Web Summit Qatar: Marketing trends for 2025 | Brian Gleason

Hello. Good afternoon. How's the energy out here? We're post lunch. Give us a little something. Okay. Okay. I see you. Good afternoon. My name is Darnell Strom. Very excited for this conversation. We're going to be talking about what the marketing trends are for 2025. There's so much that's going on in this environment. Changing consumer behaviors, new platforms, emerging technologies. So I'm joined by three wonderful experts in this field and we want to dive in and have an exciting conversation. So we're going to jump in. What I'd love for each one of you to do is just to give us a little bit about you know, what you do with your company and then also tell us one of the marketing trends this year that have really kind of captured your time and attention as you guys focus on 2025 and beyond. Christine, I want to start with you.

Sure. Good afternoon, everyone. Christine McGuire, I'm the Global Vice President at TripAdvisor, overseeing the commercial business. And most of you probably know TripAdvisor as Trusted Reviews. We're in our 25th year. We just marked our 25th anniversary two weeks ago. But our mission is really to guide and inspire travelers and 60 percent of the consumers that come to our site don't actually know what destination they want to go to. Building trust and confidence in those really high stakes decisions when they're going on trips and then ultimately connecting to commerce. So, I have the pleasure of working with global brands and destinations, small and medium businesses across things to do and accommodations and restaurants, and then building strategic partnerships that ultimately bolster our platform. We have a big and thriving experiences business, so we own Viator, which is a things to do platform. Hopefully many of you have used it. And, you know, I believe experiences, especially as the younger generations really prioritize that over material things, will have an emergence. If you haven't heard of Bill Perkins, he just wrote a book called Die With Zero, and the premise of the book is take your financial accumulation and go and have life experiences that pay off in dividends and memories for life, versus accumulating material things that deteriorate over time, so for me, that's the big marketing trend, getting back in person, socializing, creating memorable experiences that last forever, and ultimately help with multi generation and some of the younger generations that want to have memories that last forever.

Great. Thank you, Philip. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be here. So I'm Philip Davies. I'm the president of EMEA of Siegel and Gale.

I want to start with you. Sure. Good afternoon,

Everyone. Christine McGuire, I'm the Global Vice President at TripAdvisor, overseeing the commercial business. And most of you probably know TripAdvisor as Trusted Reviews. We're in our 25th year. We just marked our 25th anniversary two weeks ago. But our mission is really to guide and inspire travelers and 60 percent of the consumers that come to our site don't actually know what destination they want to go to. Building trust and confidence in those really high stakes decisions when they're going on trips and then ultimately connecting to commerce. So, I have the pleasure of working with global brands and destinations, small and medium businesses across things to do and accommodations and restaurants, and then building strategic partnerships that ultimately bolster our platform. We have a big and thriving experiences business, so we own Viator, which is a things to do platform. Hopefully many of you have used it. And, you know, I believe experiences, especially as the younger generations really prioritize that over material things, will have an emergence. If you haven't heard of Bill Perkins, he just wrote a book called Die With Zero, and the premise of the book is take your financial accumulation and go and have life experiences that pay off in dividends and memories for life, versus accumulating material things that deteriorate over time, so for me, that's the big marketing trend, getting back in person, socializing, creating memorable experiences that last forever, and ultimately help with multi generation and some of the younger generations that want to have memories that last forever.

