Welcome to Ad Age’s Influencer Marketing newsletter, featuring news gathered by Ad Age reporter Gillian Follett. Every week, we explore how brands are working with influencers and how the creator economy is transforming the advertising landscape. You can sign up here to get updates delivered to your inbox. A friendly heads up that this newsletter is taking a holiday break and will return in 2025. Sign up for Ad Age news alerts and visit adage.com for all of the latest news.
A 2024 social media and influencer marketing retrospective
For this year’s final edition of Influencer Marketing Today, we’re looking back at some of the biggest social media stars, hottest internet trends and buzziest social media marketing moments of 2024.
Several new TikTok creators stepped into the limelight this year, including beauty creator Jools Lebron, of “very demure” fame; Tareasa Johnson, better known as Reesa Teesa, whose eight-hour “Who TF Did I Marry?” series fueled a surge of longer-form TikTok videos; and father-son duo A.J. and Big Justice, who “brought the boom” to TikTok with their reviews of Costco food court items.
Casey Lewis, author of youth trends newsletter After School, joined Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast yesterday to break down the most viral moments of 2024 and how they influenced brands’ marketing strategies, from “Brat Summer” to the “man in finance” earworm. She shared her biggest prediction for the social media marketing space in 2025—an explosion of livestream content, from brands collaborating with streamers to the continued rise of liveshopping streams.
Ad Age reporter Garett Sloane rounded up 10 of the year’s most noteworthy social media campaigns, including Levi’s collaboration with Beyoncé after she named a song on her album “Cowboy Carter” after the brand and Calvin Klein’s titillating Jeremy Allen White ads. And three Gen Z marketers joined News Editor E.J. Schultz for an Ad Age roundtable yesterday in which they shared their thoughts on 2024’s marketing highs and lows.
The trio praised Marc Jacobs and Duolingo for their engaging social strategies and applauded Liquid Death’s slew of unexpected and entertaining brand collaborations. Coca-Cola’s AI-generated holiday ads and Bumble’s “tone-deaf” billboards accusing Gen Zers of supposedly choosing celibacy over dating apps were among the year’s biggest marketing mistakes, according to the panelists.
Read full article here.