Marketing is evolving at breakneck speed, and 2025 is set to redefine the game. AI, hyper-personalization, and shifting consumer behavior are transforming how brands connect with audiences.
From AI-driven search engines reshaping discovery to new privacy regulations forcing a first-party data revolution, brands must adapt or risk falling behind.
In our recent webinar, Amsive experts Michael Coppola, CEO, and Lily Ray, VP, SEO Strategy & Research broke down the five biggest digital marketing shifts for 2025 with Ruben Quinones, SVP, Client Strategy.
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Catch the Key Takeaways
As digital marketing evolves, five critical trends are set to shape 2025. These shifts will redefine how brands connect with consumers, optimize visibility, and navigate an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.
#1 AI-Assisted Consumer Discovery
AI-driven search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are changing how consumers find information, chipping away at Google’s dominance. Brands must rethink SEO and search generally to optimize for AI-powered discovery.
#2 Hyper-Personalization & Authenticity
AI enables personalized marketing at scale, but consumers still crave genuine human connection. Finding the right balance between automation and authenticity will be key, keeping customers at the center of every strategy.
#3 The Rise of Niche Communities
Consumers are shifting away from broad social platforms toward private groups and specialized communities. Brands must engage in meaningful, platform-specific ways to stay relevant.
#5 Privacy-First Marketing & First-Party Data
With new privacy laws in effect and further regulations ahead, privacy is top-of-mind for consumers and will shift marketers’ data strategies to maintain compliance and consumer trust.
#5 Agility as a Competitive Advantage
The speed of change in marketing is accelerating. Brands that embrace agility, predictive analytics, and AI-first thinking will outpace competitors and drive better results.
These trends aren’t just industry shifts—they represent fundamental changes in how brands engage with their audiences. The key to success in 2025 will be adapting quickly, leveraging AI strategically, and keeping consumers at the center of marketing efforts.
Watch The Webinar On Demand
Dive into the Transcript
Ruben Quinones (00:08)
Hey everyone. Thank you for joining us. I am your moderator for today, Ruben Quinones, and I’m looking forward to the discussion today where we’re going to be talking about the biggest digital trends shaping 2025: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and now Deep Seek. What does this all mean? It means that we’re just running at this rapid pace as marketers, and we’re just trying to keep up.
So, there are going to be five transformations that we’re going to be talking about today:
1. The AI-assisted consumer discovery process. How do brands stay visible as search evolves?
2. Hyper-personalization and authenticity. How do we balance between AI-driven marketing and human connections?
3. The rise of niche communities, which is making it very fragmented. Through this fragmentation in this digital ecosystem, how do we navigate that?
4. Privacy regulations and data strategies. With new laws shaping our marketing landscape, how do we navigate that as marketers?
5. The speed of this transformation is just amazing over the last few years. How do we adapt and remain agile as brands? How do we define success in 2025?
So, to help me do that, we’ve got two incredible experts: Michael Coppola, President and CEO of Amsive, and Lily Ray. If you guys want to say a quick hello before we dive right into it.
Michael Coppola (01:48)
Hey, everybody! Excited today. Thanks, Ruben, for this setup. Great topic, passionate about it, and glad to have Lily join us today too and share her perspectives.
Lily Ray (02:02)
Yeah, thank you both. I’m super excited to be here. There’s a lot happening in this space right now, so excited to share some of our thoughts.
Ruben Quinones (02:09)
Not enough. It seems like every day there’s a new platform coming up and new strategies that we have to employ, but I’ll dive right into it. And if there are questions, feel free to leave them in the chat. We’re going to leave some time at the end to allow for some questions.
But Mike, I’ll start off with you. Before we get into those transformations, let’s talk about the state of digital marketing. How do you see 2025 shaping out with AI playing this more prevalent role? How is this changing how marketers are approaching their strategies this year?
How AI Is Transforming Digital Marketing in 2025
Michael Coppola (02:45)
Yeah, it’s really—I think where last year was much more about test and trial, I think this year is sort of adapt or get left behind. AI has been an accelerant. It’s an accelerant of change, but it’s also an accelerant in how we go about crafting our strategies using automation. But it’s also an accelerant for how we need to approach our work.
I’d say in past years, we were focused on thinking more digital-first. Now, it’s about building this almost muscle as a marketer that is an AI-first mindset. And that’s kind of the adaptability as a marketer that we have to cross that transformation.
If we have not, I do see people still struggling with that—to start thinking AI-first. And then when it comes to actually the strategies, it’s less about just automating everything and more about becoming more precise with how we use it.
From a consumer behavior perspective, using predictive analytics, marketers are just becoming faster at getting to the results that we want.
So, we’ve been leveraging a lot of AI at Amsive and a lot of automation for years. And we’ve really accelerated our ability to drill into real high-intent audiences that have better predictability to power a lot of campaigns.
Two years ago, it was a ton of automation and a ton of data sourcing, but not the accelerant we’re seeing now to actually be more predictive in those audiences in a more transparent way.
I think that’s shaping a lot of our strategy as we go to market, but I think it’s also shaping us as marketers to really start thinking AI-first and really looking at the enablement it provides.
Ruben Quinones (04:53)
Yeah, no. And Lily, I guess maybe the same question—or just what are you seeing as an introduction to this? What are you seeing in the landscape overall?
