January is over and so is the season of media, marketing, and technology predictions - a perfect time to reflect and challenge opinions and beliefs. The trends highlighted below are extracts from a presentation at Warwick Business School on the 27th of January 2025.
Trend 1: Long-term Thinking - halfway through the 2020s
Some of the best insights are the ones that build on prior years. I still find myself referring back to econsultancy-ashley friedlein digital trends 2020-to-2030 for some smart long-term thinking. Much of the advice is still relevant today and in many ways predicted the AI wave. Econsultancy highlighted 5 trends throughout the 2020s:
- In search of trust
- Humane Tech
- Personalisation 2.0
- Everything-as-a-service
- Ecommerce and the environment
For each of the above, there are some very clear implications and considerations for the marketing industry to grapple with.
- Trust in media is at an all-time low, In January, Meta stopped their fact-checking program. Will 2025 see a return of advertisers to regulated and recognised publishers and channels?
- The focus on Humane Tech is ensuring that digital experiences are designed for real people, whether that be accessible websites that work well on mobile or content created for humans rather than search engines. Google’s helpful content updates came into effect circa 2022 with this in mind.
- Personalisation 2.0 foresaw the deprecation of third-party cookies on Chrome, the rise of Data Clean Rooms, and the commercialisation of First-party Data. More on this later.
- Everything-as-a-service is linked to the most impactful marketing theory of all time (a personal opinion) The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing which effectively licensed the productisation of services in areas not previously considered, such as Volvo subscriptions and many Saas modeling.
- E-commerce and the environment is an incredibly important subject. Brands such as Vodafone have taken the lead, however, with the estimated energy required for a Chat GPT search x7 the energy of a Google search, the usage of AI needs to be considered.
Trend 2: Media & Marketing investment will improve in 2026
The IPA Bellwether report highlights the highest degree of pessimism amongst Marketers since Q4 2022. Much of the malaise is linked to The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising quarterly report, indicating investment into media and marketing. There are quarter-on-quarter investment increases for PR and events and digital marketing continues to grow. However, the decline in investment in main media (Video, publishing, and OOH) is a departure from the previous quarters and a continued long-term trend in a decline in brand-building media spending vs short-term sales activation and a prediction that 2025 for many media outlets will be lower growth.
Trend 3: The Rise of Data Clean Rooms
A data clean room is a secure environment that allows multiple parties to share and analyze sensitive data without compromising privacy. The two big players are InfoSum and LiveRamp.
They are already embedded into many publisher deals and there are 4 key use cases: for brands to utilise:
- Data enrichment of existing 1PD (first-party data) with established insight providers such as Kantar, Experian & YouGov.
- Trade Partnerships, including Retail media networks and the ability to forecast demand.
- Sponsorship Partnerships & Promotions for brand-on-brand tie-ups.
- Media delivery partners – exclusive partnerships with Meta, Google, ITV, and Channel 4.
Trend 4: Retail Media Networks (RMNs) and 1PD Commercialisation
RMNs: digital advertising platforms that allow retailers to sell ad space to third-party brands, using Data Clean Room technology to commercialise First-party-data (1PD) as a revenue stream.
Crtiteo was one of the first tech platforms to dynamically insert digital adverts onto partner sites. Amazon, which is currently estimated to be 70% of the RMN market is able to demonstrate ROI to brands selling on Amazon Marketplace by using the many platforms under the Amazon umbrella (Prime, IMBD, Wall St Journal, Audible). The likes of Nectar 360 provide Sainsbury’s partners the ability to measure the full customer journey on the website and in-store, through the 18m Nectar card holders. Essentially, RMN allows for omnichannel marketing and allows marketers to activate the 4Ps of marketing.
Trend 5: Composability in Martech (Marketing Technology)
The Martech Landscape grew 28% YoY to 14,106 Products, according to Chief Martec. The continued growth is down to AI, new smaller entrants, and a move away from a belief that a smaller martech stack was the goal. There is a competitive advantage in having a border teach stack that enables integration, as there is no ‘one’ Martech provider that does it all. Composability is the key for a martech stack and whilst the decision-making process will now be harder and longer (it will need to involve the CMO, Enterprise IT Leads, Finance, and Customer Experience teams).
As the diagram below shows, there is much more growth for composable marketing technology and budgets.
Trend 6: Social Media - A Dividing Line in 2025?
Will the lack of trust push investment towards regulated main media channels and will some brands come off social media platforms?
Trend 7: The Verticalisation of Marketing and T-Shaped Marketing Strategies
Having recently conducted extensive benchmarking in email and social channels for our clients, we see a huge variance in engagement metrics across categories and industries., which effectively ensures the use of anything other than specific category insight is a distraction, or worse, false hope.
We also see verticalsiation coming into Retail Media Networks, as Same Knights at SMG highlights; “Last year saw clear signs that RMNs are now aware that they are, or need to, become distinct brands. Good early examples are Boots Media Group's positioning around personal care and Co-op Media Network developing evidence-based stories to promote the distinct power of media in a convenience context.”
Tools such as Hubspot’s AI Grader evaluate how ‘AI search engines are describing your brand’ as users search LLMs (Large Langaueg Models) for answers to their queries and LLMs & Generative AI become a source of truth for these users.
As TikTok continues to grow its share of search in terms of volume it’s also increasing the relevance of searches for financial advice, building on holiday destinations, cosmetic and wider nutrition products - as the go-to search engine for Gen Z.
In summary, brands, marketers, and their agency partners need to move From:Industry level best practice approaches comparing against aspirational competitors using bought measurement measuring ROI, to Category & service specific insights, measurement, and audience context for benchmarking but more importantly, delivery of marketing campaigns across platforms and channels. The B2B customer is also the B2B customer and in many cases, they are wearing both hats regardless of their media consumption habits. Generalist marketing is still an incredibly valuable skill set, but one which needs to be built on - as we move into the second half of the 2020s.
