So What? 2025 Trends in Marketing

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why most trends reports are terrible
• The emerging 2025 trends in marketing
• Using generative AI to eliminate obvious trends and identify emerging trends

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Katie Robbert 00:33
Well, hey there, everyone! Happy Thursday, and welcome to “So What?”, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show—which we will not be changing the name of. It shall stay “So What?”, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show until further notice. Now that I’m back, I can keep track of these things. John and Chris, welcome! How’s it going?

John Wall 00:54
Good, good. There we go.

Katie Robbert 00:57
Oh, so close.

John Wall 00:58
That was kind of late, but we’ll take it.

Katie Robbert 01:02
So, this is our second to last show of the year 2024. We have this show next week, and then that is it. You will not see us until 2025. So, with that, we thought it would be fitting if we did a show dedicated to the 2025 trends in marketing—which is every marketer’s favorite topic this time of year—what the heck is going to happen, what’s upcoming, what’s new, what’s shiny, what’s going to be the thing. So, I don’t know. Chris, where would you like to start on 2025 trends in marketing?

Christopher Penn 01:38
Well, let’s start with this, and I’m going to throw this back to both of you. When you look at trends lists and the things that people share, what tends to be on those trends lists?

Katie Robbert 01:52
Marketing specifically, or just like—yes—in 20 marketing trends?

Christopher Penn 01:56
Here’s what to be aware of in marketing for next year.

Katie Robbert 02:00
Let’s see: shiny object, technology influencer, marketing influencer. They’re always the next thing. One of these days it’s going to stick. Let’s see, social media is probably going to make a comeback. I don’t know where it went, but it’s making a comeback. And SEO never goes out of style—or in style—depending on who you ask. What about you, John?

John Wall 02:32
Call me jaded, but it seems like every talking head is pushing what they’ve been pushing the whole rest of the year, anyway. It’s just that this year is going to be the year that it’s going to be all about personal URLs this year, finally. I don’t know if I buy any of that stuff, for the most part. The biggest thing is—and this is right up our wheelhouse—none of it’s ever based on data. People never give you any data. They’re just like, “Here’s what’s coming in 2025.” It’s basically because I pulled this out of my file that nobody knows about, and there’s no factual anything or research behind any of it.

Katie Robbert 03:09
I think part of that is because—and this please full big huge disclaimer, I am not shading anyone or slamming anyone—the challenge that I find with these lists is they tend to ask the same people over and over again: the quote-unquote influencers and tastemakers and trendsetters of any given industry. It really depends on how the person’s feeling that day. So, you’re absolutely right, John. The problem with these lists is that they’re not based in any kind of data. It’s just sort of—I don’t know—I feel like blue is going to be the color of the year. That’s really honestly the way there could be a lot more thought that goes into it.

Katie Robbert 03:53
As the consumer, that’s how it feels to me—it’s just a big guess. We don’t know. We can’t predict the future. So, Chris, how can we do better?

Christopher Penn 04:06
Well, to what John said, we could start by using actual data. And to what you said, Katie, we could start by using actual data from people who aren’t the same five talking heads. Part of this is also—and this goes back to something John said—a lot of the trends lists, just like a lot of the recommendations list, curiously always have whatever company is promoting it as the top number one trend or the thing to buy for next year, which does somewhat dampen its credibility. So what you could do instead is use actual data. You could go out to communities that are having conversations about subject areas that you care about and analyze those conversations. There are thousands of them. There are thousands of communities having thousands of conversations all day, every day.

Christopher Penn 04:59
If you were to do that, you would find three tranches of interesting information. One is the obvious stuff. Spoiler alert: AI is going to be a thing in 2025.

Katie Robbert 05:13
I am shocked and dazzled.

Christopher Penn 05:18
Then you have less obvious stuff that is still being discussed, but not as frequently. Then you have the stuff that is interesting, but maybe only a few people are talking about it. Those are things that could become emerging trends. Now, in the past you had to have gotten started in, say, June to be able to process all of the data, to have it ready for the holidays. However, today generative AI, particularly large language models, are capable of analyzing enormous quantities of unstructured text data and finding exactly these things. What are the obvious things? What are the less obvious things? What are the non-obvious things? So what we did—we’ve put together the Trust Insights 2025 Trends report, which you can get a copy of for free at TrustInsights.ai/2025-five-trends.