Lily Ray (05:05)
I mean, as it relates to search, I think the big elephant in the room is obviously that people’s behavior is shifting. I think a lot of people are shifting towards starting their searches in different places, whether that be—obviously, I think ChatGPT is the biggest game changer right now.
But of course, a lot of people are searching on TikTok first or Amazon first, and so there’s a lot more diversification within the space, which is really changing the game as far as SEO is concerned.
We have to really concern ourselves with where our audiences are, where they’re spending their time, and as people start to use large language models more and more to answer questions, how can we maintain visibility on those platforms?
Ruben Quinones (05:44)
And I probably jumped ahead a little bit, right? Because this is really going into transformation one.
So for the first time—and gosh, I didn’t know this until recently—I feel like Google’s been dominant for the last decade or so. They were always above 90%. But in Q4 for the first time—correct me if I’m wrong, Lily—they dropped below 90% market share when it came to search.
And maybe we can start off with that. You were kind of cueing in on that with these AI-assisted tools like ChatGPT or Gemini reshaping discovery. What are you seeing as some of the top strategies for ensuring that I, as a brand—not me personally, but as a brand—remain visible in this new ecosystem?
AI-Assisted Search: How Brands Can Stay Visible in ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews
Lily Ray (06:30)
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the big question that a lot of marketers and search marketers are really focused on this year—really understanding how these different large language models and AI tools are sourcing information and gaining knowledge about people, brands, places, and things.
What we’re trying to reverse-engineer right now is: How do you get mentioned in ChatGPT? How do you get mentioned in people’s AI overviews?
And luckily, the answers that we’re finding are that a lot of those same tactics and approaches that we’ve used for SEO for years seem to be pretty consistent as far as getting cited in large language models.
So whether that’s good website architecture, clear answers to questions throughout your content, good messaging throughout social media platforms, structured data—there are some new discussions around things like an LLMs.txt web standards file, which would be something like robots.txt to kind of inform large language models about how to navigate through your content.
But I would say right now, making sure that you’re everywhere and that your brand has a really consistent voice and messaging throughout the different platforms—because we’re seeing ChatGPT and Gemini sourcing information from a lot of different places—so you just want to make sure that you’re visible in all those places.
Ruben Quinones (07:41)
So it’s almost like, Lily, what you would employ and utilize to surface in Google, some of that is transferable to these platforms as well, if I’m hearing you correctly.
Lily Ray (07:51)
Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think the more that you can get ahead of how people are searching in LLMs—because that search behavior is a little bit distinct from how people have used search engines for many years—making sure that your brand is clearly answering those questions in all the places that large language models would look to answer those questions.
Ruben Quinones (08:10)
And then just being visible in other platforms. We’ve seen Reddit play a more prevalent role in search. It’s just making sure that beyond the website, you’ve got visibility on those platforms as well.
Lily Ray (08:21)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, the LLMs—like ChatGPT when it’s connected to the internet—actually use social media posts a lot. So you want to be everywhere.
Ruben Quinones (08:31)
Great. And Mike, I don’t know if you have anything to add to that or if there are any examples from the agency side that we’re utilizing as a brand that we’re utilizing and surfacing on AI?
Michael Coppola (08:50)
Yeah, I think what Lily said too, it’s a lot of the foundation, the same strategies feeding into these models. But I think we also—we’ve been through shifts before. This is the first time Google has lost overall market share.
But whether it’s Amazon sort of search behaviors, where it’s more about being purposeful—we want to be everywhere but be purposeful in the places that really align with your customer journey.
So often, marketers react, where Google wasn’t monetizing a lot of toilet paper searches, but that’s happening on Amazon in a very commoditized way. So that’s a different sort of search behavior.
And what we’re seeing is that same shift to—I would say in-platform with TikTok—there’s a very specific type of search journey that’s there that would need to kind of align with what my brand or my product niche is.
And really, AI and our chatbots—they’re accelerants to a different type of access to that same foundational content.
So for example, I still think brands will, when I think about adjusting their content strategy, it still is—what are those blocks? What are those niches that you really need to own within that consumer journey? They’re just going to be expressed in different formats in different places.
But be purposeful to be really, really strong in your niche. So if you are more of a discovery brand with more broad content, places like Discover—and we’ve had a lot of success mining using AI tools to find gaps in comparing competitive content, places where then we can drill in on long-tail queries that become really discoverable both in Reddit and Google Discover.
So I think that we’re using those AI tools to shape or find some of those micro-niche strategies, which are still a building block of what we were doing before. It’s just accelerating our ability to get to the really good answers of what’s in the long tail, for example, that’s successful.
Ruben Quinones (11:26)
You bring up long tail and just kind of stimulated this question that I had around long-tail. It was always this thing for search. Is it even more so with AI, Lily? Is that even more prevalent that we have to be more conscious of long-tail search queries?
Lily Ray (11:46)
Yeah, definitely. There’s a variety of different new studies that have come out about this—about how people are searching on LLMs. And for sure, the queries are much, much longer. They’re much more conversational, and, in fact, they are conversations.
I think one of the main ways that people are using tools like ChatGPT is literally to have a conversation. So that’s a brand new way of using these tools compared to what we used to do with just Google and Bing and traditional searches.
So I think it presents even more opportunities for brands to be visible because as people are able to have those deeper conversations with large language models, it’ll just surface more diverse information.
