What you need to know:

• ‘Virtual professor’ Mark Ritson says AI-powered automation is coming for marketing functions faster than many realise – with ad and promotion-focused marketers facing “a crisis” as a result.
• He cited data suggesting only circa 20 per cent of marketers remain involved in product and pricing. The rest appear increasingly vulnerable.
• Ritson also told an ADMA-hosted event that purpose and ESG are likewise on the nose as global politics swing hard to the right, and that the days of brands getting away with bumping up prices and still seeing growth are “over”.
• He said 2024 was also the year that platforms stopped selling personalisation and started selling mass reach much harder. Yet TV is still getting rug-pulled by marketers despite “all the data” showing “TV is still a very strong medium”.
• As for 2025, Ritson observes a palpable sense of anxiety about what comes next across New York, London and Sydney. The answer? “No one knows,” per Ritson. But “all bets are off”.

Virtual professor Mark Ritson reckons strategic marketing planning functions may be almost entirely automated within five years. He told marketers and the media supply chain to prepare accordingly, though suggested creative agencies may survive a cull coming faster than many realise.

As an early backer of Evidenza – which uses AI to create “synthetic customers” on demand and according to its founders can create “a finance friendly marketing plan that used to take months in minutes” – Ritson has a dog in the fight. But he told ADMA’s annual shindig that’s precisely why they should take heed.

EY’s “quite scary” CMO “who told us synthetic data was bullshit” had a Damascene conversion when Evidenza ran a synthetic version of EY’s latest $2m human CEO survey and replicated the results within 24 hours – with 96 per cent accuracy, per Ritson. “We had to point out that the four per cent that was different wasn't our error, it was hers. Now she's a client, so we've got there with synthetic data.”

Because Evidenza’s initial thrust has been to disrupt market research, Ritson acknowledges it’s been a relative blip on the marketing supply chain radar.

“But once you've got unlimited free data, qual and quant, it opens the door for the real game, which is artificial intelligence marketing and brand planning,” he said.

“Now what's happening very quickly is we're building tools that can instantaneously create a segmentation, build a funnel, do real-time pricing, develop your category entry points, tell you what your best distinctive brand assets are, tell you what an econometric balance of your media mix should be, etcetera, etcetera. All of those tools are now quickly becoming possible. Some of them are not there yet, but they're coming,” claimed Ritson.

“We can run literally millions of iterations across these 10 or 12 planning tools and say to a client, ‘this is the best set of objectives you should set next year, and this is the investment, and this is how much money it should produce’. And that's infinitesimally better than anything we [marketers] as a group can do, because … we're pretty good, but we're not AI good.”

The speed of development puts a swathe of the marketing industry on notice.

“I think by the 2030s, we will be looking at systems that do that for us … It eliminates a lot of the media planning, it eliminates a lot of strategic planning that many of us have done for our whole lives. Ironically, I don't think it eliminates the need for big creative agencies; I think humans will always do that better. But the rest of it is, I think, a very interesting proposition, and it's coming more quickly than we think,” per Ritson.

Given the plethora of AI-based planning, attribution and econometric modelling tools now hitting the market – with anecdotally huge uptake by CMOs – perhaps Ritson is attempting not to spook the horses by putting a five-year timeframe on the total disruption he appears convinced is inevitable.

“I’ve always thought most marketing technology is bollocks. So … when an old, critical, conservative person like me says it's going to change everything, I think I get double points.”

‘Crisis coming’

That could pose problems for marketers aiming for a career beyond the next few years. Most, per Ritson, “aren't really marketers at all. They're just working on advertising, they don't get involved in anything else”.

He cited a UK study – possibly this one – showing that “only about 20 per cent of marketing teams are involved in the product or in pricing anymore”, juxtaposing that with marketers viewing brands like Liquid Death, which sells water in tins, as the great category disruptor.

“It’s a great little company, and it’s going to do amazing things. But everyone loves it in marketing, because fundamentally, it's got great ads, and that's about it,” per Ritson. “I think we have to recognise that the good marketing teams are still just as involved in product and pricing as they are with promotion. Everyone else, however, isn't – and there's a crisis coming.”

Sticking with pricing, Ritson underlined that the days of marketers hiking prices and getting away with it amid runaway inflation “are now over”.

“We're going to have to find new ways for growth. That's no bad thing, but I think it's a marked change in what's happened over the last few years.”

