If Carat’s global managing director and client president, Anna Campbell, could put a label on 2025, it would be ‘the year of everything’ or ‘the year of orchestration’.
Agencies and clients alike, Campbell said, have faced a wide range of challenges this year, including rapid developments in AI, internal pressures from senior executives, ‘sky-high’ consumer expectations, and persistent geopolitical and economic headwinds. And the industry had to figure out how to navigate all of these simultaneously, hence 2025 becoming both ‘the year of everything’ and ‘the year of orchestration’.
The pressures have been particularly acute around AI. Adobe’s 2025 AI and Digital Trends Report, published at the beginning of the year, found that 78% of senior marketing executives said their organisations expected them to achieve more with AI and data. Marketers, the report claimed, were facing ‘mounting demands to deliver more of everything in 2025 compared with 2024’.
Shrinking budgets compounded these pressures. Seth Matlins, managing director of Forbes CMO Network, told MediaCat that marketing budgets over the past five years have dropped by about 43% while ‘expectations of marketing are flat or up, not down 43%’.
And it’s not only internal expectations squeezing marketing teams — consumers are also demanding more in the age of AI. Campbell told us consumers still want brands to be authentic and purpose-driven, and they now expect seamless customer experiences across online, offline, physical and virtual touchpoints. But she added that these expectations sometimes have to take a back seat due to budget constraints and pressure to deliver growth.
These changes, she noted, are now transforming the role of the CMO: ‘In many organisations, we’re actually seeing the CMO role evolve into the chief growth officer.’
The role of the chief growth officer, Campbell added, encompasses not only traditional marketing, brand communications, and campaigns but also end-to-end growth, which she says spans ‘everything from revenue to customer experience, innovation and all the new business models’.
All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of economic, geopolitical and supply chain volatility, which is unlikely to resolve itself in 2026. Campbell argues that agility will be critical and that marketing will need to become more ‘scenario-based’, as a result. Dentsu, for example, is working on building its own capabilities, Campbell said, to ensure it can be agile, flexible, and interoperable and ‘respond to clients who want to work in different ways’.
Being agile, she added, will require orchestrating AI tech and data effectively.
‘We’ve seen over the last 18 months clients and agencies really struggle to move beyond the surface level adoption of AI. We’re now seeing a shift into a demand for genuine organisational-wide technology that is truly embedded so that these technologies can be used more effectively,’ she explained.
Another glaring challenge that marketers will need to tackle in 2026 is how to leverage AI and drive differentiation. (Campbell uses differentiation in this context to mean standing out, as opposed to the way that the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute uses it, to refer to a unique selling point.)
From AI homogeneity in 2025 to differentiation in 2026
Campbell described a growing ‘AI homogenisation’ in the industry, whereby everyone is using the same tools and data sources and ending up with similar outputs. She predicts, therefore, that ‘differentiation will become the name of the game’ and that to achieve it, marketers will need to get ‘the right blend of AI and PI’.
This sentiment is something that even OpenAI’s former VP of marketing, Krithika Shankarraman, would agree with; speaking on Lenny’s Podcast earlier this year, she said that ‘taste’ — or creativity — will become ‘a distinguishing factor’ in an era where AI is at ‘anyone’s fingertips’ and can generate ‘so much drivel’.
This is one reason why it is becoming increasingly difficult to connect with audiences.
Duolingo’s international marketing director for LATAM and EMEA, Rebeca Ricoy, told MediaCat that ‘surprising people has never been harder’.
‘What we’re seeing is a renewed hunger for real world connections, the kind that can’t be generated by an algorithm,’ Ricoy said. ‘Creating fun social content isn’t enough anymore. To truly resonate, brands need to create and become cultural moments, the kind that live beyond social feeds.’
She highlighted two brands as standout examples from 2025. The first was Tecate, which responded to map apps renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America (following an order by US President Donald Trump) by setting up a floating bar in the area and calling it the Gulf of Mexico bar, reclaiming the space with a new pin. The second was Astronomer’s Gwyneth Paltrow campaign, which capitalised on the company’s CEO infidelity scandal. Execution at that level, however, requires ‘the right team structure, trust, and agility,’ Ricoy said.
‘The brands that win in 2026 will be the ones built for speed, the ones who can identify cultural opportunities and act on them instantly,’ she added. ‘That’s something AI can’t replace, because it takes real humans to read culture, feel the moment, and make it matter.’
Campbell echoed the need for authentic connections, saying that the agency is ‘pushing clients to think about how they build their brands’ to resonate with consumers in 2026. She predicts we’ll see more micro communities, influencers and more immersive experiences in the new year.
‘That’s where you can start to create that differentiation we talked about,’ she said.
If 2025 was a year defined by overload and homogenisation, 2026 may well become the year of differentiation, where brands are rewarded not for keeping up but for standing out.
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