Digital marketing methods are adapting alongside emerging and developing technologies, in response to Mediaocean’s H2 Market Report for 2025, with methods and tech considered experimental earlier this yr becoming established strings to marketers’ bows.
The survey is predicated on the responses of over 500 marketing professionals the company contacted, and is the eighth publication from Mediaocean in its bi-annual research series.
The biggest and strongest trends in the industry in the last six months, Mediaocean says, are AI, CTV, and identity, with nearly three-quarters of marketers surveyed citing AI as a priority. Current uses for the technology focus on creative, copywriting, media planning, data evaluation, and campaign optimisation.
Identity stays a core pillar for marketers, driven partially by the apparent decline of cookie use, plus an uptick in media channels available to campaigns. Pinning down elusive customer profiles tends to entail a mix of first- and third-party data, and “probalistic approaches,” the survey’s results show.
As a part of activities that increase the focus on personalisation, cultural and political sensitivities were held to be increasingly necessary by the marketers who responded to Mediaocean. Brands have gotten aware that their communications intersect increasingly with political and advocacy issues, needing more detailed and nuanced messaging to succeed in diverse audiences, messages that must change rapidly in response to events.
As firms examine and allocate their budgets, Connected TV (CTV) looks set to learn the most from marketers’ spending. CTV is the placing of ads on streaming platforms, and because of each the multiplicity of providers and higher user identification metrics from broadcasters, firms can now focus more on precise targeting and individual ad performance, relatively than a ‘spray and pray’ approach that concentrates merely on reach.
Privacy concerns have slipped down in the list of what marketers consider necessary, with the survey suggesting that marketers could also be “deprioritising compliance-specific initiatives in favour of more proactive, identity-based solutions.”
Search promoting spending has fallen by 22% from H1, Mediaocean says, as AI results proceed to switch ‘traditional’ SERP pages, with marketers now undertaking broader optimisation than pure-play keyword and incoming link activities – traditionally the cornerstones of web optimization.
Optimising content for AI could be highly technical, with processes required that fall outside the remit of marketing function: moving JavaScript rendering to server-side, relatively than in-browser, means re-coding online platforms, for instance.
Despite the drop in search promoting budgets, overall marketing spend appears to be holding up, Mediaocean says, with firms reallocating funds from search to different channels and methods.
W Media Research’s principal and chief analyst, Karsten Weide, says “marketers are meeting change with a mix of resilience and reinvention.” Arron Goldman of Mediaocean say technologies and methods like AI, CTV and multi-ID strategies have moved beyond an experimental stage for marketers, and predicts that success in marketing later this yr will probably be dependent on “how well brands align their technology, data, and inventive.”
One primary technological challenge in digital marketing continues to be the unification of knowledge sources from disparate platforms, a difficulty which is each technical and time-based – technologies and channel popularity change quickly in comparison with the speed at which data aggregation tech could be built and put into production.
Mediaocean is holding a webinar on July 29 to debate its H2 Market Report, with input from IAB, Weide, and Lafayette Media.
(Image source: “Mistakes were made: evolution (HMM!)” by lindakowen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)
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