Christopher Penn 06:10
It comes with a nice, lovely generated image of a crystal ball. I probably should have just used a photo of me holding it. We’ve taken the last 90 days of conversations from subreddits on Reddit, in particular SEO and Big SEO, the Content Marketing subreddit, the Social Media subreddit, Influencer Marketing, five different AI forums, and sort of general marketing. What we’ve put together is essentially what are the obvious trends, what are the less obvious trends, and what are the non-obvious trends for each of these. Now, I will say, even with generative AI, there’s still a lot to go through. There’s 89 pages in the summary version of what was over 1.5 million words of conversation.

Christopher Penn 07:02
We had to do a lot of filtering because there are a lot of replies and comments on these posts like, “You’re a jerk!” and “You smell!” That stuff isn’t super relevant to detecting trends. But what we ended up with was actually fairly useful. So, I figured today we could spend some time maybe briefly hitting on a couple of the big obvious, less obvious, and non-obvious ones in these categories. We are not going to read all 89 pages of this out loud—that would take forever. So, of the buffet of topics here, let me put it back to you two. Which one do you want to start with?

Katie Robbert 07:38
Let’s start with influencer marketing.

Christopher Penn 07:43
Influencer marketing.

Katie Robbert 07:44
What is new and coming up and interesting in influencer marketing? And can you make this a scooch bigger?

Christopher Penn 07:54
Thank you.

Katie Robbert 07:54
Oh, there we go. Perfect.

Christopher Penn 07:56
Influencer marketing. In this report, the first thing you get is the current state, which is a summary of the corpus itself, and then we get to the trend. So, let’s very quickly go through the current state. People are looking for more efficient tools to manage and do outreach—no surprise there. The complexities of pricing and conversation: how do you figure out what an influencer should cost? Searching for people who are not just walking ad machines that you can actually have a real, professional partnership with; the platforms and channels—where should you be working with influencers—dealing with scams and misleading practices; the segment of micro and nano influencers; how AI plays a role, how talent management and dealing with talent managers plays a role in influencer marketing. So, those are some of the big areas of where influencer marketing is currently being discussed.

Christopher Penn 08:43
So, if we scroll down to our obvious trends, number one—this is the most frequent trend, most likely to be the case—continued growth of micro and nano influencers. Micro defined as 10,000 to 100,000 followers, and nano under 10,000 followers. Brands will increasingly partner with smaller ones as they don’t cost as much.

Katie Robbert 09:05
I like that this is called “Obvious Trends” because I’m like, “Yeah, no kidding.” It is interesting that influencer marketing tends to continue to be such a head-scratcher for people: How do you use influencers? What do you pay them? Do they have representation? How do we measure the effectiveness? It’s interesting to me that it’s still coming up as a trend for 2025 versus just a standard marketing tactic.

Christopher Penn 09:47
John, what do you think? Given that you and I both fit in the category of micro-influencer…

John Wall 09:52
I know I need to get a shirt that says “Nanoman,” or something.

Katie Robbert 10:02
Going to change your title on the website.

John Wall 10:03
All my… Nanoman. Nanoman. Yeah, it’s right on the mic. I would totally expect to see these exact results for scraping that body of work. These are the topics that come up at the top of the list. Katie, it’s interesting how—when—I understand why people have so much difficulty with this, or why it gets covered so heavily. I mean, it’s basically you hire somebody who’s big in the space, and you do stuff with them. It’s not like it’s brain surgery. And yet, there are a lot of people trying to put a lot of structure and have a ton of questions about like how it should work and where should it go. But, yeah, it’s interesting, too.

John Wall 10:42
One thing I loved about this report is that it addresses the idea that it can hold, it can sit and ride with completely contradictory trends. It can say nano-influencers are the thing, but then it can say big, huge celebrities are the name for big brands. It totally doesn’t—every other trends article I’ve ever read is always like, “This is the one way that it’s going to be.” Whereas this puts everything out there, and there are a lot of divergent opinions, even contradictory. But it makes sense that out of millions of marketers, they are going to be trying everything.

Christopher Penn 11:22
Exactly. Go ahead, Katie.

