How to Thrive in 2025: 3 Tips to Future- Proof Your Creative Marketing Strategy

2025 is about future-proofing your business through technology and collaboration. Successfully navigating the tech wave brand and creative marketers are met with is critical. Ignoring or delaying it will risk you either being left behind or swept in the swirl. 

Audiences want information and entertainment. Advertisers need to balance performance and presentation. The blend of beauty and impact is where we win and AI is revolutionizing how we do this. 

The New Customer Journey
The customer journey has undergone a fundamental transformation. Consumers now expect brands to engage with them in new, more personalized, ways. This requires brands to embrace technology that can both scale big ideas and foster authenticity. 

AI invites marketers to explore, iterate, and innovate faster than ever before. It also allows them to do so without compromising quality; creating deeper connections and context through every touch point. This is neither finite nor fixed. AI is a collection of dials, not a switch. Creativity—the human element—is where we can fine tune these outcomes. 

Technology is empowering creatives to deliver against expectations and asks we’ve not been met with before as an industry. It’s breaking down barriers that traditional production methodologies have left us with. It’s making room for new voices and perspectives to thrive. Put simply, AI is helping us see the work, work (more effectively). 

Here are three beneficial focus areas for brands tapping into the power of AI in 2025:

1. Collaboration: Unlocking new thinking, together, with new tools.‍

How do we want to re-invent creative collaboration with these new tools? How can we launch campaigns—across channels, throughout the funnel—in more considerate ways through creative tools and tech? How do we push traditional  thinking into uncharted territories, from proof of concept to production? How can we use tech to be more playful in our approach in order to find new outcomes? 

2. Simplified Processes: Streamlining workflows to make the complex simple and efficient.

Media and creative teams are closer than ever before. This is a good thing. The more creative thinkers understand the goals, channels, and outcomes of their concepts, the more context and trust they build with the audience. With these new technologies, the distribution and production methodologies can be a key part of the creative concept, in and of themselves.  

While key principles remain—exploration, reduction, repetition—technology is adding an element of provocation speed and scale that we’ve never seen before. 

3. Variety: Ideas that live longer and reach farther.  

The opportunity to create has never been so promising. Technology allows us to scale ideas like never before across all corners of the digital world. New production methodologies give us the ability to achieve both quality and speed while still building context with the audience, which makes for a better experience across more, even limitless,  formats. All of this leads to a more personalized, more authentic output, allowing brands to make more meaningful connections with the ever-changing consumer.

At the end of the day, AI is a set of dials, not a switch. It’s our job as creative thinkers, leaders and collaborators to fine tune these in order to get the most impactful, most exciting outputs.

It’s a creative renaissance and the new set of brushes we have to paint with are incredible.  

Join Smartly and AdWeek for the upcoming webinar "Digital Ad Creative Benchmarks for 2025" Wednesday, Jan 29, 2025 1:00 PM ET. Register now!