Great. Thank you, Philip. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be here. So I'm Philip Davies. I'm the president of EMEA of Siegel and Gale. And we've been going in business since the sixties. So I guess inherently where we're kind of optimists by nature. But since then, our defining Philosophy and way of working has been to deploy simplicity in everything we do. And for us, that's probably as relevant now as it was in 1969 when we were founded. And you think of whatever way of looking at that you like from, if you like the expression VUCA, where everything is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous and simplicity really is the antidote to that. So when we create brands, when we develop brands, when we create stories. We make sure that they have that thing, which is absolutely fundamental for us, which is about focus and simplicity isn't about productionism or minimalism or anything like that. It's actually that, if you like the pretentious way of talking about it, it's the intersection of clarity and surprise. You know, we need to make things easier to understand, but we also need to engage really, really, really well. So, you know, going back to why we feel that works, look at maybe one of the, it'd be like our first. The first identity we ever did was the NBA logo. And if you can picture that in your minds, it's that, you know, silhouette of, of Jerry West, the L. A. Lakers player. Still exactly the same today as it, than it was in 1969. And we kind of like to think that's a illustration of the power of a simple, enduring idea. Which is, you know, universal it's enduring, and it's scalable as well. And it makes them three billion dollars a year just out of that identity. And it's also. I guess we like to think a logo is measured by how commonly it's used as well. And you'll find that a lot of body parts around the world. So if a, if a logo can be tattooed on somebody, we think that's probably a pretty good measure of a job well done. So you asked also about, prediction, I guess in terms of trying to make sure that brands are able to play a role in people's lives and be genuinely useful to them. And. You know, in looking at that, I would say that really thinking about how brands want to try to speak to people, not in a mass market, but as a huge market of individuals, it's about finding ways that you can personalize without being creepy. Yeah, you want to be part of people's lives, but you don't invade people's lives. And I think the more that we see brands doing that, that's what they have to do. Otherwise, they'll simply be rejected if they don't do that.

Well, the personalization piece will come back to because I think there's a lot to explore on that front. Bryan. I like the analogy of the, if you can tattoo it on the logo. Do you have the tattoo? Do you have the NBA logo tattoo on you? I don't have a logo tattoo. Maybe in the future.

We can start with you, Christine.

Yeah, it wouldn't be a marketing trends panel without talking about AI, and if you think about history, arguably AI consumer shifts have dramatically accelerated versus any other time. So, if you look at ChatGPT, within two months they had 100 million users. I don't know if we could look back in history and see anything like that. So I would say for marketers, it's a first mover. You can't lag. You can't sit still. You really need to adopt the technology quickly. And then as I apply that to travel, you know, talking about e-commerce or streaming, those consumer experiences and behaviors have shifted so dramatically where it's a frictionless experience, you expect same day or on demand programming. I would say travel in the era of AI is ripe for disruption. There's so many touch points across a fragmented journey that AI can really help bring that all together, personalize the experience. You know, at TripAdvisor we really believe in people powered guidance guided by people like you that have been there before, and it is really backed on authentic, real reviews. So for travel, I think it's going to be a game changing time to really bring up all those different elements from the pre planning and booking journey right through to the end, sharing and the loopback. So I'm excited for AI and how quickly it's going to change with AI tools.

Philip, you mentioned in your intro about personalization and trying to do it without coming off as creepy, right? We have so much access to data and insights now. How do you, or when you advise your clients, how do they personalize the experience of marketing without feeling too invasive and turning off the consumer?

Yeah, so we look to try to create a brand that can have universal appeal, but individual sort of recognition and an individual sort of relevance to them. So you know, we manage brands globally and one of our brands that we have worked with for a number of years is American Express. So you know, we find that in say London, people are actually asking for the old heritage card, you know, the green card because they like it, but they want all the toys loaded up onto it, so they want all the platinum toys, etcetera, the centurion toys, maybe, but they want it to look quite modest, but we do find, you know, you may go to a certain Mumbai and people when they take that card out, they want it to light up. So they want a celebration of being a member and so forth. So finding ways that that can ladder up to the same story about realize your potential is how we would do it. So then it's about finding ways that can be modulated around the world to absolutely make sense. So for us, when it comes to using that with AI, it is down to a simple idea like that. And that's always what we look for. And for us, it's finding that AI won't find that for you. So we use AI as writers and as strategists and designers, but it's really being able to identify. You know, David Lynch, the famous film director passed away, what, two months ago, three months ago? I loved one of his phrases. He used to say, an idea is like a fish. You can't make a fish, but you can catch one. And that's kinda like what it's like using AI as well. Making sure that you can really spot the right things and you can see a fish rather than just see the shimmering light on the water. You can really get something. So it's finding a great idea that is actually very, very versatile and flexible.

Brian, have you seen examples of incorporation of AI in unique ways that marketers have used that you think will be continued to use more in the future?

