From a top-level view, marketing may very well be greater than ever in 2025. Global ad spending is projected by GroupM to surpass $1 trillion for the primary time, with channels like streaming TV, gaming and retail media continuing to broaden their canvasses for brands.
Even as the macro picture seems robust, the people making the industry gears turn aren’t seeing a corresponding resource windfall. CMOs entered their “era of less” in 2024 while agencies felt worn down by mounting client demands and thin margins. Consolidation is on the horizon in a friendlier environment for M&A, with Omnicom’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group set to shake up the sector.
As marketers attempt to navigate myriad challenges, including managing data within the face of proliferating regulations, the name of the sport is efficiency. Demand for tools that will help work get done with greater efficiency, including generative artificial intelligence (AI), stays high, but execution would require a level of finesse.
“The indicators are that it’s not going to get easier in 2025,” said Ewan McIntyre, vice chairman analyst and chief of research at Gartner for Marketers. “The era of less is beginning to move into an era of productivity.”
Many other pieces on the board could change in the following 12 months and again alter marketing’s trajectory: Will the tech antitrust crackdown, including the push to get Google to sell Chrome, proceed apace? Could TikTok be banned? How will the incoming Trump administration affect consumer sentiment? Below, Marketing Dive breaks down 10 key predictions:
Brands must own their values as consumers feel unseen
Marketers have more information than ever about consumers, but are they really listening to them? Nearly half (44%) of consumers across geographic, racial and ethnic lines feel ignored by the media and most advertisers, in response to research from iHeartMedia and Pushkin Industries. Three-quarters are willing to pay more for brands that share their values, while 72% don’t need to buy products from the advertisers they feel are ignoring them.
“Consumers are clearly telling us they need brands to see them and reach them where they’re,” said iHeartMedia Executive Advisor Gayle Troberman. “Consumers are telling us, ‘Don’t pander to me while you’re just talking to me. I need to know what you stand for, who you’re.’”
To break through in 2025, marketers must construct their brands consistently and boldly. Instead of attempting to reflect back their consumers’ identities, an approach called “mirror promoting” by Paul Prato, executive creative director at agency PPK, who insists marketers should “fearlessly state brand truths.”
“When you are attempting to force it to where [brands are] depicting who they think their audience is, or who they need their audience to be … the one thing that suffers is that they don’t get to discuss themselves,” Prato said.
For example, Nike’s “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” campaign returned the brand to its core tenet: the spirit of the athlete embodied by its namesake Greek god. While that effort proved divisive, it might paradoxically be the approach needed for a contentious cultural moment.
“This is a moment where folks are really going to be leaning into their values, almost like a renewal of vows,” said Victoria Jordan, general manager of branded content and artistic at My Code. “There are brands which have at all times leaned into embracing what their products solve and universal themes to maintain from polarizing consumers.”
Generative AI gets all the way down to brass tacks
Despite the growing generative AI backlash, marketers see the technology as a fixture of the industry that may develop into more necessary in 2025, albeit not at all times in consumer-facing ways. Productivity boosts around campaign briefing, versioning and production and tapping into synthetic audience data were some of the use cases identified by experts.
“The back-of-house examples are those that brands can quickly engage with and start to extract value from,” said Josh Campo, CEO of Razorfish.
Coke’s holiday ad fumble underscored that many consumers still see an uncanny valley effect in AI-generated content, however the campaign also represented an all-in approach many brands will eschew. Instead, AI may very well be leveraged in a piecemeal, subtle fashion so as to add in computer graphics or cut down on shooting time.
“It can’t be about, ‘Hey, we used generative AI.’ In fact, it’s like we’re hiding the generative AI to a level,” said Chris Neff, global head of emerging experience and technology at Anomaly.
As marketers try to refine their AI strategies, they’ve an amazing number of tools to pick from, with major digital platforms, startups and agencies all racing to scale products. The coming yr could see some winnowing down of options as hype is traded for a concentrate on the brass tacks, with larger, more mature AI players prone to win out.
“You will begin to see some shake out,” said Campo. “I also think we’re hopefully coming to a detailed of the period of time when each product on the market got slapped with, ‘Now with AI.’”
