By Charles Lee Mathews. Marketing Intelligence Hub’s MD says behavioural change and the quest for consumer attention as media fragments will be a “frightening” 2025 mainstay.
“Everybody is hunting for attention,” says Isla Prentis, managing director of Marketing Intelligence Hub. “But there’s just so much content out there, which makes getting attention all the more critical.” Marketing Intelligence Hub is a part of Park Advertising/Nahana Communications Group.
Shifts in human behaviour
“We’re living in an era of content, and advertising needs to be seen as just another form of content. Brands and marketers need to know how to court engagement in a context where content is limitless. This, at a time when human behaviour is changing faster than ever before. The implication for marketers is frightening because behavioural change is one of the hardest things to deal with,” she says, adding: “Homogeneous behaviour doesn’t exist, which means that brands often try to be everything for everyone in contexts powered by technology. This is exceedingly difficult for marketers to cope with.
“Fragmentation is one of the biggest things we face in the media industry. We’ve been talking about it for years, but it’s just gone to a whole new level,” she says and laughs about what media people thought fragmentation was or would be. “Getting a brand message out there has never been more difficult. I think it is harder than ever to communicate in a way that breaks through to consumers. Relevance needs to become more important than before, and we need to get back to basics, but we need to do this well,” Prentis says.
Rising above the noise
She acknowledges that marketing exists in a golden age for consumers, where people can get information and insight for every niche. “But for marketers, this means battling all kinds of content to rise above the noise. Content is now advertisers’ biggest competitor,” she says.
“It is not that the pot is getting bigger. We’re just having to split that pot into so many more options. This is because the consumer has so many more things grabbing their attention. Everybody’s trying to be everything to everyone, which is why I don’t think anybody has it easy out there,” Prentis says.
New research conducted by Ipsos underscores this thinking. Of marketers surveyed, 79% say they increased investment towards organic social over the past three years. Given the challenge, Prentis says performance media remains a winner in the digital and social media space.
Identity osmosis
TikTok has ignited huge behavioural change in content creation and consumption, she notes. Statista shows that in 2025 TikTok will reach close to 1 billion users.
The short video app recently released its 2025 Trends report. The two big trends are a state of fusion, where brands can gain “renewed vigour” by collaborating with creators. This leads to greater responsiveness from users and builds better consumer and creator bonds. “Identity osmosis” is another trend where brands organically integrate “their consumers’ evolving values, allowing these shifting ideals to reshape their identity.”
Media’s evolving currency
“For media agencies, the threat of disruption is huge, because the currency of media is evolving. To some extent, data has always been the currency of media agencies, but I think the level of this data has grown exponentially. We started talking about big data back in 2013 when big data hit trend headlines,” says Prentis, who explains that big data is the core of competitive advantage. Big data refers to the massive, complex datasets being generated at an unprecedented rate — far beyond what traditional data processing tools can handle. This is why evolving media forms and businesses like retail media networks pose an existential threat to media agencies that don’t evolve.
- The groundbreaking growth of retail media (Aug 2024)
- Adland calls for retail media standardisation (Sept 2024)
“The challenge for us all is to tap into human insights that unite people across different segments. The brands who win are those who are not scared to try new things. What the industry will hear from CMOs the most is this: ‘I want innovation, but I want you to be able to prove that it all works.’ Sadly, this isn’t how innovation works. But, the winners will be those marketers willing to test and try new things with their agencies. We need to forge partnerships where brands and agencies are willing to leap into the fire together and learn,” she says, stressing that the playbook is burned. Adland is now entering a media landscape that has no playbook.
Charles Lee Mathews is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
