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.