Ruben Quinones (12:25)
Great, great. Just to keep on pace here, we’ll go to our second transformation that we’re kind of observing.
So, 32% of customers are more willing to spend when brands are using a customer’s preferred channel for communication.
And so maybe I’ll kick it over to you, Mike, on the recent stat by Salesforce that talks about unifying customer data sources. That 31% of marketers feel confident about unifying customer data sources being unified.
So it’s still a small number, I would think. So it’s still a challenge. So what are some of the biggest challenges that brands are facing when it comes to truly personalized customer journeys, and how AI can help bridge that gap?
Michael Coppola (13:19)
And if 32% are confident, 31%, so many are unconfident. I think it’s because we’re still dealing with a lot of fragmentation of data in different silos on the brand side and data from different access points.
So I think this past year when we looked at the beginning of last year, there were a lot of brands saying, “Alright, well, we’re going to invest in our foundation to unify our data.” A year later, they’re still not confident in that, and I think that’s the biggest challenge.
They may have stood up projects but didn’t understand what they’re actually dealing with and some of the challenges to connect those data sources.
So I think what’s been really great to see is a lot of the unified customer data platforms or CDPs starting to use a little bit more AI to bridge that gap—to connect all those data points to have a universal view of what my customer’s behaviors and browsing history are.
And that’s been really effective. And that’s sort of the basis of—now I can personalize my messaging more. I can create more personalized messaging because I feel more confident in my underlying data.
So I think we’re still, as an industry, struggling with the fragmentation of the data and the unification, and although projects started, a lot of them haven’t been so successful to get there.
So there are ways to bridge it a little bit with sort of the next gen of CDPs. And we see it in action—just putting sort of purchase history with browsing data together for e-commerce is to deploy email campaigns.
We’re seeing double engagement rates by just tapping into one more data source that wasn’t available before in someone’s structured data.
So the more we can pull it together, I think the more our response rates—let’s say in email—are just going to get better and better.
Ruben Quinones (15:39)
And obviously, as we continue to adapt, you’re going to be leaning on AI a bit more and more, but then that kind of potentially deteriorates the consumer personal journey or how you connect with them and how you’re authentic.
So consumers are just overwhelmed. They’re wanting or they’re craving authenticity. Lily, what do you think are some practical steps that brands can take to balance between hyper-personalization, leveraging AI for that, but also making sure they’re balancing it with a genuine connection?
Hyper-Personalization vs. Authenticity: Striking the Right Balance
Lily Ray (16:17)
Yeah, I mean, I think something we’ve seen a lot of in the last couple of years is brands have gotten really excited about using AI and automation, sometimes almost overusing it to a fault.
So I think the key is to balance automation with real human insights, real authentic human discussions, and expert insights.
And I would say also, where we’re going—at least in the SEO space—in 2025 is that less is more.
I think a lot of brands had a tendency early on to use these tools to scale a lot of content—a lot of maybe generic content with AI very quickly—but we’re starting to see with different algorithm updates and also just consumer behavior that people don’t love that all the time.
They want to feel something that’s a lot more authentic. They want to feel like it really came from the brand. It has real human insights, real expert insights, real first-party data.
So I think making sure that you’re leveraging AI and automation where it makes sense to do that, but while you can kind of maintain that authentic brand voice, those real, conveying brand values that you’ve had.
And also just making sure that you’re incorporating real human discussions and conversations into the content whenever possible.
Ruben Quinones (17:24)
So let’s not get rid of the humans right away.
Yeah, there was that recent article with the CEO that was kind of touting, “Hey, I cut down my workforce,” but sorry, Mike, go ahead.
Michael Coppola (17:36)
No, it’s just also a reminder that there’s an importance to the brand.
And I’m seeing that in some of the new opportunities that we get to pitch or be part of.
I can only see the shift—the need to personalize more, the need to use AI—but then just, and maybe it just happens to be recently, just all of a sudden the brand kind of coming back and center. The brand matters so much.
And just—you can do these things, you shouldn’t do them unless you do them with purpose and you have a way to keep your brand authentic or at least have proper guidance from the brand so it still resonates.
So I think marketers, as fast as we are moving, are also saying, “Hey, the brand needs—we have to measure everything against what does our brand identity stand for?”
So I’m seeing it in new RFPs coming across—more brands being more vocal about “Protect my brand.”
If you’re a performance marketing agency, I just don’t want to personalize and scale with the chance of losing who I am.
Ruben Quinones (18:52)
Simple, and correct me if I’m wrong, we’re also seeing how do you use AI as well as an agency?
So there’s always—there’s an ask between, yes, protect my brand, but I want to peek under your hood on how your agency is utilizing AI as well.
Michael Coppola (19:12)
Okay. Yeah. And different industries with different perspectives on that, Ruben, right?
Some of it is—we’re just not there in certain industries, and we’re still concerned about what using AI or how your organization uses AI—Is that going to give me challenges with compliance or security?
Or others are actually really looking to say, well, how can I take advantage of what you are doing to be more efficient, to do more things, to make a bigger impact, to either drive efficiency—which sometimes means costs—and can you do more with less?
Or two, it’s just performance. Can we improve?
So I see that being asked in probably all three ways, and we can speculate what’s the future of that.
But I think it’s more of those same three things. How much more value can you provide me as a partner, as an agency? What can I tap into that you’re doing?
