragmented, creative quality becomes a more important variable. If you are going to pay a premium to get in front of someone, the creative had better be worth it. The brands that maintained strong creative standards in 2023 got more out of their media spend than the brands that treated creative as a cost to be minimised.

I judged the Effie Awards, which evaluate advertising effectiveness rather than just creative quality. The work that consistently performed was not the work with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated media plans. It was the work with a clear, specific idea, executed with discipline across the right touchpoints. That holds regardless of the media environment. Fragmentation makes it harder to build reach. It does not change what makes an idea worth reaching people with.

For a broader perspective on why go-to-market execution feels harder in this environment, the team at Vidyard have written thoughtfully about why GTM feels harder for modern teams, and some of that analysis maps directly onto the media fragmentation challenge.

Creator Partnerships Moved Up the Funnel

Creator and influencer marketing in 2023 shifted in an important way. The conversation moved from “does this drive conversions” to “how does this build brand.” That is a maturation, not a retreat.

The early model of influencer marketing was largely performance-oriented: affiliate codes, tracked links, conversion attribution. That model still exists and still works for certain categories. But the more interesting development in 2023 was brands using creator partnerships for genuine brand-building work: establishing cultural relevance, reaching new audience segments, creating content that had value beyond a campaign window.

This requires a different briefing approach and a different measurement framework. If you are using a creator to drive conversions, you measure conversions. If you are using a creator to build brand awareness in a new audience segment, you need to measure reach, sentiment, and brand lift, not just clicks. Applying a performance measurement framework to brand-building activity is one of the most reliable ways to make good work look like it failed.

Later have done useful work on how brands can structure creator partnerships around specific go-to-market moments, including their thinking on how to go to market with creators for campaigns that convert. The framework is practical and worth reviewing if creator partnerships are part of your mix.

The Privacy Shift Continued to Bite

The deprecation of third-party cookies was delayed again in 2023, but the underlying direction of travel did not change. Brands that had been waiting for the deadline before acting on their first-party data strategy were running out of time and runway.

The practical reality is that the brands with strong first-party data assets, email lists, CRM data, loyalty programmes, direct customer relationships, were in a structurally better position than the brands that had outsourced their audience knowledge to platforms. That gap widened in 2023 and will continue to widen.

This is not a technical problem. It is a commercial strategy problem. Building a first-party data asset requires giving customers a reason to share their data with you directly. That means having a product or service that is genuinely useful, a content or community offer that people want to be part of, or a loyalty mechanic that creates real value. None of those things are the job of the media team alone. They require the whole business to be aligned around the customer relationship.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation touches on this alignment challenge, and their framework for go-to-market strategy and commercial transformation remains a useful reference for thinking about how marketing connects to the broader business system.

Connected TV Became a Real Planning Consideration

Connected TV advertising grew in 2023 to the point where it became a genuine planning consideration for mid-market brands, not just a premium option for large advertisers. The combination of TV-quality environments, digital targeting capabilities, and increasingly accessible minimum spends changed the conversation.

The appeal is clear: you get the attention and brand-building characteristics of television with the targeting precision and measurability of digital. The reality is more nuanced. Measurement in CTV remains inconsistent across platforms and publishers. Frequency management across a fragmented CTV landscape is genuinely difficult. And the premium pricing means that CTV only makes sense if you are clear about what you are trying to achieve and honest about whether the environment justifies the cost.

For brands that had been locked out of television advertising because of minimum spend requirements, CTV opened a door. For brands that had been over-indexed on digital performance channels and were looking for ways to build brand awareness, CTV offered a credible option. The key question, as with any channel, is not “is this channel growing” but “does this channel make sense for what I am trying to do.”

What the Brands That Grew in 2023 Had in Common

When I look back at the businesses that gained ground in 2023, across the industries I was working in and the work I was reviewing through the Effies, a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with which specific channels they were using.

They had clarity on where their growth was coming from. Not just which channels were reporting positive ROAS, but genuinely where new customers were entering the franchise, why existing customers were staying, and which audiences represented the most realistic opportunity for expansion. That clarity shaped their media decisions rather than the other way around.

They were honest about the limits of their measurement. They did not pretend that their attribution model was telling them the full story. They used it as one input alongside other signals: brand tracking, customer research, competitive data, and commercial outcomes. This is what I mean when I say analytics tools are a perspective on reality, not reality itself.

And they maintained investment in brand-building even when the pressure to cut to short-term performance was intense. That is harder than it sounds when a CFO is asking you to justify every line of the marketing budget. But the brands that cut brand spend to protect short-term ROAS in 2023 were, in many cases, mortgaging future growth to protect a number that was already a partial fiction.

Growth strategy is not just a media planning question. It is a business question. If you are working through how to connect your advertising decisions to a broader commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is where that thinking lives on this site.

How to Use This in Your Planning

The honest answer is that most advertising trends articles are more useful as a prompt for questions than as a source of answers. The trends I have described above are real. But whether any of them are relevant to your business depends entirely on your category, your competitive position, your customer base, and your commercial objectives.

The question worth asking is not “how do we respond to these trends” but “which of these trends, if any, changes the calculus for our specific situation.” Retail media matters enormously if you sell through major retailers. It is irrelevant if you do not. CTV is worth exploring if you have a brand-building objective and a target audience that has migrated away from linear TV. It is not worth exploring just because it is growing.

I have sat in enough planning sessions where the agenda was driven by what was new rather than what was needed. The best planning sessions I have run started from the commercial objective and worked backwards to the channel mix, rather than starting from the channel landscape and working forwards to a rationale. That discipline does not change because it is a new year or a new trend cycle.

Resources like Semrush’s analysis of growth approaches and Crazy Egg’s breakdown of growth frameworks offer useful tactical perspectives, but the strategic filter always has to come first. Tactics without strategy is just activity.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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