Digital marketing in 2024 is not just a list of new tools. Several regulatory, technical, and behavioral changes are altering the way brands interact with their audiences. Some developments have been visible for months, while others remain underestimated by most teams.
Digital Services Act: what the regulation requires from brands since February 2024
Since February 17, 2024, the Digital Services Act (DSA) applies to any brand hosting third-party content: customer reviews, comments, forums, or seller listings. A simple product review section on an e-commerce site is enough to bring the company within the scope of this European regulation.
Specifically, every advertisement displayed on a platform must be clearly identifiable as such, with the name of the advertiser and the main targeting parameters used. Controls in France can be conducted by Arcom, DGCCRF, and CNIL.
For marketing teams, this changes the daily management of community spaces. The obligations focus on the transparency of moderation decisions, reporting channels, and security metrics. Resources like marketing on wakeupnews.fr help track these regulatory changes that directly impact digital strategies.
The DSA is not limited to cookie and consent issues. It redefines the responsibility of brands for their own digital spaces, not just on third-party platforms.
Retail media in Europe: an advertising channel that redistributes budgets
Retail media (advertising displayed on retailer websites and apps) is experiencing rapid growth in Europe. Amazon captures about two-thirds of retail media spending on the continent, which indicates the market’s concentration.
For advertisers, this channel presents a structural advantage: purchase data is directly linked to the advertising space. Targeting is based on actual shopping behaviors, not on presumed intentions. However, reliance on a limited number of platforms raises questions about pricing negotiations and visibility of performance data.
Retail media and mid-sized brands: managing internal agencies in parallel
Mid-sized retailers are beginning to offer their own retail media solutions. For a brand selling through multiple retailers, the proliferation of internal agencies complicates campaign management and result comparison.
Retail media does not replace Google Ads or social networks. It adds as an additional channel, with its own metrics and format constraints. The main challenge remains the unified measurement of performance across these different environments.
B2B content creators: the rise of internal voices
B2B content creation is no longer solely reliant on communication teams. More and more companies encourage their executives and internal experts to publish directly on LinkedIn or other professional platforms.
This phenomenon can be explained by a simple observation: posts signed by identified individuals generate more interactions than corporate pages. Social media algorithms favor personal profiles, and professional audiences grant more credibility to a named expert than to a logo.
- Executives who regularly publish in their area of expertise become entry points to the brand, sometimes more effective than sponsored campaigns
- The question of content ownership arises: when an employee leaves the company, their personal audience goes with them
- The creative brief evolves, as brands and creators renegotiate editorial control over the messages shared
This trend is not limited to large companies. Smaller organizations achieve measurable results by identifying two or three employees capable of producing regular and credible content.
Personalization and generative AI: where marketing teams really stand
Content personalization through artificial intelligence is the most discussed topic of the year. The gap remains significant between the features promised by software vendors and what teams can deploy on a daily basis.
Generative AI tools allow for the production of variations of advertising texts, segment suggestions, or summaries of customer data. Automating large-scale content production is now accessible to companies that previously lacked the resources to do it manually.
Concrete limitations to know
The quality of the results directly depends on the quality of the input data. A poorly structured or incomplete customer database produces unreliable recommendations, regardless of the tool used.
- AI models generate plausible content but not always accurate, which requires systematic human proofreading for any published content
- The cost of integrating these tools into an existing marketing stack is often underestimated in sales presentations
- Questions about the privacy of customer data injected into third-party models remain open, particularly in the context of GDPR
AI personalization works better on specific tasks (email subjects, product recommendations) than on overall content strategies. Teams that achieve concrete results are those that define limited use cases before deploying a tool.
Digital marketing in 2024 is structured around new regulatory constraints like the DSA, advertising channels being reshaped with retail media, and AI tools whose actual adoption remains uneven. The teams that progress are those that test in limited scopes before generalizing, rather than those that try to apply all trends simultaneously.
