Key Takeaways:
- US consumers have passed a personalization tipping point, placing fresh emphasis on the importance of responsibly sourced audience data for cross-platform targeting.
- Rising tariff concerns are prompting marketers to reevaluate their advertising investments.
- Identity is key to unlocking the true potential of AI, especially when integrating AI platforms into existing tech stacks.
Today’s marketing ecosystem is facing challenges — old, new and unexpected.
With continued martech fragmentation and intensifying data access concerns, it’s undoubtedly chaos out there for marketers. Given that, POSSIBLE 2025 couldn’t have come at a better time, with marketers gathering in Miami to discuss innovative approaches and novel strategies that will help them navigate even the choppiest of waters.
From taking a fresh look at personalization to reexamining the role identity plays in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), here are three concrete strategies we took away from this year’s show.
1. Pay attention to the privacy-personalization balancing act
The explosion of available martech tools and platforms isn't the only chaos marketers are navigating this year. Shifting consumer preferences are also contributing to the turbulence.
According to research TransUnion® debuted at POSSIBLE, US consumers passed a personalization tipping point. Thirty-nine percent of respondents to our Q1 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey relayed they now expect to receive personalized messages when shopping online — compared to 34% who said they have no opinion and 27% who disagreed. This represents a significant shift in consumer expectations. While personalization has been lauded as a successful tool for marketers and web teams for the better part of two decades, it's only now those experiences have firmly taken root with audiences across the US.
And it's not hard to see why. According to the same survey results, 45% of US consumers who receive personalized messages (the largest cohort) find them genuinely helpful, with 39% more likely to buy from a brands that deliver personalized messages..
Put simply, personalization is impactful, so much so that consumers expect it in their day-to-day interactions with brands. However, consumers are also increasingly becoming aware of how their data is used to power those personalization strategies. And with that awareness comes anxiety.
An overwhelming majority of US consumers surveyed are placing renewed scrutiny on their data privacy. According to our survey, a whopping 89% of participants said their data security was important to them, while 80% responded they were at least somewhat concerned about sharing their personal information online. When asked specifically why they were anxious about data security, 77% said they didn't want their identities stolen and, tellingly for marketers, 44% said they didn't want to receive unsolicited marketing communications.
This puts marketers in a bind. How can they respect consumers’ data privacy while meeting their personalization expectations? It all comes down to audience data.
By employing an audience creation and targeting strategy that relies on robust consumer data that’s been responsibly sourced, marketers can do the seemingly impossible: satisfy consumers’ contradictory needs while they deftly walk the privacy-personalization tightrope.
2. Take a tactical approach to tariffs
If there was one thing that put a damper on the Miami vibes at POSSIBLE, it was the looming specter of tariffs.
But it's not just economists who are feeling the pressure. According to results from our Q1 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey, nearly half (43%) of US consumers said their household incomes weren’t keeping up with the rate of inflation, and a staggering 96% said they were at least somewhat concerned about rising prices.
Skittish consumers mean skittish marketers, which in turn means shrinking advertising investment. In fact, we're already seeing this in the 2025 upfront season, with linear TV spending expected to decline by $2.78B from last year. Even CTV spending, long on a steady upward trajectory, is expected to stay flat in a tariff-heavy environment.
To an untrained eye, this makes perfect sense. After all, the natural reaction to an unfriendly market is to batten down the hatches, cancel tests and focus investment on proven bets.
But it’s not quite so simple in reality. In fact, according to historical record, decreasing marketing investment is the exact opposite of what marketers should be doing to grow their businesses in uncertain times. During and after the 2008 financial crisis, McKinsey found companies that kept advertising budgets steady saw significantly higher sales growth and return than both those that pulled back spend and the market as whole.
If there’s one thing to take away from all this, it’s continued marketing investment is crucial to navigating the choppy waters of an economy in chaos. In fact, it may be a prime growth opportunity for advertisers that can stomach the risk.
3. Focus on integrations to realize AI’s full potential
Any conversation about POSSIBLE 2025 would be incomplete without mentioning AI.
Nearly three years after ChatGPT hit the mainstream, AI technology platforms are continuing to push the boundaries of data analysis, productivity and creative development. And marketers aren’t missing the wave. According to eMarketer, as of January 2025, nearly half of marketers across the globe said they use AI daily.
But even for all this success, AI-powered martech stacks are still out of reach for many marketers due to one simple factor: integration difficulties.
As tech stacks grow more complex, ensuring each platform in the stack communicates clearly with the rest becomes increasingly difficult — and that’s before throwing new AI technologies into the mix. In fact, the inability to effectively onboard AI capabilities for marketing was a top-three challenge caused by martech fragmentation, as reported by Forrester.
To realize the full potential of AI, marketers should focus on what they can most easily control — getting their data houses in order. According to the same research from Forrester, this starts with identity. Among marketing leaders that leveraged identity resolution to connect data across their tech stacks:
- 93% said they’re meeting or exceeding their customer experience and understanding goals
- 88% said they’re meeting or exceeding their goals to improve customer insight and understanding
- 79% said they’re meeting or exceeding their data-driven, decision-making and adaptability goals
In essence, AI tools are only as good as the martech stacks they’re a part of, and identity plays a crucial role in making those tech stacks work. Without it, it’s nearly impossible to create a full, 360-degree view of the customer. And without that, marketers are doing little more than taking shots in the dark.
Wrapping up
If 2025 would have a theme for marketers, it would be disruption. Between economic uncertainty, shifting consumption habits and growing consumer demands, marketing is growing more complex than ever.
But as we saw at POSSIBLE, keeping up with the pace of change is far from, well, impossible. With a focus on the core of what makes marketing work — responsibly sourced audience data, robust identity and steady investment — marketers can make the most of a challenging moment and find clarity in the chaos.
To learn more about how to confront data chaos in your own organization, download our latest infographic — Walking the Personalization-Data Privacy Tightrope.