Two, can you make it drive performance? But three, can you also keep me safe?
Ruben Quinones (20:29)
Yeah, no, that’s interesting, right? It’s like brands realize that we have to adapt to it.
So I don’t think there’s resistance on it, but balancing it with brand safety is key, obviously.
Okay, so we’ll hit on—and I think we hit on this before—but that’ll lead us to kind of data fragmentation.
So this is what we quoted before, the 31% of marketers are fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources.
So, fact—with fragmentation playing this more prevalent role, how do we double down on it?
So, Lily, search continues to be or grow to be more specialized with algorithms changing and user intent rapidly evolving.
What are some SEO tactics that brands should focus on to make sure that they’re relevant across these fragmented platforms?
Lily Ray (21:32)
Yeah, I mean, I think you mentioned specialization. I think that’s really key in 2025.
SEO for a long time was often synonymous with Google. We would just use Google and SEO synonymously, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore.
I think there are lots of different organic platforms where people can be discovering brands and then searching for content and searching for questions and answers.
So I think meeting users wherever they are—whether that be TikTok or forums or Reddit or WhatsApp—these are all potential organic marketing channels.
So just understanding how those different algorithms work, understanding what’s trending on those different platforms.
And I think one thing that’s been really effective for our clients on the SEO team is that our team has specialists in different platforms, in different areas.
So we have some people that are super focused on TikTok. We have some people that are really expert in YouTube.
We have a local SEO mini team, very focused on local SEO.
And just having that specialization and different subject matter expertise in all the different organic platforms is essential in 2025.
Ruben Quinones (22:34)
And if you had to maybe prioritize where we’re focusing our time more, I assume it’s still Google, but below that, where does AI play a role?
I know it’s starting to trickle in with traffic, right? You’ll see ChatGPT referrals, but is it Google first, and then within Google’s ecosystem, Google Discover?
Where do you feel like we’re leaning in more because that’s where the traffic is?
Lily Ray (23:00)
Yeah, I mean, it definitely depends on the category of website that we’re working on.
So obviously, if it’s a small brick-and-mortar business, we’re focused primarily on local SEO.
But if it’s a much more informational type of client, we’re going to be thinking a lot about the different AI tools and large language models and Google Discover for certain publishers that have more of that kind of engaging type of content.
So depending on what the site’s needs are, they might show up in different places in different ways.
But of course, making sure we’re checking all the boxes so we can be visible in all the different platforms where it makes sense for the client.
Michael Coppola (23:34)
Yeah, no, totally makes sense.
Yeah, it’s kind of like having a strategy versus having a bunch of tactics, where it goes back to understanding that purchase journey and where the points of interception are going to be based on our content or our purpose.
So it’s search, it’s your search presence, your sort of overall digital presence or web presence, but where’s your discovery presence?
It could be different than where your high-intent presence is, right? So it shifts universally.
Ruben Quinones (24:18)
Yeah, so I think—and talked about data before, Mike—so just integrating that data just continues to be this key challenge for marketers.
Is there an example that we could just talk through as far as a unified data strategy that we’ve kind of helped a client succeed across multiple platforms?
Michael Coppola (24:47)
Yeah, probably several, but I’m thinking there’s unifying data sometimes within different platforms that we have, but there’s also unifying data from offline platforms.
And I find that that sometimes can be a tremendous boost to online results.
In the CPG space, there’s a lot of retail data that can be pulled in, and whether you have access to SKU-level data or store-level data—there’s one retailer, CPG, that we work with, where we were able to extract really good point-of-sale data and retail data, unify that with our universal sort of customer profile, and then use that data to really build online audiences based on intent to fuel their e-commerce strategy.
And it was vastly different than when we were just aggregating our online data—that sort of propelled this particular CPG brand to really just enormous gains.
Obviously, ROAS metrics, but to kind of get into that top 1% of Shopify stores based on launch.
And if we didn’t unify that offline data, we’d probably be kind of mulling around too much with the data that we had access to through our e-commerce ecosystem, and we wouldn’t have been able to accelerate it that much.
That stands out as—just think offline too, whether it’s point-of-sale data, retail data, physical traffic data—there’s a lot of data.
But if you can unify it into a first-party data identity, that’s where a lot of the magic happens.
Ruben Quinones (26:50)
And I guess with this, and talking about doubling down on fragmentation—and it’s an impromptu question, clearly—but how do we report on success on that?
Or do we just focus on the top three platforms? But are we starting to integrate reporting around AI and how that’s playing a role or some of these smaller platforms?
Lily Ray (27:18)
Yeah, I mean, it’s still early days, but definitely our team is very focused on being able to report on these changes.
We’re putting together some new reporting around traffic referrers coming from different large language models.
So I think there are a lot of new studies recently coming out that show that traffic referrers from ChatGPT in particular are really growing.
So we’re reporting on that with our clients to just get an understanding of not only which platforms they’re being mentioned in—whether it’s Gemini or ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude—but also which content, which articles on their sites are receiving the most traffic from AI.
So we can kind of deduce what people are searching for in the large language models that’s leading them to find our content.
Ruben Quinones (28:07)
Yeah, that’s interesting. I would just think, “Oh, we’re just reporting out on referring traffic,” but being able to provide another dimension on the type of content that is being elevated in these platforms is probably even more important.
Lily Ray (28:22)
Definitely.
