2025: “It’s going to be a wild ride!”
Well, it’s that time of year again, so I’m dusting off the ol’ crystal ball I’d hauled out with the Christmas decorations to gaze into its murky depths in an effort to catch a glimmer of what 2025 has in store for marketers.
Here’s my prediction: 2025 is going to be a wild ride and here’s why:
The world gains some perspective on AI-generated content…with a caveat. According to Hubspot, 83% of marketers say that generative AI allows them to create “significantly more content” than they’d be able to without it. Now, whether or not the ability to generate more content is necessarily a good thing is debatable, but there’s no doubt that the ability for tools like ChatGPT to generate nearly unlimited content with minimal effort had a huge impact on the marketing world in 2024 with lots of creatives quaking over their future employment prospects.Fortunately, Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends 2025 Survey give some hope to those of us afraid we were going to be replaced by our Robot Overlords: while marketers were increasingly using AI tools to generate text (77%) and images (44%) this year, the largest rises in usage trends from the previous year were in using generative AI tools to edit or modify existing text and images. In fact, the percentage of marketers reporting that they were using AI to “completely revise and rewrite text” jumped 39% from 2023 to 2024 and the percentage using AI to “edit and modify images” jumped 27%. Both of these jumps seem to indicate that creators are starting to understand that the real power of AI comes from using it as a tool rather than a replacement for humans. But here’s where the caveat comes in: while I don’t have any data to back me up on this, my gut feeling is that the move to see AI as a tool rather than a replacement for humans will happen first in tech-savvy and forward-thinking brands and agencies, with the lower end of the pack not catching on until 2026 or beyond…if ever.
Those who use SEO and paid search to reach customers and prospects are going to be scrambling to keep up with the chaos. If you haven’t noticed — although I’m sure you did — Google has been beta testing generative AI search results (aka “AI Overviews”) since May 2023. And guess what? It’s not going away. In fact, I’d predict that were going to see more generative AI search start to find its way into other search functions ranging from social media to on-site search. While Google’s AI search has had some growing pains, the utility of having custom search results created by aggregating across a wide range of sources is just too useful to go away, drastically changing the way marketers are going to have to deploy SEO and paid search in the future. Add to this the DOJ asking the federal judiciary to force Google to sell of its Chrome browser (used by 67.5% of web users according to statcounter.com) and we could be seeing the kind of web disruption we haven’t seen since the Microsoft antitrust decision in 2001 which effectively de-throned Internet Explorer as the top browser.
Interest in “Verified Human-generated Content” will start to surge as consumers start to rebel against ubiquitous AI-generated content. I won’t blame you if you think that this prediction contradicts an earlier prediction, but they’re actually complimentary trends. Researchers at MIT found that while consumers were generally “okay with” AI-generated content, if they found that there was a human in the loop, their level of approval went up, expressing, as the researchers noted, “human favoritism” or, as others have noted, clearly showed “algorithmic aversion” against fully AI-generated content. Similarly, a study by the Reuters Institute found that 52% of Americans were “uncomfortable” about fully AI-generated journalistic content.If you’ve cringed at weirdly-robotic voices increasingly showing up in online video content or felt like you’ve had your eyes (and intelligence) assaulted by the explosion in absurd AI-generated clickbait thumbnails currently splashed all over YouTube, human aversion to AI-generated dreck shouldn’t be a surprise. And it’s only going to get more pronounced as awareness spreads and more bottom-feeding marketers lean on AI to spam our media with content. The backlash is already happening, and the pace is just going to pick up in 2025, with content created by humans (aka “Verified Human-generated Content”) becoming an increasing draw for people looking for relief.
A surge in new AI-powered ad blockers is going to force some serious re-thinking about digital business models and how digital marketers reach customers and prospects. While Ai-generated content coming out of LLMs like ChatGPT and other content-generating AI tools gets all the hype, the really revolutionary uses of AI tech are happening in other places, specifically in the realm of Machine Learning (ML) and other “behind the scenes” AI tech. And it’s exactly this kind of AI that marketers really need to pay attention to in 2025. While publishers and advertisers are no strangers to the ongoing ad-blocker battle, new ad blockers that use Machine Learning to detect ads are starting to hit the marketplace and they’re going to be game changers. Trained on huge bodies of online ad examples, these AI-powered ad blockers operate more like humans, able to detect ads based on what they look like rather than the code behind them. The result is an ad blocker that’s impossible to circumvent, throwing a proverbial monkey wrench into the whole ad-based economy of the digital world.
Changes in the social media landscape — and how consumers use social media — will force communicators to re-think their social media strategies for 2025. For those of us sick of irritating “influencers” popping up everywhere from our feeds to our takeout apps, 2025 should bring some relief as big brands — increasingly sick of scandals and overall weary of the whole “influencer” vibe — start to turn away from questionable online celebrities that have inexplicable gained millions of followers and start to consider lesser-known social media personalities with more targeted audiences (and hopefully smaller egos) as major brands also start moving towards more personalized, targeted approaches to reaching their audiences. But because keeping track of micro-influencers and hyper-targeted micro-trends on social media requires casting a bigger net, “social listening” apps such as Sprinklr, Brandwatch and Keyhole which can scan across multiple social channels in order to identify trends and changes in brand sentiment will become increasingly popular “must-have” tools in every savvy marketer’s toolbox.
It’s time to turn off the crystal ball and get to trimming that tree. Happy 2025! May we all keep our sanity in the New Year. It’s gonna be a doozy!
