2025 Marketing Trend Predictions

2024 was another big year for marketers. Google decided to keep cookies in their cookie jar and launched AI Overviews, changing the search engine results page as we know it. Social platforms continued to make headlines (TikTok is under threat of a U.S. ban in 2025) and advertisers continued to avoid X, waiting to see how it evolves under new leadership. And while the U.S. presidential election hasn’t happened yet, EMARKETER predicts total U.S. political ad spending will be up nearly 29% from the 2020 election.

Reflecting on our 2024 marketing predictions, we weren’t far off from where things landed. And as the new year quickly approaches, we’ve pulled out our crystal balls once again to help marketers prepare for the year ahead. Spoiler alert: you won’t be seeing AI on our list of predictions this year. Given the proliferation and usage of AI technology in 2024, it’s clear that it’s on a trajectory for further adoption into our everyday lives in 2025. We even asked ChatGPT what it predicts for itself in the year ahead, and it agreed. 

*Drumroll please* To help marketers successfully navigate 2025, here are our top four predictions:

• Brands that align their marketing with customer values will succeed
• Social media will be fully adopted as a discovery engine
• There will be a retail media network surplus 
• Media mix modeling will become mainstream

1. Brands that align their marketing with customer values will succeed

Thanks to burdens of higher prices on everyday items, today’s consumers are comparing prices before making purchases more than ever before. Take grocery shopping for example. Whether they shop online, buy online to pick up in store, or have groceries delivered, all consumers faced the same challenge in 2024: increased grocery bills for less food. NerdWallet reports that consumers are paying 28% more for groceries than they did five years ago, and 61% of consumers surveyed by Statista reported noticing smaller packaging without changes in price. While this example is specific to groceries, its effects have a ripple effect on how consumers consider other purchases. With consumers shopping more based on price and perceived value than ever before, brand loyalty is in jeopardy.

Marketing impact 

Heading into 2025, it’s predicted that consumers will carry their price sensitivity into the new year. And when consumers feel price sensitivity, they often switch brands, which puts loyalty at risk. To combat this behavior, brands must ensure they understand their audience and what they value so they can effectively deliver on it.

Taking action 

Marketers will retain loyal customers and attract new ones by clearly highlighting (1) the value their product or service provides and (2) how their brand can provide additional value via new capabilities, content, exclusive experiences, and more. But don’t forget: the value a loyal consumer is looking for may vary from the value a new customer may be seeking. 

In 2025, brands must expand their audience strategy beyond their current customers. Success requires developing a strong understanding of the motivations and mindsets for not only a brand’s core persona, but also additional motivation-led buyer personas to successfully attract new customers. This requires leveraging multiple datasets to build a holistic understanding of the broader audience pool, pairing a mix of syndicated sources like MRI, YouGov, and GWI with digital media platforms and the brand’s own first-party data to derive insights that can inform targeting strategy, media mix, messaging strategy, and brand value propositions. From there, marketers must carefully balance segmentation and scale to ensure dollars are spent effectively against core audiences while keeping the door open for hand raisers and new audiences.

2. Social media will be fully adopted as a discovery engine

Originally created as a means to forge connection, today’s most popular social platforms are now being used by consumers for brand discovery. In 2024, Statista reported that globally, the average person spends 143 minutes a day on social media. While this data point outlines how much time is spent on platforms like Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok, how people use these channels for brand discovery varies by generation. For example, EMARKETER reports that roughly 25% of all individuals surveyed (regardless of age) use social media for searches, but when we narrow in on specific generations, Gen Z uses social media to discover brands more than any other generation on a daily basis (44%). Because of its ubiquity — and because of the content users want to see — social media has become a place for brands to be discovered. From small businesses that operate almost entirely on social media to major enterprises looking to connect with new communities, social media is at the forefront of discovery.

Marketing impact

Brands have evolved their social strategies to keep pace with changing consumer behavior and platform executions to prioritize more personalized discovery experiences. It’s for these reasons that user-generated content and influencer marketing are growing tactics (for B2B and B2C brands alike) to develop branded content that drives consideration earlier in the shopping journey. It’s also why influencer marketing is expected to be a $24 billion market by the end of this year — a 14% increase year over year.

Taking action 

Brands will be discovered via their social efforts in 2025 by providing relevant content to end users. The ticket to ensuring a brand’s content resonates across generational differences? Using search and social insights to stay relevant. Analysis of these channels can highlight the most important topics, pain points, and sentiment shifts across brand, category, or audience moments that can help a brand’s social efforts truly resonate with their target audience. 