Michael Coppola (28:26)
And Lily, what also made me think about is the type of data that you get when you look at the referrers and you look at—you mentioned before, a stronger or a different type of long tail.
It also unlocks other insights to isolate that data around what that purchase decision or that discovery journey is.
Different intent signals that weren’t really available in the more traditional, shorter searches.
So it’s really interesting to kind of see that.
It could be voice-enabled, or it could be just the method in which we’re interacting differently with these models that give us really interesting data around more of the decision-making process, more of what’s important in that discovery journey that’s going on.
Ruben Quinones (29:23)
Mike, you said “unlocked.” I wonder if you checked ChatGPT for that, because that’s such a ChatGPT word.
Michael Coppola (29:29)
Is it “unlocked”?
Ruben Quinones (29:30)
Unlocked, yeah.
Michael Coppola (29:31)
Unlocked.
Ruben Quinones (29:32)
I think I saw a LinkedIn post where someone listed the most used terms, and “unlocked,” “delve,” and some of these other ones were on there.
I think I saw those words before AI came along, but now they’re bigger.
Michael Coppola (29:44)
And I find doing it yourself—being a marketer—this is probably one of the hardest things.
When you’re in a brand every day, it’s your job to think like your consumer.
And we get into these traps of thinking everyone has the same sort of discovery or the same way they go about it.
So I experiment a lot. I use tools just to see how someone—not like myself—would search.
And sometimes it’s asking questions.
So I have younger kids, and my son has some challenges with typing and writing that are developmental, and everything I’ve learned—everything is voice.
And I watch that interaction, and then I repeat that, and I say, “Wow, it’s a really different kind of customer journey experience that I, as an individual, normally wouldn’t do.”
It kind of unlocks—hard to use the word—a lot of different thinking on how to approach a strategy or how to address content.
So just be different. Try, test, trial—be the consumer.
Ruben Quinones (31:03)
Yeah, it’s funny, that kind of ties back into—again, we’re talking about fragmentation, but it goes back to the long tail.
You mentioned voice, right? It’s like, I noticed my daughter—she can’t type.
We all type. They’re just used to—she was like, “Why?” And you’re right, probably in 10 years, we’re not going to have a keyboard.
So, you’re probably talking through—and correct me if I’m wrong, Lily—but I would assume that actually would mean doubling down on these long-tail search queries because they’re more conversational rather than typed out.
Lily Ray (31:40)
Yeah. I think that speaks to the larger trend of moving away from keyword obsessiveness, which the SEO industry has been really focused on for 25 years.
And moving more towards conversational search.
So, to your point, it’s addressing every possible concern and question that searchers might have in that kind of conversational format and in a way that large language models can clearly understand where the question is being answered within your content.
Michael Coppola (32:09)
Yeah, when you said the keyword—I mean, it’s absolutely true.
I think back years ago to how we obsessed—our clients obsessed. And there are still marketers who focus too heavily on that, in my opinion.
The other day, a friend called me—sometimes when you’re in this industry, your friends call you.
He’s a small business owner, and he asked me a question. And I just went, “Years ago, I would have told you to optimize for that keyword.”
But he said, “How do I show up for this?” And I told him, “You’re a restaurant in a tourist town. Don’t worry about it.
You should be focused on these other platforms that are going to be more important for your discovery as an independent restaurant in a tourist town.
Lily Ray (32:59)
And I think the tools themselves are changing and evolving as well because for 25 years in the SEO space, we’ve looked at rank tracking.
We’ve looked at how you’ve positioned for individual keywords people might be searching for.
But that’s all changing so much just based on how people are searching, how the search results have changed, the fact that they’re starting their searches in different tools.
So the industry is evolving and needs to evolve to better represent how brands are appearing.
Ruben Quinones (33:24)
Good stuff. Alright, not to do a strong pivot, but we’ll go to transformation number four, which is more about privacy regulations.
You talked about brand safety, Mike. So there are eight states, including of course California and Texas, that will see privacy laws take effect in 2025.
So let’s talk about that a little bit, Mike. I think with these states introducing these new privacy laws, how should marketers rethink their first-party data strategies or just data strategies in general to stay compliant and competitive?
Privacy Regulations and Data Strategy: What Marketers Need to Know
Michael Coppola (34:04)
Yeah, I think you can’t stop certain economics. You can’t stop certain social changes.
And I just think the push for stronger privacy is just going to continue as there is so much access to data.
So it really comes back to, like you said, Ruben—it’s like we need a foundation of our own first-party data, and that should be the focus versus chasing the next sort of third-party data access source.
You’ve got to balance that. We need to look at what our data collection process looks like. Can we condense that data? What should we do to collect better first-party data?
What’s the incentive? What’s the value? And you’ll see better loyalty programs for brands getting smarter, better physical on-site collection to online.
Just—what’s the exchange of that data mean for me to collect if I can’t transact?
So I think the focus should be on building that trust with the consumer—that they can maintain your first-party data and that there’s a benefit for that.
And that can get us smarter as marketers. So it should be just continuing to work against our own data silos, aggregate, unify that data, but amass and build a really good first-party strategy to collect it.
But then also know—how am I going to use that? And I think those are two different things.
Ruben Quinones (35:55)
And then—the stronger that first-party data is, the more we can maybe potentially create models around it outside of the platforms as well.
