Four trends driving marketing decision making

Stuart Smith at Mediaocean shares his insights into where marketers are investing in 2025 and beyond 

 

As we find our way through the second half of 2025, the advertising industry stands at a juncture where marketers are meeting changes with resilience, reinvention, and a relentless focus on innovation. To better understand how marketers are adapting to change, Mediaocean surveyed nearly 500 marketing professionals worldwide to uncover the key consumer and technology trends shaping the market, along with projected media investments for the remainder of the year and into 2026.

 

Here are the four key trends driving how marketers are making decisions today.

 

 

1.    CTV Leads as Ad Spend Remains Resilient

Despite growing economic uncertainty, most marketers plan to maintain or increase spend across the majority of media channels. CTV leads the way with 58% of marketers planning to boost investment, reflecting continued confidence in CTV’s full-funnel value.

 

Social platforms (56%) and digital display/video (52%) also rank among the top channels for planned increases. Search, meanwhile, registered the sharpest decline, with 22% fewer marketers planning to increase spend, likely due to GenAI’s impact on how consumers discover content and products. Overall, while budgets are tightening, marketers appear to be merely exercising caution and not pulling back entirely.

 

 

2.    Identity as a Top Priority

While performance-driven paid media, brand advertising, and measurement/attribution remain core to marketers’ strategies, identity and demand generation saw notable gains in importance. Marketers increased their focus on identity by more than 41%, signalling a strategic pivot in response to a shifting privacy landscape.

 

Meanwhile, demand generation rose nearly 33%, reflecting the importance of strategies that focus on building and nurturing customer interest over time. While privacy remains important, marketers are shifting focus from compliance-driven initiatives toward proactive, identity-based solutions.

 

Taken together, the data signals a shift where marketers are aligning their investments to drive long-term brand growth and performance amid ongoing macroeconomic headwinds.

 

 

3.    GenAI Reshapes Marketing

GenAI has cemented its place as the most important consumer trend, according to 72% of marketers. Every surveyed industry, from automotive to retail, financial services, and entertainment, ranked GenAI as the top trend, highlighting its growing role in shaping consumer expectations and driving marketing innovation.

 

Marketers are also moving beyond experimentation, embedding GenAI into both strategic and creative workflows. Data analysis remains the most common application, according to 47% of respondents, underscoring AI’s role in distilling insights from increasingly complex datasets. Meanwhile, 46% of marketers use GenAI for market research, leveraging it to synthesise competitive intelligence, consumer behaviour, and campaign performance.

 

While analytical applications continue to dominate, creative use cases are rapidly gaining traction. The use of AI with copywriting (34%), image generation (25%), and creative versioning (27%) is increasing as more marketers focus on scaling personalization efforts and streamlining creative production.

 

Looking ahead, 31% of respondents anticipate major disruption in creative optimization over the next 12 months, while 25% expect significant changes in media planning and buying. This suggests that although AI is poised to reshape decision-making, entrenched systems and workflows in media buying may take longer to evolve.

 

 

4.    CTV’s Next Frontier: Personalisation, Performance, Precision

As CTV solidifies its role in omnichannel strategies, marketers are demanding more from the channel. When asked which aspect of CTV is most important for driving full-funnel performance, personalising ads with dynamic, relevant creative messages ranked highest at 28%, pointing to an industry-wide shift toward audience-first, data-informed storytelling.

 

Still, performance isn’t limited to creative. Measurement and accountability remain top priorities, with 24% of respondents emphasising the importance of measuring reach, frequency, and outcomes across media investments. Yet fragmentation remains a persistent challenge, with 52% of respondents citing limited cross-channel visibility, another 52% highlighting a lack of unified measurement, and 49% noting how data silos make it harder to uncover insights and course-correct in real time. This may explain why real-time optimisation currently ranks lowest (9%) as a current CTV priority, despite its potential value. In short, marketers are ready for CTV to deliver more, but the ecosystem must catch up.

 

As 2025 draws to a close and 2026 comes into view, marketers face a critical inflection point. An evolving privacy landscape, rising expectations for personalised experiences, and the rapid evolution of AI will demand agility, investment, and cross-functional alignment. Success will favour the brands that don’t just react, but proactively design intelligent, connected, and future-ready marketing systems.

 

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Stuart Smith is EVP, Customer Engagement at Mediaocean

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Tirachard