Happy Sunday, Everyone!
2025 is officially in full swing: we’re already having Spring/Summer planning meetings with clients (yes, the groundwork for those Easter, Spring Break & Memorial Day campaigns is laid in snowy, rainy, cold-as-Cruella DeVille’s heart January), a new administration officially takes power Monday (with some massive plans for both tech & the broader economy), and TikTok may (or may not) live to see either of those two things happen (though Pres-Elect Trump has recently signaled he may grant TikTok the legally-permitted 90-day extension to finalize a qualified divestiture). Tack on top a more fractured, de-centralized media environment than at any point in history and the emergence of AI as a true enabling layer (and maybe more), and all of the ingredients necessary for tectonic shifts are ready to rumble.
Put simply: we are living in interesting times.
And with interesting times comes massive challenges - and massive opportunities - for marketers (and everyone else). Ironically, seizing those opportunities is going to require marketers to do something they’ve long been loath to do: go back to the classics.
Even more specifically, there are 5 things that will lead to successful outcomes in 2025 (and likely beyond):
Thing #1: Re-Think Audience Research
One of the most startling trends of 2024 was the wholesale shattering of the media and information ecosystem. What little trust was left in legacy media evaporated like water in the Sahara, TV viewership plummeted and a remarkable number of new media outlets emerged, from podcasts to newsletters to YouTube channels (and more). TikTok, YouTube and Meta have emerged as viable information - not just entertainment - channels.
Despite those massive shifts, most brands still refuse to update their audience research or conduct additional audience insights work.
The simple reality is that all of us are getting information in different ways today than we were a year or two years or five years ago. We have different expectations. We have different content preferences (audio, visual, video, written, etc.). We are influenced by a different network of people, sources and channels.
Audience research isn’t glamorous. It isn’t as sexy as an influencer campaign, or as exciting or launching a new channel, or as avant guard as rolling out a new app or tool or piece of tech. It’s - to be quite honest - boring. But unlike most marketers (and investors), I like boring – largely because most other people don’t.
If you haven’t already, subscribe to SparkToro. Pull your brand’s audience. Pull your competitor’s audience. Benchmark them. Then keep pulling them every month (or at least every quarter). What you’re looking for are changes + trends – do you see larger percentages of the audience on podcasts? Are progressively more of your customers/leads on YouTube? Do you notice a few new influencers appearing across the social sections? Are different websites appearing in the trusted sites or hidden gems?
Those nuggets of insight are precious, because they are the canary in the coal mine. They’ll tell you where your audience is going long before it’ll emerge in post-purchase (or post-lead) surveys – which means you’ll be able to adapt your media plans and marketing strategies weeks, months, maybe even quarters before your competition.
If you can supplement this third-party audience research (i.e. Sparktoro clickstream data) with first-party data (surveys, focus groups, customer interviews), you’ll be able to get from data point to insight even faster. The discipline to proactively and continuously engage in audience research, despite the siren song of other, sexier things is a competitive advantage. If you’re curious about other ways to leverage audience research, check out this issue.
If you want to turbo-charge this (or make it more appealing to your AI-hungry boss), consider this: take your most valuable 0P/1P data source (i.e. sales team notes, or customer service tickets, or whatever), export it into a Google Sheet, then ask Gemini (2.0 is staggeringly good) or GPT 4o to analyze it for you and surface commonalities, trends or other things worth noting, along with relevant statistics about those trends/commonalities and/or outliers.
It’s old school. It’s boring. But the brands that grow big start with strong foundations.
Thing #2: The Value of Platform Expertise
It’s no secret that every ad platform on the planet is leaning into machine learning + automation – whether it’s Google or Meta or Walmart or Amazon or Reddit or even Glassdoor (yes, they have an ad platform - it’s about as good as you’d expect) – and encouraging advertisers to just trust platforms with increasingly-more-black-box products.