CMOs prioritize productivity to administer ballooning remit
Chief marketers are expected to lean further into productivity levers as the role’s mandate of doing more with less intensifies. Hopes of returning to the old ways of operating inside a narrow brand-building purview will probably be put aside if CMOs need to deliver on their ballooning agendas.
“It was marketing with a capital ‘M.’ I feel like now it’s marketing, all-caps,” said Biljana Cvetanovski, a partner at McKinsey. “The remit has just exploded.”
Among the most dear qualities for CMOs will probably be a collaborative and commercially oriented mindset, said Gartner’s McIntyre. A much bigger concentrate on growth comes as 55% of marketing decision-makers report their campaigns sometimes or at all times fail to justify their investments, per Gartner.
“With many CMOs, they’re afflicted with the identical condition, and it’s called FOFO, which stands for fear of checking out,” said Ross Martin, co-founder and president of Known. “It’s not good while you get up and you discover out that you simply’ve wasted $30 million or $40 million in upper- or lower-funnel spend.”
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“[CMOs] are afflicted with the identical condition, and it’s called FOFO, which stands for fear of checking out.”
Ross Martin
Co-founder and president, Known
The degree of CMO churn in 2024 was typical, per Spencer Stuart, but many within the role aren’t realizing one of their biggest opportunities with AI. The amount of marketers currently scaling up use cases for generative AI still hovers within the low single digits, in response to separate McKinsey findings.
“Everyone is talking about it, but few are doing it well yet,” said Richard Sanderson, a consultant who leads Spencer Stuart’s marketing, sales and communications officer practice in North America, over email.
Social media’s flash-in-the-pan trends cement as marketing moments
The social media landscape faces a wave of uncertainty as a possible TikTok ban looms, the X (formerly Twitter) exodus endures and a concentrate on AI reaches a fever pitch. However, that hasn’t curbed advertisers’ bets on the channel. Social media promoting spending within the U.S. is predicted to top $82 billion in 2025, up from $75 billion the yr prior.
As brands search for ways to win on social, deepened relationships with area of interest creators and larger bets on social commerce via TikTok Shop are two expected trends, said Christopher Douglas, senior manager of strategy at Billion Dollar Boy. The exec also anticipates that flash-in-the-pan social media moments — “brat summer,” for instance — will probably be co-opted by more brands to comprehend earned media potential.
In hopes of reaching coveted audiences like Gen Alpha, brands are also pushing the boundaries of their typical social presence, as reflected in the present concentrate on “unhinged” content, in ways that would inform long-term strategies.
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“Prioritizing long-form content in 2025 will help brands connect with a highly engaged audience…”
Sophie Crowther
Talent partnerships director, Billion Dollar Boy
“I feel we’ll begin to see more recognition in value placed on showing up for Gen Alpha as very authentically, very raw, very ‘we’re not a brand, we’re a bro,’” Douglas said.
A concentrate on long-form content can also be expected as 70% of marketers plan to extend their production on this area over the following yr, in response to research from Billion Dollar Boy.
“Prioritizing long-form content in 2025 will help brands connect with a highly engaged audience who actively decide to subscribe to newsletters, watch lengthy videos and opt-in to hearken to prolonged podcast episodes,” said Sophie Crowther, talent partnerships director for Billion Dollar Boy, in emailed comments.
Collaboration is essential as first-party data still reigns supreme
Predictions of a cookieless future were dealt a significant blow when Google last July announced that it will explore a “new path” around online privacy as a substitute of deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome. For advertisers, agencies and ad-tech providers that had been working for years to find out the long run of targeting and tracking, the news was a shock.
“Part of my soul literally did die [that day] since it’s just so unlucky,” said Mari Docter, senior vice chairman of data strategy and innovation at indie media buying and planning agency Novus. “But although cookie deprecation is not [happening], we still should future-proof the business to have the option to be as effective as we were.”
Regardless of Google’s next steps, privacy regulation is poised to proceed to evolve, with or without overriding federal laws. That reinforces the necessity to prioritize the secure, ethical collection of first-party data that not only deepens understanding of existing customers, but additionally the behavior of wider audiences.
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“You need to start out investing in ‘what am I trying to resolve for’ as a substitute of ‘let’s just put money into the clean room.'”
Mari Docter
Senior vice chairman of data strategy and innovation, Novus
