2025 Marketing Trends in Review: AI & The Trust Gap

In 2025, budgets tightened, attention fractured further, and consumers became faster at filtering what felt useful versus what felt like noise. As a result, we had fewer “shiny object” strategies and more operationalized, performance-driven marketing rooted in trust, relevance, and proof.

Global digital ad spend is projected to surpass $790 billion (AI Digital) and this year marks a tipping point where AI-driven hyper-personalization collides with tightening privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, while consumers demand more authentic, value-driven brand interactions.

We'll be diving into each AI, CTV, Retail Media, Creator Economy covering the trends that shaped U.S. marketing in 2025, uncovering:

-       How brands applied them

-       How consumers responded

AI as Marketing Infrastructure, Not “a Feature”

In 2025, AI stopped being positioned as a novelty and instead became the operating layer behind marketing decisions, from creative optimization to media allocation and lifecycle messaging. U.S. brands moved beyond “AI-powered tools” to AI-embedded marketing operations—planning, creative, media optimization, and measurement increasingly ran through AI workflows.

In Practice:

Retailers like Walmart and Target used AI to localize messaging by region, store, and inventory status. Walmart used AI to localize creative, pricing messages, and promotions by ZIP code and store cluster, driving measurable lift in both ecommerce and in-store traffic.

DoorDash: Leveraged Google’s AI-powered Demand Gen tool, which boosted its conversion rate by 15 times and improved cost per action efficiency by 50% compared with previous campaigns.

Tech platforms such as Adobe, Salesforce, and HubSpot embedded predictive modeling directly into marketing workflows, allowing teams to move faster with fewer resources. In the process, they became de facto AI marketing stacks for mid-market and enterprise brands, automating segmentation, predictive churn, and creative testing.

Media teams increasingly relied on AI to forecast ROAS and dynamically reallocate spend across CTV, paid social, and retail media.

Search Interest:

Google search interest for terms like “AI marketing,” “AI tools for marketing,” and “generative AI advertising” remained consistently high throughout 2025, with spikes tied to major platform updates. The U.S. showed some of the strongest relative interest globally, suggesting not just curiosity, but active adoption.

Consumer Reaction: 

Consumers appreciated relevance and speed but remained wary of over-personalization.

According to Kantar, when it comes to consumers:

• ~50% report enjoying AI-generated visuals in ads, more than half continue to feel uneasy and distrustful of AI-generated ads.

• More than 60% of consumers worry that generative AI could lead to fake or misleading advertisements, highlighting a substantial trust gap between marketers and the public.

What Is Clear: AI is welcome when it reduces friction, not when it feels intrusive.