The clearest example of this is Google, which is simultaneously pushing:
- Broad Match everything (including a relatively new “Broad Match Only” campaign setting)
- “Upgrading” all campaigns - including high-performing search campaigns - to Performance Max
- Auto-Applied Recommendations
- Gemini Campaign Setup (basically an LLM that creates ads and picks KWs)
- Negative KW Removal (a new GitHub tool)
Why? Because each of these things is designed to push more advertisers into more auctions, increasing CPCs and converting surplus advertiser value into captured Google value.
I wrote years ago that Google’s goal was to eliminate advertiser surplus, and they’ve finally cracked the code on how to do it. The machinations behind this are complicated, but the gist is this: each of these five things removes the control levers that advertisers typically use to direct spend, eliminate waste and/or leverage their own (non-Google) data.
The fact that Performance Max comes with the side benefit of less search query transparency AND cannibalizes search campaign impressions even when search campaign performance, as measured by CTR, CVR, Conversion Value, Cost/Conversion and Conversion Value/Cost (ROAS) is a pretty clear indicator Google knows what it’s doing. And if you don’t believe me, check out this study from Adalysis across thousands of accounts and billions in spend.
So, where’s this going? What do the smart brands do? They hire true experts.
If everyone else is leaning into automation and letting platforms run progressively more of their ad budgets with little-to-no oversight, the smart brands are going to go the other way: old-school media management.
Over the last 6 months, I’ve reviewed about two dozen ad accounts, with spends ranging from mid-five-figures to mid-seven-figures. Without fail, the ones that were over-indexing into automation without oversight were the ones with tanking efficiency, fewer results and higher spends. I’m not anti-automation. I love automation. But I stand squarely behind the assertion that smart people + smart machines will always trump smart machines alone.
Yes, management looks different today than it did before – it’s much more “eyes on, hands off” on a daily basis, with more batched changes, more machine-learning friendly account structures and more rule-and-data-based architectures. But the simple fact is that smart management is a bigger point of leverage today than it was five years ago.
My other (reasonably hot) take on this: the value of true paid search / paid social / paid media experts will skyrocket over the next 3-5 years. The chasm that emerges between the people who know these platforms inside and out, and the people who only think they do will be the size of the grand canyon by 2030 (if not sooner).
Thing #3: The New Mad Men Era?
Speaking of automation and AI – there’s a lot of noise about how AI will forever change the content game. And underlying that noise is a lot of truth: we’re constantly experimenting with various AI tools for everything from cutting video to generating outlines to conducting research.
But in the midst of doing that, one thing has become clear: AI content lacks “it.”
LLMs (simplifying greatly) are pattern-recognition machines – they find patterns across trillions of data points, then use those patterns to “create” new content or execute tasks or do whatever. The end result is content that tends to be in the meaty part of the bell curve (if you were to plot the overall quality + uniqueness of content on the x-axis, and the number of pieces of content with that quality/uniqueness score on the y-axis).
The fact that LLMs are creating that caliber of content after a few short years is wildly impressive – and that’s why more and more brands are flocking to AI tools to support their content creation needs.
The most likely outcome? A whole lot of brands creating a whole lot of content that sounds a whole lot like everyone else. A sea of AI-powered sameness. And if there’s one recurring thing throughout the (now) 99 issues of this newsletter, it’s my belief that any time I see a trend going hard in one direction, I recommend brands go the other way.
In this case, that “other way” is a very specific thing: we’re going back to the “Mad Men” days. I think exceptional writers and creative directors are going to become some of the most valuable people in marketing departments. The other creative skills - editing, cropping, photoshop, etc. – can (and will) be commoditized. But genuine creative brilliance is under-valued.
The brands that win will be the ones that either (a) do things differently OR (b) are the fastest to identify (and copy) the brands who do things differently. And while many of us like to think we’re pretty smart and clever when it comes to picking winners, it sure is easier to just do things differently.