But to effectively use social as a discovery engine, it’s a two-way street: Brands must push relevant content out to be found, but also pull audiences in when they are searching. Optimizing your brand’s social ecosystem for search (social SEO) is an important tactic in today’s discovery era to ensure your brand and its associated products or services are easy to find amid the clutter on social media feeds. 

3. There will be a retail media network surplus 

Retail media has continued to gain steam throughout 2024. According to EMARKETER, retail media spend has increased nearly 30% year over year, topping out at a projected $55 billion in 2024. Despite Amazon’s dominance in the space with 77% of U.S. retail media dollars invested there this year, there are now over 200 retail media networks (and counting!).

Marketing impact

The traditional retail space has become saturated and is no longer only for mass retailers or ecommerce juggernauts. While we predict this space will consolidate (do we really need 200 retail media networks?), the more interesting phenomenon is that the concept of a retail media network has now transcended retail. Chase Bank, United Airlines, Marriott, and Grubhub (among many others) are now getting into the proprietary “media network” space by standing up their own media sales businesses. It’s a smart move by these brands if they can successfully monetize their brand equity and customer base; however, time will tell if companies will be able to effectively operationalize media businesses — and more importantly — if there is enough marketer demand to justify them. While the diversification of retail media networks allows marketers to have more choices on where to invest their dollars, it has also created a fragmented environment and left some marketers scratching their heads about where they should start.

Taking action

The increase in “media networks” offers greater opportunities for non-CPG brands to test retail media tactics. Targeting options available through retail media networks are based on large sets of a company’s first-party data, which enable accurate, consistent targeting across channels and, in turn, effective people-based media programs. Even further, many companies have media assets themselves — from the TV screens in hotel rooms and the seat-backs on airplanes to a bank’s bill-pay portal, ads may soon be literally everywhere. As marketers explore these networks and their associated opportunities — as with all new shiny objects — be wary of pricing models and underlying technologies that may not be up to snuff. That said, if your brand hasn’t tested leveraging these datasets for targeting efforts yet, take this as your sign to make retail media part of your brand’s new year’s resolutions.

4. Media mix modeling will become mainstream

It’s well known that effectively reaching users along their path to purchase requires a multi-channel approach. And while developing this full-funnel strategy and executing against it are table stakes, actually measuring how all channels work together to achieve brand goals is often the hardest part. When coupled with the fact that data privacy decisions are increasingly in the hands of consumers — we’re predicting a world in which consumers decide to turn on or off cookie tracking entirely — using an advanced measurement solution that allows brands to plan and measure the impact of cookie-free media is a tall order. Enter: media mix modeling (MMM). What is old is now new again. And while MMM has historically been an effective tool for large advertisers with data science teams and computing power, it is now finally accessible for brands of all sizes. 

Marketing impact 

Brands can now access MMM thanks to the removal of cost barriers and the availability of more options. Today, brands have the ability to choose between four different modeling approaches, each with their own benefits and drawbacks:

• In-house model: The model output when developed in-house will likely have the greatest context of your brand’s business and industry. Data inputs are essentially only limited to what resides within your walls, and the friction of sharing these data outside of your organization is mitigated
• External measurement partner: Third-party expertise will be of immense benefit to your brand given their familiarity with marketing data and ability to consult on resulting strategies. However, these partners may not have the familiarity to provide strategic media recommendations given their area of expertise
• External media partner: Marketers can consider leveraging the modeling capabilities of their media partner who is already familiar with the brand and its media investment. Therefore, they likely need little time to onboard the data. Ensure your media partner is taking a holistic approach to recommendations and is not just favoring the channels they manage.
• SaaS modeling solutions: For “DIY marketers,” leveraging SaaS modeling solutions (like Google’s Meridian) might be appealing given its self-service option and sleek user experience. To fully leverage this option, ensuring the right talent is in-house is critical to maximize success and activate on model outputs.

Taking action

The decision on whether to invest in MMM is behind us; doing it must become the default answer. The real focus moving forward should be on actually using these models to adjust how media is planned and managed. While some brands today center planning activities on a careful review of historical performance and individual channel forecasts, this will soon become a thing of the past thanks to the loss of data signals that traditionally informed audience and performance insights. In 2025 and beyond, marketers must look to MMM as a core input to media planning (including channel execution and market tests) and the primary vehicle to request funding. This means leveraging modeled data in conjunction with platform metrics so media plans are developed with a better balance of response-based planning informed by directly attributable media alongside top-down planning informed by MMM.

Are you ready? 

With a new year around the corner, now is the time to evaluate how your brand’s marketing efforts must evolve to keep pace with changes impacting the broader marketing landscape. Use our predictions as a way to identify potential testing opportunities, prioritize focus areas for your brand, and ultimately inform your brand’s 2025 marketing efforts.