AI and authenticity will lead marketing trends in 2025

At end-of-year reviews and office parties, colleagues will have merrily appointed blame and claimed credit for what happened in 2024 – and set the scene for 2025.

This is a good opportunity for us to do the same and look forward to guessing which issues and trends will live on or spring to life over the next 12 months.

Artificial intelligence was the hot topic for 2024, and there is no reason for it to come off the boil in 2025. 

We will still see plenty of media and marketing content that is obviously AI-generated to save time or money. This won’t help anyone. 

Hootsuite’s latest Social Media Trends Report found that 62 per cent of people mistrust content if they suspect it was created by AI. 

But clearly labelled AI content can be fun and engaging. If human imagination is thrown into the mix, it can be very creative.

There are now AI-powered influencers in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, for example. 

Radix Media announced the UAE’s first virtual influencer, Mayaseen, in April. And Saudi Arabia already has at least eight. They are getting likes and follows without pretending to be something they are not.

At the end of 2023, “authenticity” was Merriam Webster’s word of the year. Marketers picked it up and ran with it through 2024, chasing new ways to engage on a more personal level. For example, through user-generated content (UGC) and micro-influencers with smaller but more engaged followings.

And native advertising, which is designed to look like the content it is placed next to, is becoming more important as cookies continue to dwindle. 

The world’s most popular web browser, Google Chrome, was planning to abandon cookies (the small pieces of code that allow websites and advertisers to track your activities across the web) in 2024. But at the eleventh hour the browser’s owner Google said it would keep them.

However no one will be relaxing and going back to their old ways in 2025. Cookies are still on the way out, even if they have been granted a temporary reprieve.

This means that first-party data – the information that websites can get you to part with voluntarily – is more important than ever.

First-party cookies can’t be shared, so if advertisers don’t know who they are talking to, they need other ways to make sure that they reach the right audience.

We can expect to see brands creating a lot more content on their own, tempting customers in with articles, videos and competitions, then offering to sell them some things as well.

First-party data is also at the heart of shopper marketing. The advertising options on marketplaces such as Amazon and Noon mean brands can spend money to steer shoppers towards their products. This spend will carry on rising.

Philosophically, in 2025 business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) advertising will overlap more. B2C advertisers are focusing more on demand generation, traditionally a strength of the B2B sector. 

And B2B brands are taking a leaf out of the B2C strategy book by using commercial influencers and social platforms such as LinkedIn.

Creatively, we can expect to see branding broaden its self-definition. 

Sonic branding – giving a brand an “audio identity” – is on the rise in the region. Agencies such as MassiveMusic, Mindloop Studios, WithFeeling, BrandMusiq and Amp have made audio identities for brands including BSF bank, Dubai Festival City Mall, the RTA and others in recent years. This will ramp up in 2025.

Advertising agency BBDO worked with the Saudi Investment Bank on a signature font in 2024, and AlUla launched a bottle of its own bespoke scent. Branding can be more than words and pictures.

Social media, of course, is still strong, and Mena loves its influencers. But people are tiring of the onslaught, and savvy brands will start to go a little easier.

In early December, “brain rot” was announced as the word of 2024 by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the way our minds turn to blancmange as we each scroll through the equivalent of 150 Burj Khalifas a year on our mobile feeds.

Saudi Arabia will continue to emerge as a major influencer in regional media, and the centre of balance will continue to shift from Dubai towards Riyadh. Monks (previously Media Monks), the flagship of ex-WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital media group, announced in September that it would open an office in Riyadh and move its regional headquarters from Dubai. It’s likely that more agencies will follow suit.

Overall, AI will continue to be the big story of 2025. But the marketing industry will shift its attention from what AI can do on its own to what creative minds can do with it. Next year’s story will be written by humans just as much as by machines. 

Austyn Allison is an editorial consultant and journalist who has covered Middle East advertising since 2007