Post-purpose era?

New growth probably won’t come from purpose or sustainability initiatives, he suggested.

“There is a marked change in environmentalism around the world. People are realising that we're not going to stop producing, for example, petrol-based vehicles. Some companies are going to do that, but most companies aren't – and there's a recognition, however we want to deal with it, that this dream of moving to a carbon neutral environment isn't going to happen,” said Ritson.

With the world “swinging to the right … there's a real sense that the next 10 years are going to be very different politically and environmentally than the previous 10 years”, he added.

The same applies to brand purpose, or “hypocritical bullshit”, as Ritson has previously described it.

“We're definitely living in a post-purpose world; I think 2024 was the year we realised it was all a load of bollocks,” he suggested.

"To be clear, I don't think having a purpose for your brand is a load of bollocks … What was a load of bollocks – and what is now disappearing quickly in Europe, maybe not yet in the US – is the realisation that having a brand purpose is going to make you more money, which is a hilariously stupid, naïve [view],” continued Ritson.

“Having a brand purpose is going to cost you money. And that's okay, because the purpose of purpose was always purpose. You choose to do these things because you believe in them, and that's a great thing. But don't try and pretend that by doing these things and believing them you're somehow also going to be more commercially successful, because that makes no sense.

“Because what it also means is, if I can prove to you that destroying the planet or treating people of different orientations badly would be better for business, by this logic, you would do that too.”

Unilever, he said, provides a classic case study.

“They went completely purpose mental for five years. Their share price relative to their competitors went down the toilet. The brands underperformed. A new CEO came in this year and sorted them out – and they're coming back.

“I'm not saying Unilever should have abandoned their purpose. What they should have abandoned was [the belief that] positioning Hellmann's mayonnaise on reducing land waste was going to make them more money. It's hilariously bad.”

Brand swing?

Among other Ritson watch-outs and predictions was that “in-housing is going to continue to keep growing its share of the pie” and, while others may disagree, that brands may finally be starting to realise they have gone too short, i.e. diverted too much of their budgets into lower funnel, short-term performance tactics versus brand investment.

“With examples like Nike getting into so much trouble by going so short, so performance and so D2C and getting caught out – and bigger brands like Airbnb going back to long, big brand investment – I think we're finally seeing a realisation that you need long and short in the right proportions, and that has to be a good thing,” he suggested.

But there’s little evidence to suggest traditional brand channels like TV are the beneficiaries, especially locally.

“I've never seen a bigger delta or disparity between how the tool [TV] continues to work very well for brands and how marketers look at it … they perceive it to be this fading thing,” said Ritson. “In reality, all the data continues to stack up – not as well as it did in 2005 perhaps, but it's still a very strong medium.”

(Ritson may not agree with everything fellow marketing professor Felipe Thomaz suggests, but Thomaz’s peer-reviewed paper that analysed 1,000 campaigns and a million customer journeys via Kantar and Wavemaker and found TV to be “consistently the best performer” in every mix suggests some alignment.)

Personalisation pivot

The flip side is that digital continues hoovering up an increasing share of those ‘brand’ dollars – perhaps no coincidence as “digital is going broad”, per Ritson.

“For 15 years, you were told ‘grow targeting, personalisation. That's why digital is better than radio or TV’. Have you noticed this last year? Suddenly, everyone's gone, 'well, no, digital, you should go broad. You go after everyone’. Meta is now selling everyone on the idea, quite correctly, that you want to just put your ad to everyone, and then the algorithm, the AI, will find the right targets for you. Similarly, YouTube is positioning itself very successfully on broad mass-market reach as well as targeted reach.

“So I think what you're seeing is digital is accepting that it has mass marketing capabilities, given about half of a media spend should be mass market.”

As for what comes immediately next for marketing and the broader economy in 2025, Ritson is unsure ­– but everyone’s nervous.

“The big one for me here in Sydney, definitely in London, absolutely in New York City, there is a powerful sense of uncertainty everywhere, like something's going to happen, but we don't know what it is yet. It doesn't feel like pre-Covid. It doesn't feel like the turn of the century. It feels like something else is going on. I think it's maybe the downturn in tech jobs, the arrival of proper AI implications. I think it's a lot of things, but what you feel as you walk around these big cities is a real sense that no one knows what's coming next, and all bets are off.”

He hit the bar before anyone could say 'Armageddon'.