AdNews asked industry figures for their assessment of 2022 and outlook for next year
Gareth Davies, Managing Partner, Amplify
Emerging from the roller coaster of 2020 and 2021 pandemic restrictions, particularly for those of us that lived through the lockdowns of Sydney and Melbourne, we hoped for a 2022 bounceback. And what a cracker of a recovery year it’s been.
At the start of the year, sensing the impending return to normality approaching and wilfully maintaining a doggedly optimistic attitude to post-pandemic recovery, we made the call to find ourselves a new office space to allow for expected team growth off the back of our industry returning to normal, and an appetite for IRL over URL - and we weren’t wrong.
We went from famine to feast, from hibernation to Ninja Warrior finals in a matter of months.
The shared mass experience of lockdowns in our two largest key cities has seemingly resulted in a synchronicity of planning amongst our clients from a variety of industry verticals, like never before. Brand planning across our varied client base has inadvertently been in lock step and as a result, the delivery of experiences have peaked simultaneously which is a new challenge to overcome, exacerbated by a diminished resource pool to swim in.
So yes, scaling up when there’s fewer people in the industry has been a challenge. When bringing people together was banned through the pandemic, many of our workforce had to find other ways to make a living, and in many of those cases the alternative has remained their new career path, safe from the effects of snap lockdowns. Additionally, the closed borders have seen many return to their foreign homes never to return, or at least not yet.
I’m thankful for the solidarity, talent and tenacity of our core team that have rolled with the punches, with the highs and the lows, with the famine and now the feast. It’s our people that make our business, and our industry.
If I’d been writing this piece a year ago, I would have predicted that hybrid IRL / URL experiences would have been here to stay - and moving forward our clients would have insisted on a hybrid approach to get the best of both worlds, and ROI to boot. But we’ve not seen that in our client base. We’ve rebounded in full back to IRL, and herein lies the opportunity - to do IRL like never before. It’s time to challenge previous restrictive models and break formats.
So 2023? It’s our mission to build our industry, attract and nurture new talent and drive the business forward with exemplary work that meets (and goes beyond) the needs of our clients. As we move past the 12 month mark since the end of shared lockdown experiences, I’m hoping for the return of a more evenly paced cadence of experiences that allows us to smooth out the peaks and troughs from the world's most killer roller coaster to an undulating landscape of experiences peppered throughout the year. And with a soaring audience appetite for experiences, there’s never been a more opportune moment to take a new approach to how brands can show up in culture, break new ground and build entertaining worlds.
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