10 Years of Brand825: What’s Changed in Marketing and What’s Stayed the Same

When Cindy and I set out to start our own agency, of course we wanted it to last, but I’m not sure I could have told you what marketing or Brand825 would look like by the time the agency was old enough to start fourth grade.

A lot has changed since then, more than I might have guessed. Whole formats came and went, and in just the last few years, AI showed up and started rearranging… well, everything.

But for everything that did change, there are a lot of fundamental constants that haven’t. Ten years of upheaval mostly made them easier to see by contrast.

A Decade of Marketing in Retrospect

The Format Treadmill

One thing you could count on over the last 10 years was the rise (and occasional fall) of formats. The other thing you could count on was marketers flooding in to try to take advantage.

Vine had 200 million users at its peak, including 41% of all American teenagers by some counts, and was gone within the year. Clubhouse was a hot topic during lockdown (admittedly, it piqued our interest), topping out at 10 million weekly active users before turning out to be a short-lived, pandemic-era fad, losing two-thirds of those users in months. In both cases, marketers jumped at the apparent opportunity in front of them and ultimately wasted a lot of budget chasing hype that didn’t last.

It’s tempting to look at those examples and think every new format is a bubble, but that’s just as much of a mistake.

“Pivot to video” was the mantra among marketers for a long time, but the metrics that inspired it were partly junk. Facebook, for example, admitted to overstating viewership metrics and eventually settled with advertisers to the tune of $40 million because of it. But the underlying bet marketers made was sound, because video is still a highly effective medium. The exact numbers were wrong, but the direction was right.

Podcasts are a success story from the opposite side of the hype spectrum. Podcasting was never the splashiest story of the year, but while other formats were going through cycles of boom and bust, podcasts steadily grew from a few hundred thousand shows to more than 4.5 million, with over half a billion global listeners. Everybody has a podcast now, and there’s no sign that they’re going away.

And sometimes, a format you’ve written off comes back around. Vine looked like a dead end in 2017, but the short-form looping video is now, in TikTok and Reels, the most dominant format on the internet, far bigger than Vine ever was. Livestreaming alone has been reinvented multiple times, from Periscope to Twitch to TikTok lives, with varying degrees of success and longevity.

There’s a lesson in this: the amount of hype tells you almost nothing about what will last. The true value of something often lies somewhere between breathless enthusiasm and skeptical dismissal.

Generative AI: Words Are Now Cheap

The tail end of the last decade has essentially had one conversation, and I hardly need to name it: AI. That conversation is still unfolding, with predictions ranging from a sci-fi singularity to a popping bubble.

With the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, the cost of passingly competent, grammatically correct copy dropped to roughly zero. So, of course, the web is now flooded with content. AI-written articles went from around 5% of new web pages to more than half by the end of 2024, amounting to billions of pages.

However, that has made the job of a good content marketer more valuable, not less. AI content may be everywhere, but audiences are wary of it. In Hootsuite’s 2024 survey, 62% of consumers said they trust and engage with a piece of content less once they know AI made it. In a sea of merely passable content that consumers distrust, content that’s more than passable, with a unique point of view and human voice, is that much rarer and more impactful.

Changing Metrics

Marketers spent the last decade measuring web traffic in increasingly sophisticated and effective ways, and our reward was web traffic changing under our feet. Zero-click search chipped away at organic traffic for years, and generative AI took a jackhammer to it. Now a buyer can research your entire category, form an opinion and shortlist you without ever visiting your website. That means no data for your analytics.

The numbers in your dashboard are technically as accurate as they ever were, but they describe fewer and fewer user journeys every day, as user behavior adapts to the new search tools in front of them, like AI chatbots. Even when you’re still winning brand exposure, it’s much more difficult to tell.

Clicks Got Expensive

For a long time, you could buy precise access to almost any consumer for very little, through platforms like Google Ads. But the cost of a Google search ad has climbed almost every year, reaching an average of $4.66 per click in 2024, up almost 10% in a single year.  Evidence from Google’s own antitrust trial confirms that prices have been rising for years.

