Title: Today’s AI Stories and Takeaways for Marketers
Date: 6 May 2025
As AI continues to reshape marketing and digital advertising, leaders across industries are moving past hype to focus on scalable, practical value. Today’s stories highlight a shift from novelty-driven tactics to strategic AI integration, driven by a clear demand for personalisation, automation, and content made for AI-first environments. Marketers must now recalibrate around trust, utility, and consumer behaviour changes driven by evolving tech foundations.
Here’s what you need to know today:
AI Becomes a Baseline—But Not a Strategy
At the recent AI Marketing Summit in NYC, brand leaders warned against treating AI as a strategy instead of a tool. While AI is now considered table stakes for modern marketing organisations, there’s a growing emphasis on balancing automation with human oversight. Public scepticism of AI-generated content—especially generic or tone-deaf executions—continues to rise.
The guidance is clear: AI should enhance creativity and operational efficiency, but not replace brand authenticity. Effective teams are aligning AI capabilities with editorial oversight, creative workflows, and integrated brand governance.
Hyper-Personalisation is Now Mainstream
AI-driven personalisation—already common in e-commerce—is expanding into nearly every channel:
– AI tailors product recommendations and adjusts search results in real time.
– Conversational AI tools like ChatGPT are being used to run personalised email flows and social content, all dynamically tuned to individual customer behaviour.
– AI-generated messaging consistently adapts to reflect brand voice across campaign assets and service touchpoints.
This level of customisation is no longer experimental—it’s becoming mandatory for conversion rates and brand relevance.
Search is Changing—Fast
AI-powered search agents, voice assistance, and LLM-driven recommendations are gradually rewriting the rules of discovery. As fewer consumers interact directly with traditional search result pages or paid listings, brand visibility increasingly depends on being included in AI output.
This change is pushing marketers to optimise content for context and AI comprehension, not just SEO bots or click-through rates. Assets must perform well within AI summarisation, voice interfaces, and knowledge graph outputs—requiring a shift towards semantic, structured, and query-aware content.
‘Boring Tech’ Is Powering Real Results
A clear trend in digital infrastructure is emerging: brands are moving away from shiny but shallow tech like blockchain pilots or VR activations, leaning instead into composable stacks, flexible CMS platforms, and unified data layers.
93% of companies report friction from legacy systems, driving platform consolidation and cross-channel orchestration. Practicality is king again—marketers are investing in automation, segmentation, and modular systems that scale with true business goals rather than trend cycles.
Mobile-First and Video Ads Drive Budget Shift
Short-form and vertical video formats are dominating performance channels, with digital video ad spend set to hit $72B in 2025. Gen Z and Millennials are pushing brands to prioritise TikTok, Instagram Reels, and in-app programmatic over desktop or static placements.
“Sound-off” video design has become a standard UX assumption, driving format-specific creative and media planning across financial services and retail campaigns.
AI-Powered Ad Platforms Scale Campaigns
Amazon’s latest ad tech stack showcases how AI is driving automation across the funnel:
– Performance+ dynamically optimises DSP campaigns in real time.
– Generative AI tools are used to build Brand Store content at scale.
– New formats like shoppable video and LLM-enhanced search placements are driving measurable uplift in engagement.
This convergence of media and AI systems points toward fewer human bottlenecks and smarter campaign orchestration.
What This Means for Marketers
– Treat AI as an accelerator, not a replacement. Integrate human review to protect brand tone and audience trust.
– Optimise your content for AI-driven environments—voice search, AI curation, and summarisation engines—not just search results.
– Invest in the fundamentals: middleware infrastructure upgrades, modular CMS, and flexible segmentation frameworks will pay off more than bleeding-edge tech right now.
– Commit to mobile-first creative and media strategies, especially vertical video formatted for sound-off and swipeable app environments.
– Explore campaign automation wherever possible—from email personalisation to real-time bidding—to free up teams for creative and strategic initiatives.
The AI wave is now mainstream. The winners will be those who operationalise it with discipline, data, and empathy.