Michael Coppola (36:04)
Absolutely. Yeah. We spent years just sort of giving, “I just trust XYZ platform that they’re going to be able to create some black box sort of lookalike model.”
And those work fine, but did we really know what were the drivers? Did we really learn?
Did we take away from something other than a reliance on a tactic that a platform offered?
Now, if we have our own data and we do those same behaviors—creating predictive models, creating lookalikes, and then we calibrate those with different intent signals—then we start to really learn.
And then we could apply that to other marketing channels or other marketing strategies that we do.
So it should be all about building that first-party data and then using that data in a strategy that often automation and AI assist in.
But that we have transparency to it, so we know what works and doesn’t work.
So we can—and I think that’s where marketers need to focus their time.
And sometimes they need to get help. They need to use—obviously, Amsive is a big audience partner. We do a ton of modeling and a ton of predictive modeling and even just segmentation strategies.
But there are many, many places to get a good audience partner to help with that if we don’t feel confident as marketers to have a really good first-party data strategy.
Ruben Quinones (37:47)
And then Lily, does this affect SEO at all, these privacy regulations? And if so, how do we navigate that?
Lily Ray (37:47)
Yeah. Well, for better or worse, the SEO industry has had almost this same type of challenge for many years.
We haven’t had 100% visibility into, let’s say, keyword searches in Google Analytics—that was removed or redacted many years ago.
And a lot of our traffic gets grouped into the same bucket of direct traffic in analytics tools and things like this.
So this isn’t necessarily a new challenge for people that work in the SEO space.
But I think because there’s less visibility into what people searched for that brought them directly to my site, it’s going to become increasingly important to think about audience research and just making sure that our organic efforts are reaching consumers no matter where they are.
So whether that’s creating different customer segmentation or grouping our intended audience into different groups and understanding—this group might spend time listening to these podcasts, another group might be spending a lot of time on different YouTube channels.
And who are those YouTube influencers? Who are those podcasters? What are the Reddit threads where people spend their time?
And just making sure we’re diversifying all the different places where people might be seeing your brand or asking those types of questions.
That’s going to become increasingly important. So we’re not just laser-focused on what’s the specific keyword that they typed into a search engine.
Ruben Quinones (39:10)
Right. Yeah, that’s a good tip for navigating that as well. So basically, better data collection and better grouping and segmenting of fewer groups is key.
Michael Coppola (39:24)
And that’s a foundation of that content block strategy with channels.
But yeah, I totally see that as just an opportunity, right?
Ruben Quinones (39:40)
Yeah, so we’ll go to number five. Change will only happen faster. Speed equals trust.
Speed is now a requirement of trust in the workplace. I guess that’s for that age.
I don’t know if it was worth sharing the screen on that one. It’s just a one-sentence statement.
But not to make myself feel old, but Mike, you remember the ISP world wars, the browser wars, the search wars, the social wars.
But nothing quite feels like what we’re going through now with AI.
I mean, just like every single week, some new platform is doing it better and cheaper.
What does that mean for us as marketers? So much change happening. So speed obviously is important. It’s more of a defining factor for trust.
What should businesses expect, Mike, from their marketing partners to make sure that they’re keeping up to pace?
So we talked about—we’re getting asked whether we’re using AI. How do we demonstrate the value that, hey, we are, and this is—how do we instill confidence in that?
Speed and Agility: The New Competitive Advantage in Marketing
Michael Coppola (40:55)
Yeah, I think a lot of it is about your ability as a partner to be agile and to be able to quickly adopt, whether it’s being able to pivot based on what you’re seeing within some of the results that we’re getting.
So you have to be agile, less rigid. The idea of planned marketing campaigns is still critically important on a large level.
But you have to be agile within the campaigns to take advantage of whether it’s something in that we’re seeing or response data.
Or there’s some emerging trend that we want to focus on quickly from a content perspective because everything happens more rapidly today.
So you need that agility in a partner. And clients also need to be agile in their thinking too, to be adapting to change.
And I think that’s what creates that healthy partnership. We are not going to be able to do everything.
But can we be agile, move quickly, and adapt with some independence within the campaign structure and the guidelines?
And feel our partners feel comfortable that we’re operating within the best interest of the brand, while also on a higher level, being more agile, flexible to shift in how we want to change our more strategic approach to the marketing channels that your partners work in.
So I think agility is everything, right? If you’re going to use predictive analytics, you have to be able to actually act on it pretty quickly. Otherwise, you miss the opportunity.
Ruben Quinones (42:48)
So basically, nothing changes for us. We’re going to still be up 24/7 managing campaigns, but now with AI providing a lens to it, right?
Michael Coppola (42:57)
But I think that flexibility or the autonomy is—there are other agencies that are on here, and they probably—it’s being able to get the right amount of autonomy in the partners that we work with.
And some have many agency partners for different functions, which is important.
But you want them to be agile and have the flexibility in the things that they’re actually really good at doing, right?
Ruben Quinones (43:26)
I just thought of a question, Mike. Is it a mistake for a brand to work with an agency that has not embraced AI or is just resistant to it?
Michael Coppola (43:40)
Well, mistake, yes.
Ruben Quinones (43:42)
Not mistake, but—
Michael Coppola (43:44)
Maybe. I think AI not only allows us to do things we’re talking about now, like move faster, personalize at scale, but it’s actually also used in the strategic process too, to move faster, to challenge thinking.