Precision is declining, too, thanks to a wave of privacy changes like GDPR that limit what consumer data platforms can collect. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy arrived in 2021, and most users predictably opt out of allowing advertisers to track their behavior, giving advertisers less targeting data to work with.

That lost precision cost Meta an estimated $10 billion in 2022 alone, and the company warned that small advertisers could see their return on ad spend drop by more than 60%. Third-party tracking cookies have been on an agonizingly long way out, too.

The costs for paid traffic are rising while unpaid traffic is declining due to zero-click searches, so marketers and advertisers really are being squeezed from both sides.

In retrospect, the amount of consumer data that advertisers historically had access to was probably unhealthy. The party couldn’t last forever, and the bill is coming due.

What Hasn’t Changed

For everything that’s changed over the past 10 years, the fundamentals of marketing really haven’t:

Messages Beat Platforms

The format treadmill only trips you if you’re running on it. A good message is adaptable. With some adjustments, it can work in a six-second loop, a vertical video, a podcast or a blog. The platform is just a vehicle.

The teams that succeed are the ones building ideas and brands worth spreading and then meeting the audience where they know it is, rather than rushing to be in every format as soon as possible.

We’ve never lost a client for taking our time in exploring new channels, and we don’t waste time and budget on channels that flame out in six months.

Judgment Is the Job

When anyone can generate copy and graphics in seconds with AI, simply producing is no longer the valuable part. The job is really deciding what’s worth saying, to whom and why they should believe you. AI models don’t have taste, just statistical averages, so they can’t do that for you.

The tools themselves support this idea, in a way: around 82% of sources that ChatGPT and Perplexity cite are still human-made. The machines themselves lean on human judgment because even the machines know the limits of trusting machines.

More pointedly, there has always been bad marketing. There’s just more of it now, and the quality floor is a little higher. But judgment has always been the decisive factor in marketing that makes an impact.

Pipeline Is the Point

Analytics dashboards may not be spotlighting the right numbers anymore, but honestly, they were never really measuring the most important things to begin with. Marketing exists to move business outcomes: leads, revenue, retention and growth. Measuring web traffic was only ever a proxy for that, and it’s easy to get caught up on the proxy instead of what it’s standing in for.

If your web sessions dropped because of zero-click searches and AI chatbots, but your pipeline is just as strong, you don’t have a marketing problem. You have a measurement problem.

The tools and metrics that we use to evaluate marketing performance have changed and will continue to change, but the underlying goals we’re really focused on are evergreen.

You Have to Earn Attention

When access to consumers was cheap and precise, it was easy to treat attention as a commodity you could simply buy. Now the cost of a click is at an all-time high, and you have less guarantee than ever that you’ll get the right person clicking. That’s not a reason to stop buying reach, but it is a very good reason to be intentional about where that reach is landing. What’s true today has always been true: Paid reach works best when there’s something earned underneath it.

An ad for a brand people already recognize and trust converts where an ad for an unknown doesn’t, and that means more return on your ad spend. A strong brand is efficient that way. You can’t escape the rising costs of advertising, but you can get more for your money by building a strong brand the way we always have: building reputation, relationships and memorability.

Here’s to the Next 10

If a decade has taught me anything, it’s the importance of holding two ideas at once: stay fluent enough in what’s new to use the parts that work, but stay steady enough on the fundamentals to ignore what doesn’t. We were never going to sit out from short-form video or AI just because lots of trends fizzle, but neither are we going to pretend that marketing is actually being reinvented every year and chase the new hotness off a cliff.

That’s what Cindy and I have been doing for the last 10 years, for our clients and for ourselves. The tools, the platforms and the acronyms change, but what we’re trying to do for the businesses we work with has not.

The next “future of marketing” is already being overhyped somewhere. We’ll learn it, test it and find where it fits, while keeping to the principles that have never let us down. That’s the plan for the next decade.

Thanks for being part of the first one. And if you’d like a hand telling the difference between what’s worth chasing and what’s worth ignoring, let’s talk. We’ve had some practice.