To cap off the year, we asked marketers which industry trends were overlooked and overhyped in 2021. We also asked readers, and hundreds of you answered—668 marketers, to be exact.

So, what’s the verdict? Turns out, many of you are pretty bullish on out-of-home advertising: 16.3% said its resurgence was this year’s most overlooked trend, followed by nostalgia marketing (14.2%) and marketers going freelance (12%). Breaking each trend down:

• OOH advertising did enjoy a comeback this year after last year’s massive hit. And DTC companies like swimwear brand Andie have been leaning into it lately.
• Throwbacks were big in 2021; Pizza Hut brought back Book It!, Uber Eats revived Wayne’s World, and Domino’s Noid returned. Some marketers think 2021’s rush of nostalgia is tied to the pandemic: Agency executives told Digiday that “showing people a time prior to Covid-19 can remind them of when they were potentially happier and thereby help brands to reconnect with them.”
• ICYMI, we recently wrote about why many marketers are opting to go freelance. For some, back-to-office mandates spurred them to leave their corporate gigs.

+1: Nearly 12% of survey respondents picked “concerns about consumer privacy” as this year’s most overlooked trend.

And what about overhyped? Lots of platforms are investing in social audio. Is it all for naught? A lot of you seem to think so…roughly a third, or 32.2%, of respondents chose social audio as the marketing trend most overhyped in 2021.

• That’s not too surprising considering OG social audio app Clubhouse isn’t exactly, uh, thriving: Comedian and writer Marlena Rodriguez recently told Business Insider her Friday-night “party room” on the app, which once drew more than 1,000 people, now only attracts about 30.
• But, but, but: Twitter and Meta have been building out their own social audio features as of late.

NFTs and the metaverse: 26.5% picked the former as most overhyped, 14.5% said the latter. We’re on the same page here—the marketers we spoke with agreed the metaverse is this year’s most overblown trend, partly because it…isn’t really a thing yet.

Looking ahead: 2021 might be coming to a close, but the trends that defined it likely aren’t going anywhere…at least just yet. So what will the industry still be obsessing over next year?

According to the survey, shoppable ads—18.4% said it will be 2022’s “most important” trend. As we reported earlier this year, if shoppable ads really catch on will come down to consumer behavior. “At the end of the day, people want to watch content. People don’t want to be taken down the rabbit hole of advertising,” a media buyer told Marketing Brew in May.—MS

No, we aren’t starting a newsletter to recap all our fabulous events. But we are going to give you a rundown of what Marketing Brew’s 2021 (virtual) events looked like.

Looking ahead: We’ll keep you posted on our events calendar for next year. Crossing our fingers for some in-person vibes come 2022.

Vistaprint

We kicked off Marketing Brew’s CTA event series with a conversation about our dream wedding Pinterest boards marketing on Pinterest. Being that we’re serious journalists and have certainly never lost hours of our lives pinning away on Pinterest, we brought in a few people who actually have real experience using it as a marketing platform.

Vistaprint’s senior manager of global content marketing, Robin Vancura, and global social media lead, Femke Lenstra, stopped by virtually to chat about how they use Pinterest.

Best quote: “Pinterest is a search engine just like Google, so really make sure your copy on your pins—but also the copy on your boards—is optimized for search.”—Lenstra, on Pinterest being a search engine–social media hybrid

Check My Ads

Morning Brew B2B’s executive editor Josh Sternberg sat down with Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, cofounders of Check My Ads, in a far-away land called June 2021. ICYMI, Check My Ads is a consultancy that helps advertisers better navigate the ad-tech world’s murky waters and bad actors.

Best quote: “We have yet to work with a brand that hasn’t been on some kind of disinformation [site].”—Atkin, on just how common it is for ads to get funneled into the worst places on the internet without marketers knowing

Clinique

What’s a 53-year-old beauty brand to do about the buzziest new social media platform? According to Sameer Agarwal, Clinique North America’s VP of marketing, dive right into the fray. Agarwal stopped by in July and shared lots of info about his brand’s TikTok strategy.

Best quote: ​​“TikTok is all about empowering creators and empowering creativity, and so we saw that brands that did a great job of giving their audiences the opportunity to create against their brand were doing better than the brands that were just pushing out messages.”

We also chatted with marketers from brands including Delta, Instagram, and Mindshare this year. Click here to see what they had to say.—PB

Check out some of our favorite long reads from the year.

• The Anxiety of Influencers
• Why Sesame Street Is More Vital Than Ever
• Social-Media Manager, the Most Millennial Job, Comes of Age
• It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Blue checks: Check out (get it?) this step-by-step guide to getting your brand’s account verified on Instagram.

Sosh needs: Hiring a social media manager can be tough—do you need someone with photography skills? A copywriter? A graphic designer? Paid social expert? The list goes on, but these tips make the hiring process for these multifaceted roles a little bit easier.

NFTs: Looking for a primer? This infographic can help.

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You can tell this champagne ad is from 1967 rather than 2021 for many reasons, but mostly because the fine print implies young people could do things like buy a home or have a baby. Sincerely, a few millennials who plan to clink far cheaper champagne than this from their rented apartments this New Year’s Eve.

Catch up on a few of our favorite Marketing Brew stories from this year.

• Meet the company that turns shopping carts into ad inventory
• Do marketing roles need to require college degrees?
• Marketers are struggling with the ethics of using dead celebrity pitchmen