Top Marketing Trends of 2023

Apple’s AirDrop is a growing communication tool for Gen Z. As schools increasingly introduce social media bans, and teens increasingly own their own phones, AirDrop culture has gone mainstream.

During classes or assemblies, teens often airdrop reactions to what the teacher is saying. It’s a proximity-based chat room, in essence.

Local marketers are using it too. The ESPN marketing team recently went around New York City during the NBA finals and AirDropped promotional images to people around the city. One promotion, targeting people sitting on benches, read “Enjoying a rest on the bench? LeBron isn’t”.

As Airdrop culture flourishes, many non-iPhone users are feeling left behind, so services like SnapDrop have sprung up to meet demand.

And while AirDrop is a relatively new technology, some age-old data transfer methods are still widely used. Many hospitals still use pagers rather than phones because cell service isn’t reliable within the concrete confines, often built extra thick to keep x-rays and other transmissions compartmentalized.

As well, large data transfers are sometimes done by literally shipping the data. Amazon AWS has a service called AWS snowmobile that ships data stored on hard drives in ruggedized 45-foot-long containers that are pulled by semi-trailers. When there’s that much data, it’s far faster to physically ship than to send over the internet.

SMM panels, tools for buying fake social media engagement, are on the rise for surprising reasons.

To be clear, the direct economic value of this activity is negligible—since the followers are fake and don't spend money. It turns out that it's not brands who are buying these services most, but the freelancers they hire. As marketing work is increasingly outsourced to freelancers through sites like Fiverr and Upwork, these superficial engagement boosts are a scalable way for freelancers to reduce their costs while still hitting the engagement metrics set by their clients.

Today, a freelancer in the business of writing witty tweets and clever Instagram captions in order to attract followers is competing with people who can promise the same number of followers, and get them at a fraction of the cost through SMM panels. When success metrics are chosen poorly, software can undercut services, even though the output is lower-quality behind the curtain. This shows up in adjacent domains: article spinners can undercut copywriters on a price-per-word basis, although the results are poor; "traffic" is available in arbitrary quantities through botnets; positive reviews can also be bought at scale, though they often face removal.

What keeps the market alive is that many users are first-time buyers, who don't know what result they should be paying for. As local businesses are forced to move online due to Covid-19, more small business owners are paying up for marketing that's ultimately funneled to SMM panel providers, and getting the result they asked for instead of the result they wanted.

Today's professionals are overwhelmed by digital noise — so much so that old-fashioned snail mail is making a comeback as a channel of choice for those who want to make an impression.

For marketing and sales teams, gifting and direct mail have always been important tools of the trade, but the logistics behind them has remained stubbornly inefficient, and few companies have the resources to track the effectiveness of any given campaign. Sendoso, a B2B startup, is trying to bring the channel into the modern, metrics-driven era with a centralized platform that allows workers to send and track handwritten notes, flowers, gifts, swag, and more.

Despite how challenging it has historically been for companies to measure their return on investment, the market for non-cash business gifts is worth an estimated $125 billion. Sendoso's tools allow companies to set budgets and deliver custom campaigns without wasting time on tasks like shopping, packing, or shipping — and still ensure their message doesn't get lost in a crowded inbox.

It's yet more proof that what's old is new again in marketing. For more, look to the success of digital billboards, which are revitalizing a centuries-old ad medium with the help of targeting data.

Protonmail is a free email service, based in Switzerland, focused on end-to-end privacy. Consumers value privacy in the abstract, but usually choose convenience over privacy when there's a tradeoff. The Swiss location helps with this branding (and helps them deliver on the pitch): like a Swiss bank account, Protonmail aspires to be the classy, reliable way to keep a secret.

Email providers have built-in word-of-mouth marketing because the brand shows up in the "from" field. Email providers have some signaling value for users: when Gmail was invite-only, a Gmail address implied that the user was at least moderately sophisticated; today, an @aol.com address implies less technical savvy.

The privacy-convenience tradeoff has always been a challenge for privacy-focused apps. There's a direct tradeoff: to use a privacy-focused app, users need to spend more time on setup and lose some features. There's an indirect tradeoff as well: the companies that monetize email and messaging do so by sharing data with other applications. Gmail, for example, encourages users to stay logged-in on every device they use, allowing Google to link searches to a specific user across multiple devices. Because of this, mild privacy violations cross-subsidize product development for apps that leak user data.