So it goes back to that—I think there needs to be—it’s a mistake to not have an AI-first mindset in parts of what we do in any partner.
But you don’t want to just only be focused on the outputs of AI without really human interaction and oversight. That’s a mistake too.
Ruben Quinones (44:26)
And then Lily, I guess on the flip side, search updates always—it seems like they’re rolling out faster than ever. Tell me if that’s true or not.
How can a brand kind of future-proof what they’re doing and their strategies and make sure that they stay ahead of competitors?
Lily Ray (44:47)
Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, I think the fundamentals of what we do in the search marketing space—those are pretty much staying the same, despite the fact that everything—the look and feel of how the search results in LLMs are changing day to day.
That all obviously changes very quickly. But I think the first thing is that you want to develop systems to be able to stay informed about what’s changing and how that affects whether it’s your clients or your business.
Because it’s true that AI is changing and evolving every day. And so it’s important to stay on top of what’s changing and how it impacts your brand.
So our team has frequent meetings. We meet every day, in fact, to talk about these developments. And we also have an AI task force.
So we’re really focused on a lot of these big changes—that’s helping us stay updated.
But I would say as far as approaching search and SEO and how that kind of changes over time, the fundamentals are not too different.
But I will say, familiarize yourself with the different guidelines and spam policies and manual actions that these search engines have.
Because, for example, ChatGPT leverages the Bing index for citing brands. So you want to make sure that you’re compliant with what Bing recommends for SEO.
And Google is definitely cracking down more and more on violations of its guidelines.
So making sure that the SEO approach that maybe a consultant might’ve pitched to you that feels too good to be true—if it’s going to be scaling content really quickly with AI or whatever it is—that could potentially run afoul of what Google recommends as far as quality.
So just making sure that you’re familiar with what are the rules and outside of the rules of SEO. Making sure you stay within the guidelines.
Ruben Quinones (46:28)
So there’s moving fast to stay and be agile with all of this, but at the same time, don’t go to the other extreme—the other spectrum of like, “Oh, we’re going to ChatGPT all our content now and go crazy.”
We’ve seen it actually backfire.
Lily Ray (46:44)
Yeah.
Ruben Quinones (46:44)
I think we’ve inherited accounts that have come in as a result of that, right?
Lily Ray (46:48)
Usually.
Michael Coppola (47:02)
Yeah, and that’s kind of like you said, the foundation—it hasn’t changed.
But that’s also been around for a long time too. It’s like just chasing the short-term strategy.
If it’s too good to be true, right? It’s probably not.
If you’re focused on more sustainable business measures, more long-term—that kind of hasn’t changed either.
It’s just more distractions, more challenges, more problems.
So you do need to be familiar with—ultimately, where it’s going is going to be similar to how search has evolved.
And it’s being all about value for the consumer, right?
Lily Ray (47:50)
Definitely.
Ruben Quinones (48:26)
So I think before we go to questions, one last question for you guys.
As we look towards the rest of 2025—I can’t believe it’s February already—what’s the one piece of advice that you would give marketers to not just keep up with, but really to kind of get ahead of just this transformation that we’re going through in 2025?
If it was going to be one thing—I know Mike, you’ll probably say “unlocked” or “unlock this or that”—but what parting thoughts can you give us around that?
Michael Coppola (48:26)
Yeah, I would say if it is one thing, it is probably one thing that means something in two different ways. And I think it’s focus, right?
So one is focus on—there’s a lot of distraction. There’s a lot of emerging.
As things accelerate and move fast, we do want to have some test and trial and flexibility.
But we do need to focus on strategies that we can see all the way through as marketers, right?
Two is if we were to focus in any one area, it would be focusing on really making decisions around what is our best customer in mind—not just a land grab for a tactic for traffic or an accelerant.
But can we put our customers at the center of decisions we make?
So I would be focused on using AI to build really good customer models that I can use to anchor or activate media channels or activate really good segmentation strategies for content.
I’d say it’s focus on our customers, knowing our customers, and then building really strong audiences that we can activate using some of the predictive analytics or modeling automation that’s available.
That’s something I have definitely seen as a huge impact across client performances when we do focus the right amount of time upfront to do that well.
Ruben Quinones (50:06)
Nice. Lily, how about you?
Lily Ray (50:10)
Yeah, I think a lot of what we talked about today.
But finding that delicate balance between automation and AI and using those tools to create efficiencies while maintaining that true authentic brand voice.
And making sure that you’re not over-relying on these tools.
Because it can be really easy and really tempting to say, “Oh, this can be automated with AI.
We can just not use these processes that we’ve had in place for a long time that have proven to be very effective and just kind of replace it all with AI.”
And then you lose that humanity, and you lose that brand voice, and customers can tell. Searchers can tell.
So I think it’s really important to find that balance where you’re creating efficiencies with automation.
But you’re also staying true to your brand voice and making sure that, as far as SEO is concerned and search is concerned, you’re continuing to provide value.
And not just doing things because you feel like you’re going to win at SEO, but doing them because you’re really providing value to the searcher and creating helpful content.
That’s going to be key in 2025, for sure.
Ruben Quinones (51:09)
And Lily, as a marketer, obviously, I know the go-tos for SEO—Search Engine Journal, Moz.
So what do you do to keep ahead as a marketer?
Lily Ray (51:21)
It’s a full-time job.