Katie Robbert 11:24
I was going to say what I do like here—and this was something we were talking about when we were editing this report yesterday—is how it ties into the actual trend that I think is going to be happening more so in 2025, personalization. So, marketers can expect a shift in focus toward smaller creators. This suggests a move away from mass marketing to more personalized interactions and more direct connection with target audiences. That, to me, I’m like, “Oh, well, that makes sense.” That’s why I would want to focus on micro and nano influencers.

Katie Robbert 12:10
Because in the dawn, the age, the era of AI—whatever you want to call it—the renaissance, people are desperately seeking: How do we personalize our marketing when everything feels so mass-produced? This tells me in this report, “Oh, this is how I do it. Okay, got it.”

Christopher Penn 12:33
Exactly. So, I’m going to very quickly go through the rest of the obvious ones so that we can get to the less obvious stuff. Number two: transparency and authenticity—a no-brainer. Number three: AI-driven influencer tools—also a no-brainer. Short-form video dominance—also a “duh.” Number five: performance-based collaborations, aka, “What are we paying all this money for?” That’s kind of obvious. Creator commerce and product collaborations—get these people to sell something instead of just talking; focus on retention and long-term relationships; greater emphasis on user-generated content; better analytics and tracking; and diversification of platforms. Those are the obvious trends, and you don’t need this report—or you shouldn’t need this report—to know that those are the trends. So, with that, let’s go into the less obvious stuff. This is where we should get into the interesting stuff.

Christopher Penn 13:16
Number one: the emergence of anti-influencer sentiment. There is a subtle but noticeable weariness—consumers and creators—regarding the over-commercialization of the influencer space. Now, you wouldn’t know that if you’re on social media today because everybody’s trying to be an influencer. But this is happening, and I think this is an interesting trend to talk about.

Katie Robbert 13:43
We’re all tired of everything, to be quite honest. I say that in the sense of there’s so much content being generated at any given time on any given platform by any given person. We’re in this cycle of churn, churn, create, create to game the algorithm, get the eyeballs, get the impressions, get the audience, get the this, get the that. There’s so much that everything is exhausting. So, when I see this, I’m like “The emergence of the anti-influencer.” I’m like, “Yes, say more.” Because what happens with influencers—and this is not a knock against influencer programs—but influencer programs that are not done well, it feels very… same. There’s so much sameness.

Katie Robbert 14:43
So, basically, they will say, “Okay, John Wall is a nano influencer.” But five other companies also have him as a nano influencer. So, John Wall is now becoming a micro—macro—influencer versus a nano influencer, and I’m starting to see him everywhere, and I’m seeing the same messages everywhere, and I’m seeing the same campaigns everywhere, despite John Wall being a nano influencer. It feels very “too much” to me.

Christopher Penn 15:13
Yep. Which speaks to the less obvious trend number two, which is the rise in regional influencers—people who are doing a niche—in this case a geographic niche—but having that niche be something where this person knows this particular thing and they’re not trying to be everything to everyone. I think that’s something that we don’t see a whole lot when it comes to influencers. They’re all trying to be everything to everybody.

Katie Robbert 15:44
I think the challenge with influencers is the name “influencer.” You immediately associate it with someone who is well-known, has a lot of followers. Even if we have “Nanoman” up here, who doesn’t have all the followers, there’s still this expectation that he has some kind of influence over his audience, versus what I’m reading as this regional influencer—someone who’s maybe not that well-known, but knows their stuff, is a real subject matter expert. There are so many of those people out there in the world who should be speaking to your brand, your strategy, your services, because you want to have that authoritative voice. The reason that companies don’t go with them is because of their follower account. To me, that is just a huge missed opportunity.

Katie Robbert 16:42
I would rather hear from someone who knows what they’re talking about than someone who is spread over five different brands and sort of saying the same generic things.

Christopher Penn 16:52
Yeah, here’s an example. This is Steve Sherlock, who’s been a friend of ours, a friend of the Boston Media Makers community for, like, 20 years now. His thing is Franklin, Massachusetts. That’s where he’s based. He goes to town meetings; he does all the stuff locally; he’s at the various different high school things. He’s got 1,000 followers. So, he fits in that category of nano-influencer. But if you want to know who to talk to in Franklin, Massachusetts, and know someone who can make introductions within the community, he has far more pull than some rando on Twitch who may not even be able to find Franklin, Massachusetts, on a map.

