Hyped but hindered: Marketing moves that failed to deliver in 2024

As the sheen of the new year wears off and agencies get down to business as usual, industry professionals are taking a closer look at the trends and strategies that failed to live up to their promise. While innovation often involves a modicum of trial and error, some of last year’s most-hyped strategies and technologies merely fizzled out.

From underperforming platforms to over reliance on technologies like AI and Web3, these fell short of delivering the expected level of engagement, ROI, or brand impact.

A key reason behind these failures could well be the gap between expectations and execution. For instance, while AI-powered personalisation promised to revolutionise consumer engagement, technical limitations and data privacy concerns slowed its adoption.

Similarly, the promise of fleeting social media buzz proved to be more hype than substance, as marketers struggled to translate novelty into sustained results. These missteps highlight the importance of aligning strategies with clear objectives, audience insights, and technological readiness.

As brands gear up for 2025, understanding what went wrong with these trends is essential to avoid repeating mistakes and to focus resources on initiatives that truly matter. Campaign speaks to industry stakeholders to uncover the lessons learned from 2024’s failed trends and how marketers can turn these insights into actionable strategies for the future.

Ovez Khan, group CEO and founder, Trivium Media Group:

In 2024, ‘shiny object syndrome’ (SOS) led marketers to quickly adopt emerging technologies, such as generative AI, without fully evaluating how well they aligned with their business objectives. This impulsive adoption often led to underutilised tools and waste of resources, as many did not deliver the expected return on investment (ROI).

A Gartner survey revealed that marketers only used 42% of their MarTech stack’s capabilities, a decrease from 58% in 2020. This highlights the risks of pursuing every new trend without a strategic assessment.

In 2025, the timeless marketing principles expected to resurface are authentic storytelling by creating emotional narratives to engage audiences, genuine customer engagement by focusing on relationship management and word-of-mouth marketing. They will also focus on encouraging community and incentivising loyal customers to share positive responses and lean on simplicity by communicating clearly to help customers make quick decisions amidst information overload. Agencies will also dive into understanding consumer psychology better by leveraging data insights for personalised marketing strategies.

These principles will integrate with modern technologies, emphasising direct response tactics, data-informed decisions, and multi-channel strategies, traditional consumer connects for effective audience engagement.

Aashutosh Katre, director, Yellow Seed:

In 2024, many Indian marketers pursued trends like QR codes in CTV ads, often prioritising novelty over strategy. While these innovations appeared promising, their effectiveness was limited due to poor alignment with audience behaviour or unclear KPIs.

For instance, QR codes struggled to engage older demographics effectively, emphasising the risks of adopting trends without thorough testing. The SOS highlighted the importance of balancing innovation with strategic focus, using data-driven decisions, audience insights, and small-scale experiments to ensure new tactics genuinely enhance campaigns rather than becoming distractions.

In 2025, marketers will adopt a more discerning approach to trend-spotting, prioritising strategies aligned with long-term goals over chasing fleeting innovations. 2024's SOS highlighted the pitfalls of impulsive adoption, where tools like image-only emails and quick fixes fell short of delivering meaningful results.

Lessons from these missteps emphasise the importance of strategy over tactics and the need for agility without compromising quality. This year, marketers will focus on trends that enhance customer value, leveraging AI for personalised insights and maintaining adaptability to navigate economic and technological shifts while avoiding superficial or reactionary decisions.

Shraddha Kolbekar, SEO head, BC Web Wise:

Several marketing trends in 2024 did not quite pan out as expected. Influencer marketing, although still relevant, had diminishing returns because audiences grew tired of inauthentic endorsements. 

Similarly, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Web3 did not have much mainstream effect due to technical complexity, regulatory issues, and lack of clear ROI for brands. The excessive personalised advertising backfired as consumers got creeped out by the super-targeted ads. Personalisation will be valuable if balance between relevance and user privacy is maintained.

Metaverse has made marketing focus on fun, virtual experiences. While it received a lot of hype, the tech struggled with user adoption and the cost of development, making it unviable for many brands.

Marketers now need to create engaging digital spaces and immersive experiences that resonate with their target audience. Both metaverse and Web3 have interesting potential, but both pose development and adoption challenges on user and measurement issues.

Traditional digital marketing strategies, while mature, require continuous adaptation and innovation to remain effective in an evolving landscape. Marketers should not ignore these core strategies like content marketing, SEO/SEM, social media marketing, email marketing, CRM, and data analytics. A balanced approach, combining core strategies with emerging is key to sustainable marketing success.

Rooshabh Doshi, co-founder, Nuance Consultancy:

As a performance marketer, broad or automatic targeting failed. Meta has pretty much been pushing advertisers to trust its algorithm, but despite several experiments with multiple brands, I have always come back to narrower and manual targeting. This also might have to do with the fact that we mostly work with niche lifestyle and luxury brands.

We consistently advise brands to avoid becoming overly reliant on influencer marketing. Many brands that went all-in with influencer campaigns ended up disappointed.

Social media has become oversaturated with partnerships, often involving influencers whose audiences did not align with the brands’ products or values. The issues like fake followers and engagement have significantly reduced the impact of such campaigns. Consumers have become more discerning. The growing requirement for influencers to disclose sponsorships also undercuts the subtlety of promoting brands.

Traditional SEO is another area facing a shift, especially with the rise of AI. Outdated tactics like keyword stuffing, over-optimisation, and low-quality link-building have become increasingly ineffective. Instead, core elements such as high-quality content, excellent user experience (UX), on-page SEO, and technical SEO—like site architecture, crawling, and indexing—remain essential for visibility and rankings.

Chandan Bagwe, founder and director, C Com Digital:

The rise of the metaverse has generated significant buzz in the marketing world, creating an allure for brands to invest in this innovative space. However, not all ventures are successful. Metaverse marketing flopped as its impact was limited due to the low adoption rates within India.

The growing adoption of AI technologies in customer service had created expectations for enhanced user experiences. However, not all implementations deliver. A popular Indian e-commerce platform introduced an AI-powered chatbot aiming to streamline customer interactions. Unfortunately, this chatbot frequently provided inaccurate or irrelevant responses, leading to increased customer frustration and more support tickets, thus, illustrating the importance of effective implementation and quality control in AI solutions.

Then, there were short-lived social media trends and ignoring the core audiences. Social media is a fast-paced environment where trends come and go in the blink of an eye. Brands often scramble to participate in viral phenomena, sometimes at the cost of authenticity. Also, amid the push for modern marketing strategies, some brands overlook their foundational customer-base when it comes to following the social media trends and influencer marketing.