It’s that time of year again, the time when every marketing consultant emerges with a glossy set of “2026 trends” that will allegedly define the next twelve months. While most of these lists are more about winning favor with Google than an actual human, it's a fun exercise to look back at the trend every agency blog deemed the next big thing in 2025: Artificial Intelligence. The arrival of Large Language Models and Generative Pre-trained Transformers would reshape marketing, allow new levels of personalization, and usher in new standards for reaching audiences.
So, let’s take a moment to revisit that prediction.
First, we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: most of the industry still can’t tell the difference between actual artificial intelligence and the tasks computers have already been doing for decades. The AI label has been slapped on everything from genuinely sophisticated models to my leasing company's useless customer service chat bot meant to keep me from bothering a real human. Most of the industy's "AI Push" trended towards the later, and the deception wasn't just among smaller players: Amazon's "AI" from its brick-and-mortar retail experiment was revealed to be overseas workers manually completing tasks at lower wages. It was AI in a sense that it was actually, India.
The predictions of things that would excite consumers: better targeting and personalization, never happened. If anything, 2025 saw personalization take a back seat to inundating audiences with as much content as possible. In a SAP Emarsys study, 60% of the respondents said they’re receiving too many irrelevant emails. For all their talk of embracing new technology, marketers still can't get this half century old medium right.
Elsewhere we saw brands taking shortcuts: Coca-Cola replacing real creatives for their 2025 Christmas campaign, Disney trying to sneak in generative AI as promotional art for upcoming films. For a year supposed to be defined by reaching audiences with unprecedented precision, they sure did an unprecedented job of alienating everybody. Unsurprisingly, consumers have rejected this AI push, as the same SAP Emarsys study found that a staggering 40% of consumers now say brands “don’t get them,” up from 25% the year before.
The ad industry failed at the very trend it touted as being the next big thing. In an effort to appear relevant in a world of changing technology, they forgot the fundamental question: "are we actually providing a good experience for the human beings we’re trying to reach?"