What’s Changing in Marketing

Marketing has always had a slight obsession with the future. What’s next? What’s the next platform? What’s the next consumer behavior? What’s the next big technology? What are Gen Alpha doing? What comes after TikTok? Are we all going to live in the metaverse? Is everyone going to wear AI glasses? Is email somehow STILL alive?

And I love this stuff. Obviously.

But after spending a big chunk of my career chasing what’s next, I’ve learned that the useful question is rarely “What will happen?” I’m much more interested in “What’s changing right now that might matter later?”

That’s usually where the good stuff starts.

The future is usually already here

There’s a famous William Gibson idea that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and I think about that ALL THE TIME because the future usually looks pretty boring at first.

Maybe it’s somebody using a new tool in a weird way, or a teenager developing a behavior adults haven’t noticed yet, or a creator figuring out a format that brands will copy 18 months from now. It could be a small group of people suddenly using some technology every day while everybody else is still asking why anyone would want it.

Sometimes it’s just a feature buried inside an app that quietly changes how millions of people behave.

This is why I spend so much time experimenting with things instead of only reading about them. I want to see the weird thing while it is still weird, because by the time everyone agrees something matters, the opportunity usually looks a lot more obvious and costs a lot more money.

Technology is only half of it

We talk about the future like it is mostly a technology problem. AI, AR, VR, robotics, wearables, spatial computing, whatever acronym gets announced at CES next year.

But technology only gets REALLY interesting when people start doing something with it.

So one of the questions I ask a lot is: What human behavior does this change?

Does it make something faster or cheaper? More convenient? More entertaining? More personal? More social? More private? Does it remove friction, create new friction, or let people do something they already wanted to do but couldn’t?

That’s when the technology starts becoming a marketing issue.

Because nobody wakes up in the morning excited about “leveraging emerging technology.” They want to get somewhere faster, find an answer, make something, talk to someone, buy something, waste 45 minutes watching videos of raccoons, or whatever else humans need to do that day.

Consumers are not waiting for the annual plan

Most organizations still plan in quarters and years, which makes sense because organizations need budgets and priorities and adults in rooms making responsible decisions.

Consumers, unfortunately, have declined to behave according to our planning cycles.

They find a new platform on Friday, change how they search on Saturday, start trusting a creator on Sunday and expect your brand to somehow understand what happened by Monday morning. Have fun!

This is one of the tensions I find most interesting in marketing because organizations naturally want certainty before they move, but culture rarely provides it.

So I don’t think the goal can be knowing everything before acting. We have to get better at operating while the answer is still forming, which means watching closely, testing carefully, learning quickly and admitting when something turns out to be nothing.

And plenty of things WILL turn out to be nothing. That’s fine!

Not every signal becomes a trend, and not every trend deserves a strategy.

AI is changing a LOT at the same time

AI is especially fascinating because it isn’t politely staying inside one part of marketing.

It is changing how people search and discover brands, how content gets made, how ideas get developed, how customer service works, how teams research, how employees work, how creators produce, how software gets built, how recommendations happen, how misinformation spreads, and how much absolutely terrible content can be produced before lunch.

And we are still REALLY early.

That’s why I’m much more interested in AI as a behavior change than I am in memorizing a list of tools. The tools will change. Some of today’s biggest AI companies may disappear, new ones will show up, and features that feel magical right now will eventually become boring buttons inside software we already use.

The bigger shift is that people are getting used to asking machines for help.

Once a behavior starts feeling normal, THAT is when things get interesting.

Social keeps getting bigger and harder to define

We still call it “social media,” but wow is that phrase doing a lot of work now.

Social platforms are entertainment networks, search engines, shopping destinations, messaging systems, creator ecosystems, news distributors and cultural engines all at once. And the feed itself has changed from something you mostly curated into something increasingly curated FOR you.

Which means brands are competing inside recommendation systems now.

You don’t automatically get attention because somebody followed you three years ago. You have to keep earning it, and that shifts the work from simply publishing things to actually understanding why people are there and what they care about.

Understand the audience, understand the platform, understand the culture, understand why people are paying attention, and then make something worth paying attention to.

Turns out THAT part remains important.

Creators are becoming infrastructure

Influencer marketing used to feel like a thing you added to the marketing plan. Maybe there was a little box for it, somebody had a budget, and everyone agreed we should “activate some influencers.”

Now creators are part of the media system.

They launch products, shape culture, move markets, break news, explain complicated topics, create entertainment, build communities and influence what people buy. They are also increasingly part of the information environment that shapes how brands get discovered in search and AI-powered systems.

So I think the future of marketing includes much deeper connections between creator strategy, PR, social, paid, search and brand.

Consumers already experience those things as one ecosystem. We’re the ones who keep putting them into separate spreadsheets.

Search is becoming an answer

This one is moving FAST.

For decades, the internet trained us to search for information and choose from a list of links. Now we can increasingly just ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google or whatever comes next and get an answer.

That creates some VERY interesting questions for brands.

Does the AI know you? Does it describe you correctly? Does it trust the sources talking about you? Does it recommend you? Does it understand your competitors better than it understands you? And what happens when somebody gets everything they need from the answer and never visits your website at all?

This is why I’m spending so much time thinking about GEO and AI search right now. Brand visibility is becoming a combination of search, PR, social signals, creators, reputation, structured information and a whole bunch of public evidence that used to live in different disciplines.

The old silos are having a TERRIBLE time with this.

I am delighted.

Culture still wins

Technology changes quickly, but people are still people.

They want to belong and have status and make their lives easier. They want to laugh, know what everyone else knows, know something BEFORE everyone else knows it, copy each other, form tribes, get bored, discover things, fall in love with ridiculous things and decide overnight that something everybody loved six months ago is suddenly deeply embarrassing.

So when I think about the future of marketing, I try not to get hypnotized by the technology itself.

Technology introduces new possibilities. Culture tells us what people actually do with them.

That distinction matters because marketers are very good at getting excited about what a technology can do before we know whether anyone wants to do it.

I have absolutely been guilty of this too. Hello, metaverse!

The brands that win will be good at learning

I don’t think the future belongs to brands that correctly predict every trend because nobody is doing that.

I think it belongs to organizations that get good at noticing change, deciding what matters, testing something, learning from it and moving again.

That means curiosity matters, experimentation matters, fast feedback matters, cross-functional teams matter, judgment matters, and knowing when NOT to chase something matters a lot more than people give it credit for.

And having people inside the organization who genuinely enjoy figuring this stuff out matters too.

You can hire someone to write the trend report.

You also need people who want to click the weird link inside it.

So what am I watching?

The list changes constantly, which is kind of the point, but right now I’m spending a lot of time thinking about AI-powered discovery and GEO, the collision of AI with PR and social, algorithmic feeds, recommendation systems, creators, AI agents, wearable AI, interfaces beyond phones, synthetic media, changing search behavior, how AI changes creativity, how brands build trust when content becomes infinite, and how organizations actually adopt any of this stuff without losing their minds.

I’m also paying close attention to the things younger audiences normalize before the rest of us notice, plus whatever weird technology, platform behavior or internet rabbit hole I fell into this morning.

Some of these things will become enormous. Some will become completely normal. Some will disappear.

And at least one will become something we all pretend we never believed in.

That’s okay.

The point is to pay attention

My work at FINN Partners focuses on Futures & Client Transformation, which gives me a pretty good excuse to spend a lot of time asking: What’s changing, why does it matter, and what should we actually DO about it?

That work crosses technology, culture, social media, creators, AI, communications, creative strategy and whatever new thing shows up next.

And there WILL be a next thing. There always is.

I plan to go poke at it.

-Greg