Christine, we were talking beforehand about the generational differences when it comes to marketing, what Gen Z is interested in, or the way they like to be marketed to is different than the way that millennials like to be marketed to, how do you kind of navigate the generational differences? And then as Generation Alpha is coming up, a purely digital generation, how do you navigate that consumer journey because it's changing and shifting so much?

Yeah, we actually just published a big study called Life Stages. You know, you have traveler types, you have trip types, but life stages looks very different based on where you are in your journey. So there's a lot of great things in that. But if I focused in on the younger generations, they care about adventure, they care about sustainability, they care about value and they care about the intersection of life, sports and music and festivals with travel. So we're really honing in on that as an opportunity to bring a lot of things together and super serve that consumer.

I think you talked about a couple of points there that were, you know, I'm the Hollywood guy. So when I hear things like music and entertainment and storytelling, it makes me think about how does pop culture and cultural relevance play a part in marketing? And we've seen a lot of creator or influencer campaigns or traditional celebrity campaigns. Some work very well. Some don't work at all. How important is pop culture? And this is for all three of you. How important is pop culture in marketing? And do you see that continuing to bond together? Or do you see people moving away from it? Philip, we can start with you.

I think, as long as it's used really, really with care, obviously. So I think also we're moving away from the kind of the influencer or the celebrity who's like holding the product. It's much more about what part have they had in that product? So I really admire campaigns by people like Louis Vuitton when they work with Pharrell Williams and how he has made a creative director there. And he really, you can see he's really invested in the product. You can see his personality coming through and it's a great fusion of the two. And you go back to people like Stella McCartney did that really well with Adidas as well. So when it is authentic, that's when it works. When it starts to slip away from that, it just doesn't work. So there needs to be a degree of transparency in why they're involved, and what they do. So there's real trust in that product. One of the things we've been seeing from the agency side, to your point, using the Pharrell example, is that brands are, especially for very creative minded talent, bringing them in to actually partner with them. So making them creative director or artistic director in certain ways. Using their insights and their access to information from their audiences to be able to help them develop campaigns. That's something that we've seen and probably a trend that we will continue to see moving forward.

Brian, have you seen anything that's worked really well in the kind of pop culture or cultural relevant space?

So as we close out here, we want to look to the future. So we want you to put on your crystal ball and make your best predictions for what are the trends that are going to really move the needle in 2026 or the technologies or platforms that you think are going to be most impactful to marketers moving forward. So putting you on the hot seat first, Christine.

I'll go back to events and experiences. So it's going to be the mega decade for the US. We have the World Cup, we have the Olympics, America's 250th anniversary next year. So there's a lot of focus on tourism and experiential and all the things to super serve those consumers. And then I would say AI for good, health care and medicine and sustainability and environmental applications. That's what I would love to see in the next year or two. And ultimately, we'll probably see an emergence of companies and people that we don't know of right now, but are going to be part of the NASDAQ or some of the top five or ten companies, emerging in the next few years.

Right. I agree with you on the experiential. I feel like it's just going to continue to happen. And being a TripAdvisor here, you get to be right in the center of it. Uh, Philip?

Can I have two things? Sure. Um, okay, so away from tech, I would say that still some of the key things, and just listen to Brian there as well, in terms of how you engage. And remembering that we're creatures of flesh and blood and the way we receive information is through the heart. What's that expression? What the heart feels today, the head understands tomorrow. And I think we still need those wonderful ideas that can get into people's hearts first and then go travel up to their minds where they rationalize it. So I think language is one of the key things that we can use there. It's one of the most transportable creative elements that a brand can have. Use of language. But I would also say the other thing is I think what we're obviously seeing is just the explosion of excitement here in Doha. And the involvement here is just incredible how things are changing, progressing. Just going back to the World Cup that was staged here, seeing how things are done in Doha way or the Qatar way is really exciting. So I think what happens here is going to be something to watch over the next few years.

I agree. Brian closes. I know we're on red.

Well, thank you for your time. Thank you for your predictions. If any of their predictions are wrong, you should message them in a year on LinkedIn and tell them that they were wrong. But no, thank you for your time and thank you all for listening.