Creativity isn’t dead. It just looks different. NOTE: I’m not saying don’t use AI. I’m saying hire a brilliant, creative person (or a few of them) to work with AI.
Thing #4: Classic Media Might Just Make A Comeback
I’m well aware of the irony of writing this in a newsletter titled the “Digital Download”, but here we are: I think classic media is going to have a mini-renaissance over the next few years. This won’t be driven by nostalgia or traditional media finally removing its collective head from the sand, but rather from simple economics: demand for classic media is at an all-time low.
Some of that is a product of trust in legacy media being at an all-time low. The vast majority of that, however, is a direct result of a tsunami of ad dollars flooding into digital platforms (which, by and large, followed a similarly-sized tsunami of eyeballs/attention). It’s possible - I’d argue probable - that this proverbial tsunami was a bit too large.
In many markets, you can find 0:30 TV spots with lower CPMs than Meta ads. Radio spots are less expensive - on a CPM basis - than Spotify Ads. Direct mail generates lower CPLs than Google Ads.
Each one of these is an opportunity for savvy marketers.
Fundamentally, the job of every marketer is to allocate the next dollar as efficiently as possible. And for a long time, that next dollar was best allocated to a digital channel - Google, YouTube, Meta, Amazon, whatever. That may still be the case for many brands.
But it’s difficult to ignore the fact that - due to supply and demand - classic media is quickly becoming far more economically competitive than it once was. I’m not saying scrap digital and go full analog, but I am saying that if digital is your main course, classic media might make a wonderful appetizer or dessert.
Do the math. You might just be surprised.
Thing #5: Digital Marketers Discover That Old Marketing Principles Still Matter
Over the last 2-3 years, we’ve been fortunate to have to do a lot of hiring (growth is always a welcome challenge - and far preferable to the alternative). I’ve recently spent some time going through my notes from many of those interviews – what questions we asked, what issues/challenges/reasons for passing on candidates I noted, etc. – and one thing stuck out to me: most digital marketers have lost the plot.
That may sound crazy, but it’s true. Digital marketers have grown up in - and grown accustomed to - in-platform optimization with granular, binary data (conversion/no conversion) that they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. There’s too much marketing to keywords and audiences and segments and data points, and too little recognition that behind each search or profile or set of characteristics, there’s a real person with a real need/challenge/pain point seeking a solution.
In short: too many digital marketers have forgotten that they’re marketers first.
Right Person - Right Time - Right Message. That’s the holy grail of marketing. And it’s never been closer to being possible at scale than it is now. But to effectively do that, we need to go back to basics. We need to go back to studying human behavior and understanding how to market to actual people (not just keywords or audiences or platforms).
The marketers that win in 2025 will be the ones who understand human psychology and behavioral economics; the ones who can see beyond the query and help the person find what they need; the ones who can create emotional connections between a brand and a person strong enough to drive preference in the marketplace (aka build a legitimate brand).
I still believe that the biggest winners will be the ones who can understand the people behind a search or in an audience, then craft an offer, angle and message that moves them to act. That may sound old-school, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. And with an entire generation of marketers growing up in a digital-everything world, that skillset isn’t as common as it once was. I’ve reviewed thousands of resumes and talked to hundreds of candidates - and this - the ability to do marketing (writ large) is the biggest gap.
If you have people who can do it, keep them. If you don’t, find them. They’re only going to get more valuable (and more expensive). The value of genuine, no-doubt-about-it expertise is only going to increase, because the leverage that AI + automation provide to those experts will only increase.
To borrow a phrase from the great Archimedes, “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” Well, AI is a lever long enough. You just need the marketing genius and a place for him/her to stand.
There’s no doubt that there will be tectonic shifts in the days, weeks and months to come – but I’m equally confident that when those earthquakes subside (and they will) that we’ll be in a new golden age of marketing + advertising. But to fully capitalize on that bright future, I think we need to look to the past, pull some of the classics off the shelf, and press play.
Until next week,
Sam
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