“As another year comes to a close and we start to fix our gaze on what comes next, it’s important to take stock on the year that was 2025,” says Dave Winterlich, chief strategy officer at Dentsu and host of the Inside Marketing podcast.
“It was another great year of content and contributors from the marketing community on Inside Marketing, this year we were lucky and grateful to welcome some returning friends of the show, Ciaran O’Kane (episode 131), Bob Hoffman (episode 135) , Mark Ritson (episode 148) and Dan Calladine (episode 129).
“We also talked about some brilliant marketing transformations and successes, whether that was Debbie Byrne from An Post (episode 146) or young entrepreneur David Hartigan from Hemp Heroes (episode 140).
“So what can we learn from our guests and contributors from 2025? Here’s a quick recap of some of the big thoughts that can help as you start to navigate planning for 2026.”
READ MORE
Don’t disregard what has been proven
American ad industry guru Bob Hoffman (episode 135), in typically candid style, decried how the advertising industry has so little regard for all the evidence proving that established media channels still deliver today.
And as the media supply chain becomes ever more complicated with tech stacks, third-party distribution and tracking, we have a fractured ecosystem where, increasingly, the buyer no longer interacts with the seller in the advertising marketplace.
The growth of intermediaries creates problems with fraud, tech taxes and reduction of working media budgets.
It’s a subject industry legend Mark Ritson added to in episode 148, highlighting the fact that despite all the evidence from IPA, System 1, Binet & Field, The Ehrenberg Institute and Lumen (to name but a few) marketing investment continues to flow towards short term performance channels at the expense of longer term brand building channels such as TV, radio, outdoor or print.
It’s a theme that arose multiple times through the year, resurfacing again in episode 138 with Elena Jasper, where further evidence was provided for the benefits of TV, and again in episode 149 with Mike Follett, founder of Lumen, the industry authority in attention measurement.
Follett provided Irish specific research that showed established channels like TV, radio and print, all deliver what he called “an attention bargain”.
When it comes to campaigns, don’t be too quick to change
It’s a common criticism that marketing as an industry has a magpie-like obsession with all things shiny and new. But extensive research from System 1 demonstrates that brand building campaigns start to work most effectively after three whole years.
That is not to say brand building campaigns don’t work in the short term, they do, it’s just that they continue to pay back over the medium to longer term.
The opposite, however, is not the case, as tactical campaigns pay back in the short term but deliver little return over the long term.
Mark Ritson made the point that clients and agencies are changing their creative far too often, long before return on investment has had time to kick in. This unnecessarily reduces working capital in terms of media investment, which is essential for growth as highlighted by John Phillip-Jones’ excess share of voice (ESOV) theory in the 1990s.
The indisputable evidence is that good ads, like good wine, improve over time. The key word here is “good”, the ad must be good to start with. Bad ads, like bad wine, do not improve with age.
Don’t chase fads - keep it real
Kneecap manager and chief operating officer of Bohemians Football Club, Dan Lambert (episode 139) eloquently made the point that any successful brand or company has to stand for what it believes in, and resist the urge to chase culture or jump on trends.
If you’re true to yourself you will attract your tribe - those with a shared belief. You may put others off but that’s okay. Not everyone will agree with you. Lambert is something of an accidental marketer in that he hasn’t trained in marketing, but Mark Ritson (according to his data, gained from having trained over 40,000 marketeers on his MiniMBA course) argues that 75 per cent of people in marketing have not been trained in marketing either.
That doesn’t stop the profession from being clouded with and confused by jargon, often deliberately.
In a bid to project a consultant-like professionalism, we’re an industry that can at times over-engineer brand wheels, purpose and 100-slide brand code decks.
But while the commonly held narrative is that marketing must learn to talk the language of the boardroom and the CFO, Ritson reckons a great place to start would be for marketing people to learn the language of marketing first.
Know your audience and avoid marketing bias
That doesn’t mean language that is esoteric. Great marketing, great brands, and indeed great advertising practitioners are inherently comfortable with simplicity.
Indeed, the point of strategy is to simplify the complex. Yet all too often marketing strategy does the opposite and complicates, confuses and over-engineers.
It’s why another common theme on this year’s podcast was the need to stop hiding behind jargon, to keep it simple stupid.
Consumers couldn’t care less about brand pyramids. They don’t care or even think about your brand that much and they certainly don’t ascribe to your brand purpose.
Dan Lambert, fully aware of that fact, talked in simple terms about what marketers would label ‘precision of purpose’ and ‘importance of authenticity’.
The fact that he didn’t articulate it in marketing terms made it resonate more powerfully.
“Put yourself in the shoes of your customer”, was the simple point equally well made by retail strategist Bob Neville, in episode 132.
Walk the floor, talk to sales staff, visit that store on the city outskirts to see what that brand experience is like.
Too often marketing is done in boardrooms, on flipcharts and Powerpoint, talking about people as personas and segments, he said, which when done wrong can be both theoretical and nonsensical in equal measure.
That need for marketers to walk the shop floor was raised again by former Guinness marketer Paul Keogh, in episode 144. A man with decades of experience, he stressed the importance of “knowing the guy on the gate or in charge of the delivery warehouse - because when you realise you are a keg short for a beer promotion, the marketing team is unlikely to be any help”.
Words of wisdom indeed and, as the curtain draws on 2025, we look forward to another year of stellar guests, insightful conversation and, without doubt, thought-provoking perspectives.
To hear more from podcast and content series Inside Marketing, click here.
