Happy Sunday, Everyone!
It’s difficult to believe that we’re officially closer to 2025 than we are to 2023, but here we are. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to speak at length with a handful of long-time readers of the newsletter - all of whom are in C-suite positions, up to their eyeballs in 2025 planning, and asking the same question: how should we be thinking about our budgets + investments going into next year?
This is made all the more interesting because these individuals are in disparate industries, with wildly different target audiences (B2B, B2C, B2B2C, B2G), at different scales (from $2M to $50M/yr), trying to do different things with paid media (sell stuff, generate leads, etc.). Yet every single one is laser-focused on this topic.
After a quite a bit of thinking, I’ve honed in on four core capabilities I think every brand - regardless of size, industry, audience or objective - needs to develop in order to be successful moving forward:
1. Creative Velocity + Insight
As I’ve written about on multiple occasions, creative is a power law game – the brands that are the most successful over the long run are the ones with the capability to produce massive volumes of creative at progressively lower marginal costs.
From an ecosystem perspective, the marginal cost of new creative will continue to fall, and will slowly, but inexorably, approach $0.
But near-free creative is only useful IF an advertiser (or agency) has two capabilities in place:
- An ability to connect audience, trend + performance insights to inform creative production. Put another way: audience understanding + competitive research become progressively more important as the cost of creative falls.
- A system to ensure that the creative produced is (roughly) aligned with your brand and does not radically diverge from the image/aesthetic your core audience expects.
These two functions - audience insight / understanding and QA system - serve to de-risk
creative mass production by ensuring that each offer/angle/creative produced leverages the data you already have (audience, historical performance), alongside the positioning you want to maintain (standards).
Producing 10,000 low-quality, AI-driven creatives is not sufficient to win long-term; you must fuse the brawn (raw creative output) with the brains (data + insight) in order to truly capitalize on the falling cost of creative production.
2. Influencer Development
I fully expect more brands will either hire or cultivate in-house influencers. This trend is readily observable across dozens of high-performing advertising/marketing/SEO agencies, who have leaned into using their home-grown “influencer” founders as primary business development channels.
But this isn’t an inside-baseball phenomenon. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Taylor Swift, who effectively took a wrecking ball to the traditional music industry structure, thanks in large part to the communal loyalty of “Swifties.” The end result: a multi-billion dollar music empire, a record-shattering tour (The Eras tour has shattered all previous tour records, with another six months to go); a record-shattering film (the Era Tour movie is the #1 grossing concert film of all time at $300M+, and that’s only going to go up with the re-release), over $350M in merchandise + album sales, and more.
Given the rising import of authenticity, I don’t think we are far from a world where authentic, personal brands are more important than corporate/organizational brands. That may sound far-fetched, but I think the inverse is true: that may not be far enough. It isn’t difficult to see a world where employee-influencers are hired not for their role-specific skills, but rather for their perspective, creative style, and following. This is a radical departure from the status quo, where reputation/contact-based hiring was relegated to elite, highly personal industries (law, banking, finance, consulting, accounting, medicine, academia, real estate), along with specific, high-level roles in other industries (celebrity hires).
All this adds up to a tectonic shift in how brands approach marketing - with a new emphasis on “influencer building” vs. brand building. There are a few reasons for this, but I want to highlight the major ones:
Ease: it’s a lot easier to build a community around a person than it is to build one around a product or a brand (if you don’t believe me, look at the billions brands have spent on “community building” and “organic social” - then look at their results from those investments). There’s a reason Elon Musk chose to build his own brand first, then intertwine it to his ventures.
Overcome Divisions: Brands can’t be everything to everyone. With division (not just political, but ideological, religious, economic, etc.) on the rise; one could argue that these last few years have been among the most divisive and contentious in the modern era. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, division adds complexity to brand marketing.
