Online marketing has been marked by massive upheaval this year. At the beginning of the year, Meta had to announce its second billion-dollar loss in a row and falling sales. The share price subsequently plummeted by over 25%. The biggest cost driver at Meta is the virtual reality division. The department dealing with the Meta Quest VR glasses and the associated applications incurred a loss of almost $4 billion from July to September 2023. With the enormous investments in the "Metaverse" topic, Mark Zuckerberg made a bet that has not really paid off in 2023. The topic is only interesting for niche target groups, and the big VR breakthrough has failed to materialize.
Even the largest microblogging network, Twitter, was anything but smooth sailing. After the richest person in the world bought the network in October 2022 for a record-breaking $44 billion, it was renamed "X" in August. These just over 12 months were like a rollercoaster ride for Twitter: Musk fired more than half of the team, picked fights with costa rica whatsapp phone number the platform's major advertisers, and frequently irritated people with provocative and conspiracy-theoretical posts on his own platform. Over the last ten months, the platform has lost 3.5 percent of its active users. In October, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino estimated there were 200 to 250 monthly active users , but external analysts only put the figure at around 200 million.
Twitter users
The Twitter case has shown how quickly such a large digital player can fall apart. By focusing on strategic consulting, we have made ourselves more independent of the major platforms in 2023. We do not generally design campaigns for individual channels, but rather align the campaigns with the customer's goals. Sometimes the focus here is on marketing via Meta and Google, but sometimes we also focus on email marketing or invest the media budget across many channels. With Threads and WhatsApp Business, new channels have also been added to the marketing mix this year.