As Rory Sutherland often says, it makes sense to look for things that don’t. Let's have a look at the predictions and contradictions for 2025 to find some balance and clarity.
Marx Twain
I was born and raised in Uruguay, the tiniest and possibly quirkiest country in South America, into a particularly strange family that included orthodox communists. We had tons of books, too many good intentions, and very little money. As a child I spent my mornings at school, my evenings at literal lectures on the works of Marx and Engels, and my nights at a Beatles fan-club. I grew up among contradictions. Holding two opposing ideas in my mind and feeding from the energy of their clash feels okay to me. Now.
When I was six or seven, my conservative grandpa gave me the most wonderful gift: a one of a kind 1936 edition of Tom Sawyer, beautifully illustrated by Norman Rockwell. I was a pompous little shit so I told him I wasn’t reading a book “in the language of the Empire”. And gave it back to him.
Forward 35+ years and I’m running a very capitalist American agency, with American clients, writing about sales, and marketing for a living. The moral of the story is that it’s one thing to be a radical, and another to be a moron. I was a moron and the book was a treasure.
This thing that happens when you’re fully unaware of the opportunities you’re missing because you’re too self-centered to cope with contradictions, I call it the “Marx Twain” syndrome.
The beauty of contradictions
We’re living in stupid times and it’s very hard for anyone running a business to separate truth from fandom, opportunity from hype, optimism from wishful thinking, and fear-mongering from fact-based concerns. We need to train ourselves to question.
Truth is usually somewhere in the middle (something Marx was actually right about).
There are two ubiquitous topics you’ll find in any 2025 prediction from every tech bro, digital prophet, fearmonger or doomsayer out there. Let’s find the (middle) ground in all that hot air.
Predictions & contradictions 1: AI or Die
Since ChatGPT entered our lives we’ve been immersed in this mantra-like obsession about artificial intelligence, and a future that will leave us behind unless we change, right now, by adopting all of their tools, regardless of their utility, or else. This is not about technology. It’s about money, power, and growing the Ponzi Scheme before investors find out. I’ll prove it to you easily.
According to Wikipedia, Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. That’s an outstanding achievement. Almost god-like, if you want to delve into the philosophical ramifications (I won’t).
Do Microsoft or OpenAI share that definition? That ambitious, pivotal milestone in human history?
The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. That’s far from the rigorous technical and philosophical definition of AGI many expect. This year, OpenAI is reportedly set to lose billions of dollars, and the startup tells investors it won’t turn a profit until 2029. (TechCrunch)
If they were selling 100B of fidget spinners, they’d call it breakthrough tech. It’s just money. It’s a rigged game.
It’s a race for domination based on lies, losses, lobbying and leapfrogging from one fool to the next.
We’re pouring 500B into a company that’s not making money at all and calling it “growth”.
Predictions from big dogs like PwC’s might end up being correct, but as of today, there are way too many “will”, “might”, “could” and “has the potential to”. It will be hard for you to find a serious study (not an advertorial) comparing productivity before and after. Until then, it’s all aspirational.
Buuuut…
At the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that all of these large scale foundation models are effing amazing. It’s much more interesting to research conversationally via Perplexity than to enter stuff on Google (more on that in a minute) and have to find your way around a dozen articles. Dealing with spreadsheets, sorting data, combining options, researching, testing, proofreading. The applications are almost countless. We use it every day for pretty much anything except, surprisingly(?), content generation.
Anyone without a technical background can start joining dots with no-code platforms like N8N and build their own, very tailored applications that are unique for their needs and ways of working. We’ll see AI being applied differently to each vertical. Supply chain management is already feeding huge amounts of data for AI to provide improvements that can move the needle through optimization and performance and/or cost reduction. These are exciting and fun times, too.
So yes, to everything:
- This technology is here to stay
- We need to adapt to it and adopt it as soon as possible
- We need to learn how to navigate the nonsense tsunami we live in
- And we shouldn’t expect it to be a life-changing tech that will help you conquer your market
It might be. We just don’t know yet. And the money you have to put to see if/how it works for you might still be better invested elsewhere.