Katie Robbert 17:28
I mean, I can find Franklin, Massachusetts, on a map.

John Wall 17:32
I think they don’t allow Twitch in Franklin, even. I think that’s a thing.

Katie Robbert 17:36
All I have to do is throw a rock from my house, and I can find Franklin, Massachusetts.

Christopher Penn 17:41
Exactly. Now, if we skip down—I’m going to again, I’ll breeze through the remainder of the less obvious trends so we can get to the non-obvious trends and influences—to see how the data extraction went. We have increased demand for specialized talent managers for specific types of contracts; the blurring of lines between agencies, platforms, and freelancers; live shopping and interactive content as key drivers, which we all saw for this past year; data privacy and security; the blurring of lines between content creator and influencer—those two things are not the same, but they are starting to be; experimentation with new formats, particularly podcasts and newsletters; creative autonomy and control; and the potential of Reddit as a niche platform.

Christopher Penn 18:19
Now, in the non-obvious stuff, we get two things like the rise of “prosumer influencers”—which is people who are not professional influencers full-time. They’re actually people more like us who have day jobs, who have things that… We’re not personalities all the time. We actually have real work to do. But there are people in the audience who treat us as though we are influencers.

Katie Robbert 18:50
All right, John, do you want to update your title from “Nanoman” to “Prosumer?”

John Wall 18:55
I am the Anti-Nanoman Prosumer. I think I need to tack all those badges on there.

Katie Robbert 19:00
Okay, we’ll get you some new business cards.

John Wall 19:03
Right.

Christopher Penn 19:04
Our friend Ashley Zeckman often talks about this in “Types of Influencers.” One of the things she says is there’s a difference between an influencer and a subject matter expert. They’re not necessarily the same thing. You could have somebody who’s very popular who has no idea what they’re talking about. The only thing they can say is the script that you give them, because otherwise they’ll say things that are blatantly wrong.

Katie Robbert 19:28
This goes back to what I was just talking about with the regional influencers: I would rather listen to a subject matter expert than someone who’s super popular. I remember back when we worked at the agency, Chris, talking about the different kinds of influencers. You had the megaphone influencer, who had, like, a bazillion followers. It didn’t matter what they did; they could hawk any old product. Then you had sort of that mid-range influencer, and then you had that more niche influencer. It sounds like over the years, it’s evolved into even more granular categories of influencers, because it’s no longer good enough just to get the Kardashian-level influencer to put on your brand, because those types of influencers are so overexposed and overused.

Katie Robbert 20:23
We know they’re not subject matter experts, and we’re looking—as we look for personalization—we’re also looking for authority. If I’m looking for someone to speak on podcasts, I don’t want a Joe Rogan for a lot of reasons. But I don’t want a Joe Rogan as the influencer of podcasts. I want like a John Wall, who’s a subject matter expert on all things podcasts. That’s who I want to listen to.

Christopher Penn 20:55
Exactly. There are a few others in here: B2B marketing, B2B influencer marketing, multi-tiered influencer programs; the rise of AI-generated brand assets—this one I thought was very interesting—the emphasis on creator-led events. This is, instead of having an influencer show up at your event, having—you essentially sponsoring—the influencer’s event. I’ll give you an example of this. The creator James Hoffman is well-known on YouTube. He’s one of the “coffee people,” along with Morgan—oh gosh, what’s her name? But James has been known for being the “coffee guy,” talks about all things coffee. He started doing in-person events live on stage—this was “tasting dangerously old coffee liquors” in a live crowd in London, sponsored by—whoever sponsored it. But the…

Christopher Penn 21:51
The sponsor got to do a 15-minute segment in the middle, talking through whatever the thing is that they were hawking. But he had enough pull to fill an auditorium in London with his rabid fans, who paid—I want to say—like, anywhere from $80 to $200 per ticket just to be at this tasting event. It’s a really good example of an influencer where the creator is now leading the event, as opposed to just showing up at the event. That’s interesting.

Katie Robbert 22:25
Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, John.

