18 Olives’ 2024 Trend Forecast

With another year coming to an end, we’ve decided to look ahead to 2024. Trends are inherently fickle: As a pre-Halloween worm costume Heidi Klum once said: one day you’re in, and the next, you’re out. Our founders, self-appointed trend forecasters, have also taken it upon themselves to assess the current cultural landscape and forecast what’s in and out for 2024. Some of it is serious and actually related to content marketing, and some of it is silly. You’re welcome. 

• In: More focus on a concentrated number of platforms. A graveyard of defunct and dying trendy social media platforms — Clubhouse and BeReal come to mind — have shown the staying power of the boring and traditional. We predict brands making more investment in the places where audiences dependably show up, like LinkedIn and TikTok, creating a better community experience with better upside for brands.

• Out: Burrata. We’re sick of a slice of perfectly good pizza getting ruined with an upsold blob of tasteless, watery cheese on top. 18 Olives is steadfastly in favor of both mozzarella and cream. But when you wrap one around the other and use it to ruin our pizza, everyone loses. 

• Meeting strangers digitally is out. We’re not anti-app, but the fact is that they elide perhaps the most important thing: A person’s essential vibe. As in, what it’s like to be in a room with them. Also, anyone introduced through friends always feels like a safer bet. So we’re predicting a resurgence of IRL mixers, personal ads,  and ways to connect with potential partners who have ties to your existing social circle. 

• In: More emphasis on individual creators and personalities. You’ve already been seeing this as writers make the leap from writing for publications to writing for themselves — their names get cited the same way you’d cite reporting or analysis from The New York Times. Some outlets like Semafor and Puck brand their stories and newsletters as coming from specific names of writers and editors, as opposed to coming from the outlet itself. We predict this will become even more commonplace in 2024 — especially as layoffs continue to decimate traditional and digital media and more talent strikes out on their own. As a corollary, the distinction between independent journalism and the creator economy will get even murkier. 

• Walk-ins welcome. Restaurant reservation culture has gone too far. Instead of booking tables 60 days in advance and not being able to walk in and sit down at a table for 2 at the exact moment a restaurant opens, we predict, perhaps wishfully, that more restaurants will open up tables to allow us to enjoy the serendipity of spontaneous dining decisions. The current system seems to benefit no one – diners or restaurant staff – and we believe a better world is possible. 

• More community- and recommendation-focused social. We’re spending more time discovering and sharing within the affinity-focused communities on Goodreads and Letterboxd and in the close friends segment of Instagram, and less time on X. Other platforms like Reddit and Tumblr succeeded when they catered to passionate communities, and that passion is still the coin of the realm.

• Out: The wall of probiotic sodas at your corner store, due to a saturated market (as that formidable wall of colorful labels and winky slogan attests), a more widespread funding crunch, and also people pivoting to drinking full sugar Coca-Cola. 

• In: Meeting your neighbors. We wouldn’t be here writing this together if we hadn’t tried it ourselves.

• Out: Credulous reports of “organized retail crime.” In: media literacy, not taking a mega-conglomerate at their word, etc. 

• Print media is sort of coming back — Nylon having its print resurgence and whatnot — but expect this to happen in a way that is neither sustainable nor industry-shifting. The end stage is in sight and it's made up of two things: vanity projects run by huge conglomerates and passion projects run on the side by people with day jobs that actually pay the bills.

• White collar crime persecution. The white collar crime renaissance of the past decade was a zero interest rate phenomenon. But now, interest rates are up, VCs are no longer showering every third founder they meet in cash, and we’re starting to see how those lofty unfulfilled promises of genius founders of the late 2010s shake out.

• Pre-meal fare is *light* hors d’oeuvres and a bitter cocktail. The whole point is to optimize the entrée experience. I love salami and Brie, but if you put it in front of me at 7pm, I’m hungry and I’m going to eat like 700 calories’ worth and then I won’t enjoy the salmon you seared for me so painstakingly. And even the driest white wine doesn’t cleanse the palate like a negroni or boulevardier. - EC

• Out: Eric Adams as New York City mayor. Not to get too political here, but we’ll take pretty much any New Yorker over Adams, whose time would be better spent in such places as the VIP room at Zero Bond, or the state of New Jersey.

• In: Sizzling fajitas. As avid fans of the arts, we know and respect a “dinner and a show” moment when we see one. 

• Thinning out of the DTC brand herd. Yeah, I predicted this in 2020, but interest rates are pretty different than they were in 2020, as are the markets, which translates to significantly less patient VCs, so I’m doubling down on it. Plus, big box retailers like Target and Walmart have leapfrogged the upstarts of the 2010s both by buying up those upstarts and copying Amazon's every move. - MK

• Out: “Wes Anderson aesthetic.” Judging by “Asteroid City,” Anderson himself is ready to move on. Twee and uncanny just don’t land as hard these days. 

• In: Olives. Preferably 18 of them.

Unleash Your Story: Why You Need a Content Strategy

Any business, from a sprawling global conglomerate to your local hardware store, is always looking for new customers. Existing customers are great, but they have a frustrating habit of buying the stuff they need, then disposing of your business entirely. 

But when you have a thoughtful, strategic content program? You gain something essential: Authority. By sharing and disseminating reliable information in your unique voice,  you gain trust – a truly unparalleled business advantage. 

