Jane Burhop.
The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2024 and forward to next year.
Jane Burhop, Creative and Co-Founder, Common Ventures
2024. The year that was. Blurry. Testing and a little too hard to keep up with.
Everything is getting faster and faster and more convenient and I’m a little scared that I’m not going to need a brain anymore.
With AI infiltrating the everyday, my anxiety of early on-set Alzheimer's has only become more frenzied. 2025 is going to go one of two ways - A) I will become a ‘prompt engineer’ or B) - the internet will swallow me whole and suck me into the deep, dark depths of its doom scrolling so that all I need to survive is a Lychee Ice vape (1) and three hours of broken sleep.
Because of this, I’m not going to bore you with all my thoughts on all the micro trends of 2024, Midjourney /imagine prompt hacks or how to turn a birthday cake into a car jump in Runway.
And I know if I’m to hold your attention to spam for the entirety of this article, I should have just made a TikTok. Troye Sivan track. ASMR voice over. Me talking about my favourite campaign, dressed in haute couture, in the trad wife kitchen of your dreams.
Instead, indulge me as I use good old fashioned words smothered in a healthy dollop of sass and a couple of streaks of cynicism to talk about…
Five things that didn’t trend in 2024
- iSpy Kitsch, gaudy but somehow enchanting, the 3D worlds of
@twigbot_ ">Walter Wick’s photographs have aged tremendously but in a good way. Matched with eerie riddles, these scenes are wonderfully detailed and would be great to recreate and modernise.Walter Wick is an absolute artist. I have more ispy books to show if anyone is interested. #ispy #ispybooks #walterwick #90s #90skids #y2k #nostalgia #nostalgiacore
♬ aquatic ambience - Scizzie - No one had the messy job of refilling the ink cartridge in their calligraphy pen this year. If there is one thing AI can’t do very well yet, it’s typography. Even as one of our finest typographers is tweaking his counters and ligatures with AI exploration, I think that calligraphy, handwritten notes and blackletter might be planning their comeback tour.
- Puce - A popular 18th century pinkish-brown colour, said to be a favourite colour of Marie Antoinette, it’s colour more akin to the shade of an old bruise sulking under your skin (2). Since Charteuse has screeched its way into the culture zeitgeist, maybe puce is next. The term comes from French, literally meaning "flea colour".
- The after dinner ritual: A papery, individually wrapped wafer of an after dinner mint and a small crystal thimble of sweet, fortified sherry. The epitome of the ‘80s dinner party. A game of charades? A ballad and poem accompanied by the piano. A heated debate, kitchen gossip and a drunken whistle home. We don’t even dinner party anymore, but maybe we should.
- Book clubs I joined a book club and had to start using my attention span and the dictionary again. I kept bumping into all these words I’ve either never seen or had no idea how to pronounce. It made me use different prompts in language models as the language it kept serving up was so bland and email friendly. Book clubs, those assemblies of kindred spirits, offer a salutary balm to the faculties, wherein the convivial exchange of perspicacious reflections and the gentle contest of ideas doth invigorate the intellect and cultivate a spirit of bonhomie (3).
And for those of you who have managed to maintain some sort of an attention span this year, here are the top culture references that have stuck with me in 2024.
- Baby Reindeer Despite the horrific truth that the main actor, Richard Gadd is literally starring in a movie of his life, Jessica Gunning plays Martha Scott so perfectly you never want to walk past a bus stop again. As a dramatisation of reality, would this series have just disappeared into the true crime doco catalogue? The use of text speak and language add this extra level of eeriness and danger to Martha’s character making her so much more real and disturbing (Sent from my iphon)
- Sam Youkils’s train rides to anywhere. In an era where video content is getting rammed into our eyes, the ambient sound, close-up, almost obtrusive nature of his travels and life feel more voyeuristic than normal and are far cheaper than a euro summer trip.
- Taylor Swift - She is still touring. SHE IS STILL TOURING. What a powerhouse of a woman who can make grown females feel like five year girls again by providing a space that sparkles and fervently encourages femininity in a world that doesn’t. Even the haters were dark they didn’t get tickets.
- The branding, typography and prop department’s Activator kit for: The Substance. Meet me for your next refill. Honourable mention also goes to the prosthetics department. It was giving Patricia Piccinini I will not recover from this film.
- Butter - True crime meets french cuisine in Japan - the perfect melange of all the things I craved this year. Stock up on butter as this book will get your slathering. Also inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer,"
What does all this have to do with creative advertising? It’s a brutal reminder that your brain is where you’ll find your point of difference. We’re lazy creatures and if we stop learning, we’re no longer hunting for originality. We’re begging, borrowing and stealing from whatever tasty creative AI output we can get our hands on, when finding the cultural zeitgeist that feeds our industry might just take a mix of both machine and our own minds.
Prompts used for this article
- Most popular and fruity fun times vape flavour for 25+
- Describe puce in the tone of Roald Dahl
- Write a sentence describing why book clubs are good for you using interesting and obscure language from the 19th century
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