John Wall 22:27
I was just saying that’s interesting. It is a certain level of influencer that can pack a theater. I mean, that’s because that’s the opposite of what we’ve always faced. If you go pick any one geographic area, like the number of B2B marketers and AI marketing influencers, you’ve got 20 people that are there. You’re not going to fill an arena, but everybody loves coffee, so James is able to rock it worldwide.

Katie Robbert 22:55
How is this different—so, this is an event solely for James Hoffman—but how is this different from Social Media Marketing World, or something, looking to bring on a James Hoffman as the opening keynote, for example? Like, how is this different? If I’m new to influencer marketing, how do I differentiate the two?

Christopher Penn 23:25
So, the example with Social Media Marketing World will be like the standard thing: “Hey, Christopher Penn is going to be speaking at Social Media Marketing World,” as opposed to this example, which is, “Come to the Christopher Penn conference”—which is going to be his thing—where he’s on stage all day, foaming at the mouth for eight hours. You’ll be issued earplugs and bandages when your ears start to bleed. But it is solely about that person. There’s no one else. With Social Media Marketing World, you are competing with so many other speakers and brands and advertisers. Whereas a creator-led event is focused on that person. In particular, it’s what John was saying: the creator is bringing the audience.

Christopher Penn 24:07
The brand doesn’t have the responsibility of trying to gather up the audience and put them in one place and entertain them. The creator is pulling from their audience and saying, “Out of the 2.7 million people who follow James Hoffman, he can get 500 of them into a theater in London, and that’s enough to make the evening profitable.” Then you add the company—there was some software company who sponsored it—who is the sole sponsor, and everyone in the theater gets the blessing of the celebrity that they’re there to see, endorsing this brand on stage.

Katie Robbert 24:40
Interesting. So, that really speaks to needing subject matter experts versus influencers. Because if you’re going to have, for example, the Chris Penn event, and it’s only him, and he’s going to charge people to come hear what he has to say, he better have something of value to say for however long the event is, because otherwise why would anybody show up?

Christopher Penn 25:08
Right? So, it really is targeted around those influencers who have a very strong brand, where they can get people to show up.

Katie Robbert 25:20
It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out because there are still a lot of very loud voices in this industry—the B2B industry and B2C. But I’m curious to see, as this plays out, how many of them could not only sell a ticket, but also have something of value to say so that they could maybe do a repeat performance.

Christopher Penn 25:48
Exactly. This is a good example of what’s in our 2025 trend report. This is just one of the six segments in here. The value, as you can see, is that there’s a lot of stuff in here that isn’t going to be at the top of the chart like, “Oh, influencer marketing is going to be a thing.” “Yeah, we know.” But what about creator-led events? Was that on your roadmap? Performance-based revenue share, influencer-led user research—is that something that’s even on your roadmap if you’re dealing with influencers? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s at least a thought starter, and it’s something that not a lot of people are doing, but there are enough people doing it that the model is able to detect it in conversation.

Katie Robbert 26:36
Interesting.

Christopher Penn 26:37
All right, let’s do this. Let’s spin the wheel and pick another area. Where do you want to go, John?

Katie Robbert 26:45
You get to pick one this time.

John Wall 26:47
I get to pick one. I hate to go to SEO, but we’ve got to go to SEO.

Katie Robbert 26:53
We’ve got to go to SEO.

Christopher Penn 26:55
All right, let’s go to SEO. The main things going on right now—the current themes: website migration challenges; indexing issues; backlink strategies and quality; content creation; AI and keyword research; Core Web Vitals and technical local SEO; algorithm updates; tools and software careers. Those are the eight major themes that people are talking about. Let’s hit up the obvious trends. Number one: ta-da! AI-augmented SEO workflows. Huge surprise. Shocking.

John Wall 27:24
Machine work.

Christopher Penn 27:26
Yeah, but it is… that’s definitely on the top of the obvious trends. Number two: user experience and content quality. One of the things I thought was interesting was that when you dig into the conversations, it really is starting to show that SEO folks are realizing the number of shortcuts that work is dwindling down to effectively zero because the algorithms behind search engines and AI overviews and all these things are getting sophisticated. You can’t game them anymore. There’s just no hope of gaming these things. They’re just too smart. So you have to do the challenging thing, which is actually create stuff people want.

