Happy Sunday, Everyone!
With the holidays rapidly approaching (and the last days of the holiday shopping season upon us) and 2025 firmly in the 15-day forecast, I wanted to take a step back from the tactical, day-to-day stuff and share, big-picture, where I think marketing is going in 2025.
With that, I’ve put together 25 predictions, which will be shared in 2 issues – the first 14 below, and the final 11 (with a bonus one) next week.
Let’s get to it (and PS, I’ve been re-watching Star Wars - so I decided to incorporate that into each of the themes):
Theme #1: A New Hope: Marketing & Finance Make Friends
1. There Will Be a Material Shift From Talking About “ROI” to Actually Computing It.
The perfect storm of increasing demands for financial accountability for marketing, the prevalence of LLMs/AI enabling lower-cost ROI calculations, and the digitalization of everything results in marketing & finance teams joining forces. D2C tends to be the “tip of the spear” in terms of marketing evolution, and this is already happening there. It’s going to spill over into other industries, and once it does, it will go from “pipedream” to “table stakes” in short order.
2. Brands Get Serious About Responsible Growth
The Fed is likely to cut rates 1-3 times in 2025 (they’re signaling 2, but who knows) – which means tighter-than-usual fiscal conditions for longer. The practical impact of that is higher cost of capital for brands, which means more stringent parameters for acceptable CAC, shorter payback periods, and increasing focus on channels that produce higher-value customers. The brands that win will be the ones that are able to grow responsibly (read: close to break-even at first sale/customer engagement).
3. Forecasting & Budget Planning Go Mainstream
2025 will be the year that finance teams start taking marketing forecasts seriously - which means more marketing teams will be held accountable to what’s included in those forecasts. The combination of AI & analytics will enable both robust forecasting of marketing initiatives and near-real-time re-allocation of funds in cases where investments are not producing acceptable returns.
4. Marketing Controls More of the Organizational Calendar & Strategy
For too long, the tail (operations, product, etc.) has been wagging the dog (marketing). That’s going to change in 2025. A natural outcome of marketing & finance (finally) becoming friends is that marketing teams will be far more involved in organizational planning and go-to-market. One upshot of this is that brands will realize that moments (marketing) are less malleable than organizational milestones (i.e. a promo period or a product launch announcement) – resulting in more organizations pivoting their milestones to align with marketing moments (vs. forcing marketing to make their moments happen).
Theme #2: AI & Automation: The Revenge of Curation
5. The AI-ification of Content & Creative Creates an Opportunity for Curators
As AI content gets both better and more pervasive, users craving authenticity and real connection will flock to nano and micro influencers publishing niche, highly relevant and tightly curated content.
6. Personal Brands Take Center Stage
One of the highest return investments brands can make in 2025 (and beyond) is investing in the capabilities to build personal brands. With consumer trust in brands crashing, the ability of brands alone to create + communicate meaningful points of difference is waning. The solution? Personal brands. This is already happening across the DTC space with celebrity or influencer-led brands; it’s going to spill over into more traditional consumer and B2B sectors. I fully expect this to become a “hiring point” for organizations and agencies alike: the most talented young workers (like NCAA athletes) will want to know that the company they are joining has the capability and capacity to elevate both their career AND their personal brand.
7. Audience Research Looks Different & Gets a Whole Lot More Important
Done well, audience research is a game-changer for brands. It’s that simple. Unfortunately for most marketers/brands, we (collectively) outsourced our audience research to Google and Meta via automated bidding/targeting for much of the last decade – and, like any muscle, it atrophies without use. The same thing has happened here. Most brands have no idea what good audience research looks like, and they have even less of an idea how to do it. But with increasing privacy restrictions, increasingly fractured media landscapes and higher-than-ever demands on marketing, having a robust, data-informed near-real-time understanding of your audience will be a competitive advantage.
8. There’s Going To Be Serious AI + UGC Legal Battles
2024 brought thousands of legal cases around “truth in advertising” topics – ranging from what constitutes a sale to the proper structure for promotional claims to (more recently) if organizations can be held responsible for gambling additions. I expect we’re going to see cases related to:
- UGC disclosure standards - my best guess is that more than half of all UGC isn’t actually UGC at all; it’s brand-generated content parroted by people paid to say it. That’s not sustainable.
- AI disclosures become a thing - there will be some attempts (likely starting in Europe) to force companies to disclose what content (if any) is made using AI. How this will actually be implemented and enforced is anyone’s guess, but it’s coming.
- Truth in Advertising Lawsuits Accelerate - one piece of common ground between the outgoing US administration (Biden) and incoming (Trump) is a populist streak, and corporations are a convenient (and hated) target.
The fact that most of us don’t know who was paid by whom to produce the content we are served on our devices 7+ hours a day doesn’t bode well for the status quo. Something’s got to give, and it won’t be our internet addictions. That leaves disclosures, disclaimers and a lot of depositions.
Theme #3: The Brand Strikes Back
9. Brand Marketing Makes A Comeback
For much of the last twenty-five years, success in “performance” marketing was largely viewed as a case against brand marketing: if you can allocate dollars to specific channels/tactics with known returns, why spend it speculatively on brand ads?
That calculus is shifting. Success in performance channels today is a downstream effect of successful brand marketing. And as performance + digital have hoovered up the ad budgets from many other “traditional” channels, the costs of advertising in mediums like Out of Home, TV, Radio, Podcasts, Billboards, and direct mail have plummeted – to the point where brand marketing makes sense on a risk-adjusted basis. 2025 will be the year that more brands realize that success in mediums like search and social is a result of successful marketing in non-search/non-performance spaces.
