Digital marketing and business branding in 2025 will occur at the intersection of product, brand, and data. The most important part of this overlap will be a company’s ability to grow by consistently providing value to its customers and building trust.
Drivers of Digital Marketing Value:
1. AI adds value by improving speed and relevance. It speeds up the development of creative ideas and testing, while also tailoring experiences. Using Artificial Intelligence within certain guidelines helps creative teams produce higher quality, more targeted experiences at a lower cost. AI marketing agents from software companies are becoming common in marketing and creative teams.
2. Trust Your Consumers. Customers will reward companies that respect their privacy by giving valuable benefits in exchange for their information. This means that companies using first-party data to build and maintain relationships with their customers will see long-term positive returns as third-party tracking becomes less reliable.
3. Success Measurement via Regulation. New hybrid measurement models (MMM, Incrementality and Clean First Party Data) will replace older, less effective methods that relied on pixel tracking. Supporting these hybrid measurement methods will give clients more definitive insight into the effectiveness of their marketing investment.
When analyzing the direction that marketing is going to take in the next few upcoming years, expect to see marketing departments shifting from their siloed ways of doing things (martech) to more of a cross-functional model where product teams will have a handle on the entire end-to-end experience (Commerce + Content + Data). The creatives of the future will need to understand how to work with data at least somewhat. The analysts of the future will be expected to have a much greater understanding of storytelling than is traditionally the case. Soft skills like Empathy, Ethical Responsiveness, and Negotiation will be equally, if not more, important than the hard skills that have traditionally been associated with creating marketing technology.
We have identified three key elements to focus on, as we move forward over the long term with Digital Marketing:
First Party Data needs to be treated as an asset, managed as a product, and evaluated in terms of its ROI and capabilities, with a roadmap established for this purpose.
It is crucial for us to develop simple, “privacy agreements” with our customers. This will allow us to create a clearer understanding of how we treat their data and what benefits they can expect, so we can be more transparent with them.
We will need to invest in developing Measurement Primitives (e.g., MMM, Unified Event Collection, Lift Testing) so Executives can make informed decisions based on the outcome of their actions.
The future of Digital Marketing in 2025 will not be determined by our constant need to chase the latest and greatest marketing fads and trends, but instead, by creating systems that build “trust” with our customers, enabling us to develop “Predictive” and “Scalable” Systems that create Long-term Value for Customers using Data.