John Wall 28:13
Do good work.

Katie Robbert 28:14
Yeah, you’re asking too much of me.

Christopher Penn 28:21
Content quality, backlinks, and the E-A-T framework remain valuable next year; prioritizing local SEO and Google Business profiles; increasing emphasis on AI-generated search results—that one is reasonably obvious; increased multi-channel marketing, aka, “SEO is too dangerous to have all your eggs in one basket”; data and transparency; decreased value of manipulative technologies; shift from keyword density to semantics and volatility. So those are the obvious trends. These are the… yeah, no kidding. That’s been the case.

Katie Robbert 28:54
I was going to say that’s not new information.

Christopher Penn 28:56
Not in the slightest. Let’s look at some of the less obvious stuff: intent-driven SEO and content personalization. Content personalization, in particular, is something that the industry is still not particularly doing a good job at. The reason for that is it’s so computationally intensive to do that. Also, people don’t know how to personalize. One of the things that’s kind of a big gap is that because you don’t know who your audience is, you can’t personalize your content for them. If only they had something like, I don’t know, an ideal customer profile, they might be able to personalize the content on their site better.

Katie Robbert 29:38
I was going to say the same thing. If you’re interested, you can go to TrustInsights.ai contact and get “Nanoman” on the phone. He’ll talk you through how to get your own ICPs. But that was my first thought, too: the reason why content personalization feels so hard is because you probably don’t have a good handle on who your audience is. So, who are you writing to? Because the default is, “Well, let’s be everything to everyone,” and there’s no personalization there. That’s sort of the same criticism I have with macro influencers—being everything to everyone. There’s no personalization there. So, I feel like these two go hand in hand.

Christopher Penn 30:23
Exactly. So, you have conversational AI optimization, which has been around for a bit; actionable content; original insights, which again, that falls into the—to me—obvious category except that no one’s doing it still. It’s still not something that people produce; community-driven engagement; using communities to drive SEO value, which is a thing because you need signals to get algorithms to recognize what you’re doing. Zero-click—Rand Fishkin, over at Sparktoro, talks about this all the time—the fact that search engines continue to take clicks away. A differentiator—ethical SEO and transparency becomes a differentiator; first-party data focus, which, again, is something that people should be doing, but aren’t; dynamic content based on user signals and geolocation—this is an interesting one because we have so much technology for doing things like displaying consent banners.

Christopher Penn 31:15
“Hey, you’re located in the EU, so you get more warnings before you can use our website.” But it doesn’t do anything with the content itself to make it more usable or to make it different or tailored or customized; visual and video content. Almost no one’s doing a good job with this, and there really is no excuse for it anymore because we have so many ways to get content out there, in particular YouTube. This is something we’ve talked about for a while. And by “a little bit,” I mean five years. If you’re not putting content on places like YouTube, you’re missing the world’s second-largest search engine.

Katie Robbert 32:04
I feel like the reason people don’t is that text-based content is easier to generate. “Well, I don’t want to be on camera, or what do I create a video about if it’s not text?” “Oh, you mean I just have to read a script? Well, that’s pretty flat. I don’t want to put that up.” I feel like there’s a block in terms of what to actually create to put on YouTube.

Christopher Penn 32:32
This last one—at first, when I read it, I thought, “Oh duh, that’s obvious.” But then I was like, “Actually, it really isn’t.” Which is: if you are participating in forums, private forums, niches, are you optimizing the content you post in those places to be found by that internal forum’s own search engine? Because a lot of them—like some of these different forum hosting services that companies can use for private forums—have very primitive search engines. They’re purely keyword-based search engines. So, as you’re posting on these things, are you optimizing for the internal search engine of the places you spend time?

Katie Robbert 33:13
Interesting.

Christopher Penn 33:18
Now we head into the much less obvious stuff, to some degree: the rise of micro-conversions and engagement tracking using for SEO—this is a big deal because a lot of the time, the overall digital marketing team is talking about micro-conversions. SEO folks tend to either focus on one of two things: either, “Here’s how many leads we generated,” or, “Hey, we got you all this traffic, and what you do with it is up to you.” There’s not a lot in between. Not a lot of folks spending time in that gray zone between them. Number two is AI and SEO working in collaboration, which, again, would be one of those things we would hope people are doing; data-driven strategic SEO—getting people to just use the data that they have. They’re not doing a particularly good job of that.

