Aishling Farrell.
The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2024 and forward to next year.
Aishling Farrell, Orange Line’s General Manager
The marketing landscape is changing. 2025 will be a defining year for agencies and brands, forcing them to find the right balance between short-term wins and long-term brand building.
The pandemic pushed many brands towards performance marketing, prioritising quick online sales. But as things settle, those focused solely on performance are seeing growth stall. They've neglected brand building — awareness, customer relationships, and loyalty.
Peter Field sounded the alarm as early as 2017 in the AdNews article “Marketers' obsession with ROI and short-termism undermining growth." Indeed, this has been an ongoing topic for marketers. However, 2024 is the first time we’ve observed this conversation occurring regularly at a boardroom level.
We see many businesses that have primarily focused on performance marketing, but not always. We've also had more businesses than ever approach us to build out performance marketing efforts, as that had never been their focus. We’ve seen large, successful brands lose sales to smaller competitors purely because they aren’t showing up as successfully in search engines.
There are implications for agencies who over-focus on one side or the other. Agencies need full-funnel capabilities to drive client growth. For performance agencies, this means moving beyond just digital performance tactics and embracing a broader view. For brand-focused agencies, this means accepting the role that performance marketing plays in driving business growth and incorporating performance marketing channels into their considerations. The two sides, too often, operate in silos, even when a client has appointed one agency group for both types of activities. How specialists come together will have a significant impact on growth potential.
For brands and agencies to successfully shift from performance marketing to long-term brand-building initiatives, some of the most important topics to tackle and capabilities to develop are insights & measurement. There’s no silver bullet or one tool that will be able to solve measurement and insight for you. Brands must embrace multiple measurement tools and studies to drive success forward. From brand-tracking to lift studies, econometric modelling, creative pre-testing, and regular audience profiling.
For brands and agencies to launch performance marketing programs successfully, they will need to take a three-year view of the landscape before proceeding. Simply throwing money at digital ads won't cut it anymore, with AI and new search players disrupting the landscape. To be successful, brands need to navigate these changes. Everything can and should be quantified in performance marketing; when a media plan is produced, a corresponding revenue forecast should be provided. For agencies who have never been accountable for specific revenue outcomes, there will need to be a shift in mindset.
The bottom line for 2025 is balance. Build strong brands and deliver results. Whatever you do, resist the urge to sacrifice one for the sake of the other. Agencies need to diversify their skills, double down on measurement and support clients to find ways to connect with customers. This is the year marketing demands both breadth and depth to truly succeed.
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