Predictions & contradictions 2: Search Engines are dead
Some even say content strategy is dead.
Check this screenshot (source) from Ryan Law. Hubspot, the absolute king of content, the coiners of the “inbound” term, are witnessing their organic traffic plummet from a peak 6M sessions to 800k.
There are many factors that contribute to this downfall of content.
- Google sucks. Big time.
- Also Google doesn’t care about you, your content, if it’s good and relevant, and if it should, purely based on its merits, be shown to the end visitor. It cares about pushing ads, because they represent +70% of its revenue. It’s not making more money because it’s better, or people use Google now more than ten years ago. It’s just because it’s more invasive and expensive, all at the expense of your content’s best interest.
- Add AI research to the mix. Top of funnel content tends to be very easily and impartially resolved by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or whatever your favorite chatbot is. Users are losing a reason to drill down into the answers and visit a website.
- And very much in tune with the “two opposing ideas can be right” mantra, AI is also messing with everything as companies are irresponsibly falling into spam techniques of all sorts and publishing literally millions of pieces of crap, automated content on a daily basis. The Dead Internet Theory is no longer a theory.
And yet! Nothing is ever that simple.
- Tim Soulo from Ahrefs shows us where the missing traffic went. So Hubspot is screwed by the current state of things, yes. But it’s also losing fights with other brands doing a better job at content, fair and square.
- Peter Caputa from Databox shows us how traffic generated from AI search results are meaningless.
- And Mr. Law comes back to rethink his own post and bring some sense into the discussion.
And once you read it all, the conclusion is simple:
The days of having “easy-ish” #1 keywords are over. Google is not a reliable channel. We’ve known that for a long time. Any business that’s based on someone else’s business is aware that’s a liability. Other than that, nothing changes. Good content is a must-have. It’s just business. And sales. And relationships. And you need to have a voice, and communicate it effectively, and have some shit to say. The old black. The always black.
SEO will get harder but will still be there. Incentives are a very tricky thing, and you can rest assured that Google doesn’t want you to take your money elsewhere, so this will continue to change.
It’s not “the death of…” anything. It’s just ebbs and flows.
Simple. Quiet. Good work.
I firmly believe that for SMBs the only way to grow is through consistency. There’s only so much you can do at the same time. And technology can reach incredible velocity, but our ability to adopt and learn new tricks is limited. No more predictions. Just tips, hoping they’re useful for you this year:
- Take “digital transformation” (whatever that means, which we’ll dig into next month) seriously. Not as a start and end project, but as a practice. It’s not about transformation, but about practice, adoption and evolution.
- Don’t let tech folks sell you bloated tools you don’t need, or magical solutions that promise things they can’t prove. Demand case studies and take the time to make sure that’s exactly what you’re looking for.
- Pick one or two things. Try them on pilot programs. Measure results. Then scale. Don’t get into a 2-year “any-ERP-brand” integration nightmare just because “they have new AI tools” or “my competitor has it”. Sometimes your competitors are just morons and you’re better off doing nothing.
- And build great content. Will it work on Google? I don’t know. But it will help you establish your position in the market, create trust with your ideal customers, and provide tools to your sales team to get results.
It’s budget time!
Quick figures in case they can help as you jot numbers for the year:
- Your marketing budget should stay around 10% of your revenue. If you’re bolder or growing fast, that’s great. If you had a disappointing 2024, that’s even a stronger reason to protect that 10%.
- Not having a marketing budget or having one under 7% is equally useless to generate business.
- Roughly 40% of that budget goes into salaries (in-house, freelancers, outsourced, it’s the same thing — people’s time you have to pay for)
- Sales and technology expenses are part of the marketing budget. This leads to a bigger conversation, also for another day: Marketing and Sales should be the same team.
Of course, if you need help making plans and setting priorities, you can consider our Blueprint service.
Life’s mostly irony and contradiction. And Norman Fucking Rockwell showed it masterfully.
What would his paintings look like today?
Until next time.
Santiago.-