Christopher Penn 34:09
Number four is one of the really fun, interesting, “rehumanizing SEO content.” A backlash against AI-generated content will shift toward authentic, human-created content that connects with audiences on an emotional level by devaluing AI-generated copy. Again, that makes sense when you read the default output of a search engine of a generative AI tool. Katie, when you read the first version of this report, you’re like, “I can 100% tell this was written by a machine.”

Katie Robbert 34:36
Oh, well, yes, it was very robotic and very technical, and there was no personality to it. But I’m curious, Chris, because I remember earlier this year—I don’t remember the exact specifics—but you were saying that when consumers were given human-generated content and AI-generated content, they didn’t mind the AI-generated content. It sounds like you’re saying that is shifting to they do mind. They don’t want that AI-generated content anymore. What happened?

Christopher Penn 35:09
What happened is this: a whole bunch of marketers got lazy with AI tools and have generated a whole bunch of garbage. It’s worse in quality than the garbage they were previously creating. So, the garbage is of even lower quality. As a result, when you look at the studies that have been done that have been peer-reviewed, they were done with expertise on both sides. The people who are creating human-led content were experts in the content they were creating. The people who are creating AI-generated content were expert in the use of language models. In those situations, the language models perform better. When you have a bad manager, like, an intern go use ChatGPT to make five blog posts, you don’t get expert use of the tools.

Christopher Penn 35:57
As people are publishing more and more AI-generated content that is blatantly obviously machine-made and poorly made, you’re getting more of that backlash: “This is just a sea of garbage.” So, yeah, thanks, humans, ruining it for everybody else.

Katie Robbert 36:24
I don’t think that’s how that works, Chris.

Christopher Penn 36:28
Blurring the lines between SEO and user experience. This is something we see with many of our clients, where you can optimize content for SEO, but if the website sucks, then you’ve generated traffic, but it has no business impact. SEO, in particular, because search engines themselves are now getting good at understanding things like images and layout. When you look at Google’s new Gemini Flash model, it understands the visual layout of a page. It’s unsurprising that algorithms can get more sensitive to, “This is actually a page worth visiting;” the rise of long-form audio content, voice search, and podcast audiobooks—long-form audio—which, again, would be a general trend in marketing. But it’s interesting that it shows up specifically within the conversations that SEO folks are having, and their recognition that this is a thing.

Christopher Penn 37:23
Brand reputation and trust. Again, it’s interesting. We used to say that SEO was a trailing indicator of brand. You could measure your brand strength by how people searched. Now we’re almost flipping that around, saying, “In order for SEO to work, you need to have a working brand. You need to have a brand that people remember so that they remember to search for it.” Because if no one remembers who you are, they’re not going to search for you. Which is an interesting flip that has really changed in the last five years; hyperlocal and niche focus; server-side optimization infrastructure; and then, intent-based meta descriptions. I thought that was interesting because we typically do keyword-based meta descriptions—”Best management consulting firm Boston,” and things like that.

Christopher Penn 38:12
Instead of having more intent-based things—which goes back to what we were talking about earlier about personalization—you might have different metadata being served up based on the intent, which could be a very interesting technical implementation of SEO.

John Wall 38:31
Would that be if you were doing the keyword, you’d be using for the meta tag—”Thai food in my neighborhood,” things like that?

Christopher Penn 38:40
Depending on how granular you might be getting, you could have things like, “A Pad Thai dish that’s not too spicy.” You might have content that has that specific metadata.

Katie Robbert 38:57
I feel like this “intent-based meta descriptions” dovetails with an earlier trend in SEO of intent-based keywords versus—I forget exactly what the thing was. But basically, this is the second time I’m seeing “intent-based” in SEO. Clearly, intent-based is what you want to be doing versus, “I like this word. I want to rank for it.”