Lead From The Front: From agencies building virtual influencers + selling posts to clients, to the rise of the CEO/Influencer (a model pioneered by Mark Cuban, but now widely embraced by rising commerce stars like Sean Frank of Ridge and Matthew Bertulli of Pella Case + Lomi), it is apparent that many data-informed, forward-thinking brands see the value of building personal brands alongside their corporate brands. Again, this isn’t isolated to a single vertical or niche – we’re seeing it everywhere from agencies (Taylor Holiday of Common Thread Collective + Andrew Foxwell of Foxwell Digital are great examples), to tech/SaaS, to eCommerce (the aforementioned Sean Frank + Matt Bertulli, among many others).
Candidly, this makes a lot of rational sense: people don’t join brands; people join people. Leading from the front with actual people will always be a viable strategy in any relationship or community-oriented business; we just now have the tools to scale that one-to-one relationship building.
On the flip side, brands will need to shift their perspective + reimagine their marketing infrastructure, from a machine ruthlessly optimized to promote the brand itself, to a support network for in-house and out-sourced creators. The brands that accept this new reality and begin to build the infrastructure necessary to succeed will win tomorrow. Those that cling to the past will be left in the past. It’s really, truly that simple.
What can you do: There’s a fundamentally different creative muscle that brands need to build to thrive in this “new” paradigm. At the most basic level, I think this is a shift from “promoting the brand” to “building influence” - though the forms that it takes will vary and evolve.
And while the notion of “influencer” is traditionally associated with D2C companies, this isn’t limited to eCommerce. This is an ecosystem-wide thing:
- Agencies are rapidly building out their in-house “talent development” capacities. It may have started with CEOs + Leadership (Taylor Holiday from Common Thread Co is a great example), but it has not stopped there. Agencies like Tinuiti have aggressively hired “influential” people in a variety of spaces to build out their teams, while increasing investment in talent development + thought leadership positioning.
- Sports teams are hiring (and developing) influencers - a fantastic example (but hardly the only one) is Andrea Helfrich, who started as an on-camera reporter and in-arena host for the Philadelphia Flyers, but has leveraged her online influence to build an agency, host major music festivals, consult on community building for niche brands, and serve as an influencer across the beauty, fashion, interior design and music spaces. This has activated new audiences for the Flyers, while enabling Helfrich to build her personal brand using the resources available to major sports franchise.
- Traditional media (particularly in politics) has embraced the idea of the reporter/influencer, to the point where most standard reporter contracts expressly permit book deals + other paid engagements. In fact, it barely registers on the “outrage-o-meter” when reporters deliberately omit pertinent facts from their reporting in order to save juicy bits for their forthcoming books.
- Law & Accounting firms are featuring their professionals more than ever before – and we’re starting to see the emergence of companies founded on the niche celebrity of an online account, like the Investments Lawyer leveraging his Twitter following to start a niche firm.
- Tech companies are touting their experts in multiple different thought leadership capacities (to give props to Rand, he was among the first CEOs to truly embrace this type of thought leadership with the Whiteboard Fridays series) - whether that’s putting them out on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, or allowing their R&D teams to publish their research publicly, or something else entirely.
Let’s go one step further: this isn’t just about business development; it’s about talent attraction. Brands that are appealing to Gen Z / Gen A will be the ones that have both the track record and the infrastructure to incubate + develop influencers. We’re going to see this as a new “perk” or “fringe benefit” in the not-too-distant future.
If you want to be ahead of the curve, start investing in and developing these capabilities today.
3. Data Connectivity
This isn’t just about connecting ad accounts to business data sources (CRM, CDP, etc) - that will be table stakes by 2025. Google, Meta & Microsoft (among others) have made it so wonderfully easy to connect your data platforms to their ad platforms that I’m shocked so many brands (~80%, based on Optmyzr’s data) have failed to do so. Note: if this is you, stop reading this and go fix your data connectivity.
Rather, this is about connecting data from ad accounts to broader business contexts, then using it to inform everything from R&D to logistics/operations to your roadmap.The businesses that win will be the ones who can connect the data generated via their marketing efforts to their business systems in a scalable manner – such that insights from the ad accounts + consumer feedback are integrated into go-forward strategies.