10. Creative Velocity Becomes Destiny
The single-biggest constraint on most ad accounts (and therefore, most brands) is the volume, velocity and variety of creative. I wrote about this here and here – but the tl;dr is this: the brands that win will be the ones that consistently produce a high volume of diverse ads.
Why?
Because in the right person - right time - right message framework, the weakest link is the message. Google, Meta, YouTube & TikTok have solved for the right person and right time; what they’re missing is the right message. Ad platforms can find your highest-potential prospects with staggering levels of accuracy; the reason they don’t convert into customers isn’t because they were the wrong people; it’s because your creative (read: offer, message, visuals, ad copy, etc.) wasn’t good enough or relevant enough to them. The solution is to give the platforms a critical mass of creatives, such that Meta (or Google, or YouTube, or TikTok) can match each person to a creative in your account and solve the third part of the equation for you.
11. Email & SMS Go From Afterthought to the Main Attraction
As advertising costs (particularly digital advertising costs) continue to rise, more brands will turn to their existing customer base as a primary growth driver. Couple that with the declining cost of customization (thanks to AI) and the increasing acceptance of SMS as a marketing tactic, and you have a recipe for email + SMS to become the proverbial Belle of the 2025 Marketing Ball.
The hidden advantage?
SMS & Email are owned relationships – which means not only can brands communicate using them whenever they want, but these channels aren’t constrained by character counts or content limits. Brands can put the story they want to tell directly into the inboxes and messaging apps of the people who are most likely to read it.
12. Founders & Execs Re-Embrace Their Roles As Spokespeople
There’s a reason some of the most successful creatives across TV, Meta, YouTube & Tiktok all feature founders/executives: it works. And it works because going direct works. The founders/executives who have embraced the reality that communication is their job AND adapted their communications to the behavior of their audience are reaping the rewards.
The simple reality is that no paid spokesperson, no actor, no marketer can simulate the passion, conviction, vision and expertise that a founder or executive brings to the table. That unique blend is worth more than charisma, charm or polish because it’s authentic, and that authenticity cuts through the seemingly endless sea of sameness.
People join people & perception drives reality.
The founders/executives who take their responsibility to communicate seriously will win.
Theme #4: The Return of PR
13. PR Is Making a Comeback; It Just Looks Different.
Old-school, back-room PR is (mercifully) dead - but the concept of PR is alive and well.
In a world where upwards of 20% (if not far more) of content created - from school assignments to resumes (yes, we’ve gotten AI-generated cover letters and resumes) - is AI-generated, a progressively larger share of the population is looking for overt symbols of credibility and authentic-ness.
Is PR the whole strategy? Not even close. But for a brand that owns and controls its story, having parts of that story validated by third-parties trusted by that brand’s audience is increasingly valuable.
To use a sports analogy, traditional media has gone from Michael Jordan - a superstar capable of elevating just about anyone to an NBA champion to Robert Horry - a fantastic role player. If you’re counting on traditional media to carry your brand, you’re going to be severely disappointed; but if you instead ask it to contribute a few key shots in a few key moments, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
14. New Media Rises
There is zero doubt in my mind that new media is here to stay – and the brands that embrace it will reap the rewards of lower customer acquisition costs, higher referral rates and higher lifetime values.
New Media is a broad category, but includes everything from podcasts and newsletters to niche communities and creator channels (i.e. YouTube, X). All of these have a few key things in common: (1) there’s a genuine sense of connection between the audience and the media personality (or personalities); (2) new media is infinitely more flexible in monetization than traditional media – from sponsorship deals to affiliate revenue to acquisitions, the ways that brands + new media can collaborate are near-endless; (3) that same flexibility applies editorially: new media isn’t constrained by column inches or spot counts; this creates the opportunity for real, authentic storytelling (see above) and (4) new media isn’t hunting for Pulitzers or pulling out the “gotcha” questions or spinning a story, because none of those things are in their interest (not only does it hurt future guest prospects, but it also raises questions about the judgment of the media personality).
All of these factors make new media wildly appealing to savvy brands + marketers because - for all the hype (i.e., 2024 has been dubbed the “podcast election”) and all the screen time (Joe Rogan gets more views than MSNBC, Fox News and CNN, combined) - these channels are still staggeringly under-monetized.
Consider the fact that I can be the exclusive sponsor of Eli Weiss’ newsletter (it’s truly excellent, you should subscribe) for $4,350 on MediaSpace. The quick-and-dirty math is this: his list is ~15,000 people (mostly eComm operators and founders, predominantly on Shopify) with an open rate of ~46%. That means any given sponsorship will reach about 7,000 people, the overwhelming majority of whom are in my target audience. That’s about $1.58 per person – which is less than it would cost me to print and mail them a short note (assuming I had their addresses, which I don’t), without the benefit of it coming in an email written by someone they already know and trust. The same math holds true across thousands of new media platforms: they are underpriced relative to both their audience size and influence.
The problem?
Most brands don’t know which ones are legitimately influential, which ones are fads and which ones are fake. The answer to that challenge is #7 above: do more audience research.
That’s all for this week! Next week, I’ll drop the remaining 11 predictions.
I hope you have a wonderful, relaxing holiday!
Until next week,
Cheers,
Sam
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