Ruben Quinones (51:22)
I know. I know. OK, 24/7.
Lily Ray (51:24)
No, I mean, so I think there’s a handful of different publications, trade publications that we follow, conferences that we attend, social media—many different social media platforms where we follow different people that we trust.
But something that’s been really effective for our team is meeting literally daily.
And then weekly on Mondays, we have a nice big kind of roundtable discussion about the latest developments in this space.
So that keeps us on our toes, for sure.
Ruben Quinones (51:48)
And that’s good. That’s what I actually love here.
There are multiple Slack channels, there are meetings.
So I think for those thinking about integrating that into your business, wherever you are, it’s great just to learn from a lot of other people outside of the platforms.
So with that, do we have any questions?
I think a voice from God was going to come in and—
Q&A Moderator (52:14)
Hello? Yes, there we go.
Ruben Quinones (52:15)
A lot of really great questions. The first question is for Lily, and then we’ll have a follow-up for Mike.
The first question for Lily is: How will these AI changes affect your money, your life industries specifically?
Lily Ray (52:35)
I think, yeah. So for anybody who’s unfamiliar, Your Money, Your Life is an acronym that Google has in its search quality guidelines.
That essentially means that the content has the potential to cause harm to the user.
So it might be something related to safety regulations or politics or news or financial topics or legal topics or medical topics.
So Google has pretty strict systems in place to determine when a search query is Your Money, Your Life.
So for example, if somebody types something related to cancer or heart attacks, it’s going to be much more stringent as far as which sites or which sources it’s using to generate generative AI answers.
So I think that we’re still going to see that kind of breakdown between super authoritative companies and publications that are cited in different ways.
As opposed to citing a small natural wellness blog if somebody’s typing something related to cancer treatment.
So I think a lot of that kind of classic approach to what Google calls E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust—we’re going to see them integrate that into AI overviews and Gemini in different LLMs.
Q&A Moderator (53:43)
And sneaking another quick one in here from the Q&A as well.
So you had a recent LinkedIn post that said that local queries had been affected by the most recent changes targeting one-page-per-city companies.
Some small companies completely rely on this strategy, otherwise they’re not able to grow their market share.
So do you have any more info behind your LinkedIn post for that and what your recommendations would be?
Lily Ray (54:12)
Yeah, that’s a tricky one. So basically, sites that use a strategy of having, let’s say, one page per city or one page per neighborhood when they don’t actually have a physical store location or actually a real service in those regions or in those cities—that could be a potential issue for search engine algorithms.
Because companies like Google can say, “Hey, these pages are not authentic. You have a page for all these different cities despite not having real businesses in those cities.”
So first and foremost, you want to make sure that if you are creating regional content or localized content, that you actually have service offerings or a physical location in those places.
If you don’t, you just have to be careful. Because there are a lot of companies that do this in a really almost haphazard way where the content is not unique above and beyond different location pages that search engines have seen.
So if you do have those pages, just make sure that you’re adding a lot of original value about what your business can offer in those different cities above and beyond some, let’s say, generic AI content about the city.
Q&A Moderator (55:17)
And Mike, this is one I’m interested in myself.
So they’re asking, what types of skills can marketing professionals develop to remain competitive as AI does transform the industry?
Michael Coppola (55:35)
Yeah, what’s interesting, we start to see—when you look at, I was thinking about when you just said that—some of the jobs that we see emerging and some of these titles.
Jobs that are focused on writing really good commands or writing prompts.
And what that really signals is that there’s a skill that needs to be developed by marketers.
So when you think about this AI-first thinking, we have to get really good at just using generative AI as marketers.
And know that if you can write really good commands, you get really good output.
So I would say that comes to mind right away.
We have to be really good operators of technology, not necessarily developers, but we have to be power users.
And that’s a skill that if it doesn’t feel—if anyone’s on here and they don’t feel really comfortable, you need to immediately kind of address that.
Otherwise, you’ll start to see these jobs, which I don’t think are necessarily staying jobs.
It’s just the adaption of what a marketer needs to actually be able to do in many different ways.
So I think being comfortable with different platforms and being agile thinkers and being flexible in our behaviors, but also being able to operate AI or very basic generative AI toolsets is a critically important skill for marketers.
Ruben Quinones (57:15)
And don’t leave your critical thinking at the door either, right?
People think AI is going to do everything for them, but it should really be used to make us think more critically, not replace that ability.
Michael Coppola (57:19)
Exactly. You actually use it to make you think more critically. Otherwise, what’s your worth, right?
Ruben Quinones (57:34)
Anything else?
Q&A Moderator (57:39)
We’re running up on time a little bit.
Ruben Quinones (57:41)
Yeah.
Q&A Moderator (57:42)
So it could be good to hit the QR code.
Ruben Quinones (57:46)
Yeah, no, absolutely.
First of all, I just want to thank you. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Lily, for joining us.
It’s been a great discussion. Looking forward to some additional webinars that we’ll do in the future.
Thank you guys for tuning in. I’m sure we will get this up on the blog soon along with a summary.
Thank you, Mike and Lily again, and have a good rest of your week.
Michael Coppola (58:10)
Well, thanks, Ruben. Appreciate you spending time, thoughtful questions, and yeah, thanks, everybody, for the time.
Lily Ray (58:19)
Thanks, you guys.
Michael Coppola (58:21)
Okay.
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