Both Shein and Temu have done this quite well (and XCEL brands before them) – emerging trends on social media are used to predict “breakout” products, which then informs production strategy (sure, it helps that neither Shein nor Temu believe in critical concepts like intellectual property or trademark/copyright, but let’s not let those details get in the way of my broader point).
While the immediate applications of this are in eCommerce and tech, it isn’t difficult to see the applicability to everything from real estate to home services to travel/tourism to education. Put simply: virtually every business will need this capability in relatively short order.
As the cost of predictive modeling continues to fall (it’s now ~$10,000 to $25,000 to spin up a very good predictive model + build the requisite data pipelines), we’re going to see more brands get on board with this strategy – after all, why expend the resources to be better when it’s possible to just be first?
4. Platform Understanding
Finally, there’s the final element of this: platform understanding. It’s no secret that every major ad platform has gone to excessive lengths to “automate” functionalities – whether it’s Google with auto-apply recommendations, or Meta with Advantage+ campaigns, or Microsoft with their “Google Ads / Meta Ads import.” We’re going to see a new wave of automation in the coming year, likely including the following:
- Removal of Keywords: I’m honestly shocked keywords have lasted as long as they have, but Google’s sending exceedingly clear signals that Search Themes are the new future, and “exclusion lists” are how they want to avoid non-relevant traffic. How quickly they roll this out will likely depend on the broader economic realities, the outcomes of several pending legal cases, and Google’s perception of their standing in the marketplace (if they’re feeling weak or that their dominant position is being challenged, they’ll likely hold off).
- Full Transition to Machine-Learning Powered Audiences: As with Google, Meta is sending clear signals that they want to move all advertisers into their “Advantage+” suite of products. While some traditional advertisers will be resistant, the reality is that Meta remains one of the most effective economic engines on the planet, and Zuckerberg has no qualms about the Pirates Code (Fall behind, get left behind).
- Automated Setup + Management: Both Google + Meta, along with Microsoft, have rolled this out to varying degrees, but we’re likely to see even more of it in the near future. More point-and-track conversions setup, more LLM-driven campaign creation, more “just give us
a credit card your bank information and we’ll handle it”.
- Done-For-You Creative: Again, we’ve seen this on both Google + Meta – and to me, this is clear validation that my first point from above (creative velocity) is spot-on: platforms want more creative, and if they don’t believe you can provide it, they’re developing systems to make it for themselves using your assets.
- Data Ingestion: Every platform is hell-bent on getting their hands on every piece of data they can - from GAds rolling out 500+ CRM integrations, to Meta developing both a Google Analytics 4 and a third party attribution integration tool. Simple reality: ad platforms want more data, and they want to use it to automate more things.
So what does all of this mean? What should you do?
From a platform’s perspective: “Ditch the agency/consultant and just trust us.”
In reality: all automation does is shift the optimization up a level - from pulling levers in the platform, to ensuring the right data is available to the platform to make good decisions, and in assessing the incremental, broader impact of each platform on the business.
The fact that more of the process is automated makes genuine experts more, not less, valuable – because the stakes of each change grow larger. The brands that win will be the ones that have true, world-class experts (whether agency, in-house or consultant) working alongside them.
Put another way: platform operations is too critical a function to leave to non-transparent platforms or just-out-of-college employees – and when you consider that the cost of getting a legitimate expert ($5,000 to $10,000 per month) is nearly equivalent to the cost of hiring a fast food worker (including taxes, fringe + benefits) in CA, the decision makes itself. Every executive I’ve spoken with is planning to increase - not decrease - their investment in consultants + agencies for this reason.
As you think about your own 2025 planning, I hope this is helpful. As always, if there’s a topic you’d like to see in this newsletter, just reply and let me know.
Enjoy that summer sun!
Cheers,
Sam
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