Christopher Penn 39:27
Because that word may have no relevance. This is where understanding your customer journey, your buyer’s journey, is so important because if you’re optimizing for things that are too high up in the journey, too early in the journey, chances are you’re not going to get any traffic, because things like AI overviews will simply eat that. If people are saying, “What is Pad Thai?”—I’m sorry, your local Thai restaurant is probably not going to even show up for that. Google, in particular, is just going to show you an automated summary. But if you say, “Pad Thai in Franklin, Massachusetts; it’s not too spicy,” now you’re getting toward really into that very clear commercial intent, but also your emotional intent and your mental state.

Christopher Penn 40:19
So that’s just—again, that was two of the six areas in the 2025 Trends Guide. To be clear, to remind folks, this is derived from real conversations, which means there are gaps because if someone’s not talking about it, obviously a summary of it isn’t going to have it. There may be things that are completely novel that no one knows about yet but could be technologically happening behind the scenes. For example, yesterday, Google released Gemini 2, which has live interaction with streaming data. That is something that we don’t even know the full applications of yet. So it’s not going to show up in a marketing trends report because marketers don’t even know what it is, much less how to make use of it. It is not the definitive guide to what will happen in 2025.

Christopher Penn 41:13
It’s just conversation trends extrapolated from the things people are talking about now.

Katie Robbert 41:21
Something for us to consider moving into next year: when you started talking about how we pulled this data together, you said that typically marketers start somewhere in June to collect and cull through the data to put together the trends for the following year. For this particular report, you started maybe earlier this week, pulling the last 90 days of conversations from Reddit, demonstrating the more immediate analysis that you can get. I wouldn’t call it “real-time,” but it’s closer to what’s happening now. Marketers should be thinking about looking at the trends on a more regular basis other than just annually. Because if we had done this in January of 2024 versus when we just did this in December of 2024, the report would likely read about 70% differently.

Katie Robbert 42:19
The way technology is moving, I think it’s a huge missed opportunity to wait until the end of the year to ask yourself, “I wonder what’s going to happen next.” You should be thinking about how we can be more agile and think about what the trends are for the next month and time block it like that. If you’re thinking about a year at a time, next week this report is already going to be out of date. There’s going to be a lot that’s changed—not just with AI, but with SEO, with influencers, all the pieces. So, that would be my 2025 trends wish for everybody: to do this monthly, not annually.

Christopher Penn 43:07
There’s no excuse not to. Speaking of things that are rapidly out of date, one of the things that Google came out with yesterday—and this is only available in the paid individual version of Gemini, not the workspace version and not the free version—is their research tool. You give it a query. “What happened in marketing in 2024? Build a comprehensive research report.” It hits up the Google catalog of search results. In this case, it grabbed 31 different websites, and it’s going to synthesize, based on its research plan, what it thinks I wanted—that was a terrible prompt. You would want to have a much more extensive prompt detailing exactly what kind of research you want, what sources you think are credible and which aren’t.

Christopher Penn 43:55
I can see a bunch in here, like Forbes Council, that are like, “No.” But this is a research tool that would allow you—to your point, Katie—to do these kinds of analyses way more frequently than once a year.

Katie Robbert 44:13
John—“Nanoman”—final thoughts.

John Wall 44:18
I just like—it’s like one to grow on. Doing this every month gives you a whole different take on the world, especially, and this wouldn’t be a big deal. I know with your model, Chris, you could have it do the delta—just show us everything that’s changed over the past month—that would be really interesting.

Christopher Penn 44:34
Exactly. One of the things that is going to set apart winners and losers in the age of AI is who’s got the best data. If you’re not collecting the data and keeping it clean and using it, you’re going to have a really bad time. So, if you would like a copy of the 2025 Trends report, you can go to TrustInsights.ai/2025-trends. It is free. Enjoy it. Leave us comments. Feel free to pop in the Slack group over at TrustInsights.ai/analytics-for-marketers. That is going to do it for this episode. We will talk to you next week for the Trust Insights holiday special. Katie, you look very confused because…

Katie Robbert 45:21
Not what we’re doing. Oh, fine.

Christopher Penn 45:25
I might wear a hat.

Katie Robbert 45:26
You could wear a hat. But just to be clear, it’s not a holiday special.

Christopher Penn 45:33
We’ll talk to you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/ti-podcast; a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai/analytics-for-marketers. See you next time!

 

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.