New research shows that telecom marketers regard generative AI as the most important consumer trend for 2024.

Mediaocean’s 2024 Telecommunications Advertising Outlook Report sheds light on current trends, with data gathered from leading telecom marketing professionals.

The research crowns generative AI as the top consumer trend right now, with 64% citing it as important, beating out Tiktok/social video (54%), and CTV/streaming (54%). Clearly, marketers need to be incorporating AI in their strategies to address key issues such as personalisation, CX, data analysis and privacy.

Paid social media ad spend looks likely to skyrocket for telcos in 2024, with 68% of respondents looking to increase resources for this channel. This reflects wider telecom industry optimism, with predicted rises in spending across all channels, apart from TV and print.

The report also showed that Telecom marketers predominantly use generative AI for market research (42%) and data analytics (41%) rather than content generation, with copywriting (25%) and image generation (18%) falling behind in use cases.

90% of respondents said their media and creative processes were not fully synchronised highlighting a persistent ‘creative-media gap’. This gap is a huge issue for telecom marketers, as consumers respond best to personalised experiences. Telcos which solve this imbalance can unlock major growth potential, according to Mediaocean.