From Braving to Shaping: How marketers can lead an ever-changing industry in 2025

If the world started today, what would you do differently?

As marketers, we have experienced tremendous change with increasing complexity. Consumers have moved from single-touch; where it was relatively easy to attribute 1 or 2 channels to marketing outcomes, to multi-touch; where we could more feasibly understand where customers were and what value they were delivering to your business, to completely interconnected consumer journeys; with more unique touch points than any one person could manage. 

It’s gotten more complex to “find” and “define” a high-value customer and to truly know where to meet them on their journey. At times, this can feel like a business-hindering level of complexity.  

But it doesn’t have to be. AI powered marketing is allowing us to overcome that complexity, even use it to our advantage.

If the world started today, I contend we as marketers would start with the AI tools we have available at our fingertips and we would set our goals, teams, and data up to properly support what those tools can deliver for our businesses.

As we plan for the year ahead, I encourage you to add 3 plays to your marketing playbook to lead your organization to better business results in 2025.

Play #1 – Tighten the alignment between marketing metrics and business priorities.

In the past we might have talked about getting a lead or a conversion. A new customer that comes at a cost. What if instead we focus on what that conversion needs to mean for your business’s bottom line? Today, AI gives us the ability to activate and optimize for business outcomes, such as revenue, profit, and lifetime value. 

Indeed, the world’s largest job site is a perfect example. By centering their media around customer lifetime value, Indeed was able to identify behavioral cues that distinguished segments of more profitable customers, and invest more in them. As a result, they saw a 30% lift in return on ad spend and 50% lift in conversions.

Play #2 – Bridge organizational silos.

Today, silos exist across teams, budgets, media channels, and data sets. As we highlighted earlier, this no longer allows us to meet and measure complex, cross-channel consumers effectively. But, breaking down organizational silos and restructuring teams is a challenge that takes time. What if instead of trying to build an entirely new organization, we consider unifying our collaboration models or creating cross-team task forces that bring together distinct data sets in the meantime? Even by just bridging silos, AI can multiply your effectiveness.  

Adidas is a strong example of what this can deliver to your business. By building connections across their web, app and store channel teams, Adidas was able to make their data, media, and budgets work their hardest together – resulting in greater revenue delivery and stronger attribution. 

Play #3 – Plan for dynamic budgets

What’s unique about AI is that it can be incredibly dynamic, which is so important in today’s environment. Take right now as an example – there’s an impending election, the Fed just started cutting rates, consumer sentiment is in flux. These dynamics all impact purchase patterns. One week you may see suppressed demand, and the next you might see demand 5x. 

AI can adjust to these unpredictable dynamics to deliver business outcomes when they present themselves, but not if your budget limits it from doing so.

For some people, this means tighter CFO and CMO alignment to reallocate budgets more frequently than by quarter or half. In the case of Caraway, a direct-to-consumer maker of kitchenware, they chose to uncap budget completely during a business-critical holiday period: Black Friday. The team leaned into Google AI to target a business return rather than an acquisition number. They uncapped budgets in order to allow the campaign to capture any valuable customer available to them. And, they activated a Google product called Performance Max that deploys investment across an array of channels like YouTube, Display, Search, Discovery, Gmail, and Maps. 

So think about this, now they’ve layered all 3 plays – an outcomes-first approach, with cross-channel media, and without a budget constraint… 

The result? Caraways’ single best day in business history, demonstrating how AI can deliver business growth, effectively.

Today, AI is the worst it will ever be. Tomorrow it will be better than today. Next month, better than this month. And next year, certainly better than this year. These are just a handful of the successes we’ve begun to see by those operating with today’s technology in mind.  So the question now is how can we shift from braving this change to shaping how our organizations and teams best deliver with it?