When you have earned that all-important trust, you ensure that existing customers will return to your brand the next time they need a stepladder or can of paint – and, of course, that those coveted new customers are drawn to you. 

So, how do you start earning trust? It’s simple. 

All you need to start building a content strategy is two pieces of information, which you likely already have: 

• Your business goals 

• Your target audience 

That’s it! Like a traditional building foundation, everything else can be built out from those two pillars. For example, say you’re running a B2C software startup that helps users locate olives near them. Your content strategy would start like this: 

• Business goal: increase usage by raising brand awareness 

• Target audience: consumers with disposable income who enjoy Mediterranean food 

Next step: Gather as much data as you can get your hands on and dig in 

To create a content strategy that’s truly tailor-made for your unique needs, you’ll want to take that target audience out for a nice coffee and get to know it in as much detail as possible. In the world of marketing, this is sometimes conceptualized by crafting “buyer personas,” or descriptive portraits of the people marketers want to buy their products. 

For our fictitious olive-locating company, we’d start with any information we can glean about moderate-to-high-income consumers of Mediterranean food and how they tend to behave. Do they respond more favorably to SMS campaigns or email marketing? Video, audio, or text? Do they prefer messaging that centers on nutrition? Entertaining? Cost-effectiveness? We’d sketch out our ideal olive buyer in as fine a grain as possible, using tools like internal and external interviews, market research, and customer surveys. 

Then we put it all together

Which is to say we combine our business goals with all the insight we’ve generated about our target audience to create the potpourri known as narrative strategy. 

Say our startup, FindOlivesNow, is aiming to increase broad brand awareness, and we’ve determined that our target consumers favor longform, text-based communications focused on cooking healthy. We’d consider content initiatives like…

• A blog series focused on the benefits of a Mediterranean diet 

• A bimonthly email newsletter providing cooking, food storage tips, and recipes

• An SMS campaign that promotes available olive retailers at points in the year when people may be entertaining 

That’s what we call a content strategy, folks! Crucially, these measures elevate FindOlivesNow from a simple olive purveyor to the holy grail we mentioned at the beginning: a trusted authority our audience relies on for more than just the product. 

Now, we set it and forget it experiment 

We’ve got a content strategy, and we’ve designed it with lots of thought and consideration. But it’s still an educated guess. So we don’t just launch it and expect all the results we’re looking for (our business goals) to come rolling in. 

Instead, we monitor those results, look for patterns, and tinker with the strategy until it delivers the results we want. Maybe FindOlivesNow’s SMS and email campaigns are converting like gangbusters, but the blog series isn’t reaching our targets. 

First, we’d look for potential content tweaks that may improve the blog posts’ value for our audience. Are the email and SMS messages promoting a more broadly popular message or angle? If so, we can edit the blog series accordingly and find out whether that turns things around. Are we promoting the blog series in the right settings, and is the promotional copy touting it properly? With blog posts in particular, we can also revisit our SEO strategy; maybe we’re working with outdated keyword insights or formatting best practices. 

If these measures don’t do the trick, and our other campaigns are still performing, we may just wind down the blog series. That’s what the experimentation phase is all about: finding out what works for your audience and discarding what doesn’t. As they say in journalism, kill your darlings. 

Presto! You now have a content strategy 

From here on out, it’s all about optimizing; trying new mediums, formats, and channels, experimenting with content, and continually refining how you think of your target audience. 

The work of promoting your business is never really done – there are still billboards for Apple and Walmart, after all – but the good news is that 18 Olives can handle all of your content strategy, from those first essential pillars until your only tasks are essentially buffing a well-oiled content marketing machine. 

To get started, contact us right here.

Announcing: 18 Olives

18 Olives began as so many auspicious things do: With a cold email. 

Maya had just been laid off from her job at an early-stage VC firm and didn’t know what to do about it. Naturally, she wrote a newsletter missive. Eliza, who had previously only messaged Maya requesting her thoughts on a 2021 contemporary fiction novel, saw her newsletter and shot off an email: Do you want to start an editorial consultancy? 

As it turns out, Maya loves an ambitious cold outreach email. Also, she did want to start an editorial consultancy. 

We met up for coffee two days later at a cafe in our neighborhood, and the rest is history. 

Today we’re excited to launch Announcing 18 Olives, our boutique editorial consultancy specializing in content strategy, media relations, email newsletters, and digital ad copy. Both seasoned former journalists, we bring a reporter’s attention to detail and curiosity to our work, along with the subject matter expertise that comes with working alongside startups, VC firms, and financial organizations.

You’ll want to work with us if:

• You’re just getting your company’s content marketing strategy off the ground and need some help getting from 0 to 1

• You’re starting (or restarting) your brand’s newsletter

• You’re looking for top of funnel marketing expertise 

• You’re an early-stage founder, a VC firm or a financial services organization that would benefit from two subject matter experts

• You’re a technical founder with zero communications skills

• You’re ready to launch your early-stage startup or make a funding announcement

• You need literally anything written and can’t do it yourself

• You’d prefer contracting your editorial work out to two extremely nice and smart former journalists 

We’re ready to hit the ground running. If you’re looking for help with editorial strategy, contact us today.