Boom Time: Social Media Ad Spend Set to Explode in 2024

After nearly two years of constant talk about a recession and its downward impact on digital advertising revenue, the official numbers are in. 2023 was a banner year for advertising, with advertising spending a record $225 billion in the US alone. 

2024 promises to be even more rewarding, as political campaigns will pour $12 billion into reaching voters in online channels, including social media. Social media will be a beneficiary of this spending, seeing an 87% increase over 2020. 

For this reason, DDH’s family of brands -- Huddled Masses, Orange 142 and Colossus SSP -- are gearing up their social media advertising services, with a goal to helping brands, agencies and publisher clients take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity. 

But it’s not just political ads that will drive a social media ad boom in 2024. Social commerce continues its upward trajectory, with revenue that originates in this channel topping $86 billion. 

 What is Social Selling? 

So what is social commerce exactly? Basically, it’s when brands use their social media feeds to promote and sell products to consumers directly.  

In some cases, a post or a video will include a link to a product page, but increasingly, consumers can actually complete the entire purchase from within the feed itself (kind of an ideal situation for consumers who don’t want to interrupt what they’re doing to visit an ecommerce in order to complete a purchase).  

 Thanks to its algorithmic approach to content surfacing, TikTok is a leader in social selling. The platform also has its own ecommerce marketplace, TikTok Shop. 

But TikTok is hardly alone. Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shops, along with a growing list of digital wallets means that consumers don’t need to dig out their credit cards in order to buy something they’ve seen advertised in their feed. Thanks to headless commerce -- i.e. decoupling the customer-facing frontend of an ecommerce site from the backend -- brands can turn their social media posts into points-of-sale.  

A key benefit of social selling is that other customers do the heavy lifting of product promotion. Brand enthusiasts enjoy sharing images of the products they use, as well as answer customer questions. Note, these are activities that brands engage in directly. Influencer marketing is a separate tactic, and it continues to grow.  

Next-Level Influencer Marketing 

The influencer market continues to grow in terms of importance and sales. This year, influencer marketing market size will reach a record $24 billion, that’s 3x higher than in 2019. 

It’s also growing in sophistication.  If you haven’t read Taylor Lorenz’s book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, I highly recommend it. It used to be that influencers snapped a pic of themselves with a brand’s products, but today, brands are collaborating with the influencers to create distinct lines of products that are marketing to the influencer’s followers. 

 “​​This allows influencers to gain more recognition and steady income, and for brands to have their products represented by a social media icon,” writes Izea in a blog post, a company that specializes in influencer marketing. 

Key Trends for DDH Companies 

Both Huddled Masses and Orange 142 have clients that will benefit from social selling in sectors that perform very well across leading platforms: 

For this reason DDH teams across all of our brands will make social media commerce and advertising top strategies for our clients.