3 Things That Made Marketing Harder in 2025

If marketing felt harder to you this year, you weren't imagining it.

And if you’ve ever seen Seinfeld, then you know that today is December 23rd, also known as Festivus.

And friends, it’s time for my professional Airing of Grievances.

Even in a year where my business grew, I saw talented marketers struggle with industry-wide issues beyond their control. I’m talking about conversion tracking breaking down, continued AI disruption, and general macroeconomic weirdness. That’s enough to make anyone feel like the Grinch.

And with the new year right around the corner, here's something worth remembering: a lot of what made last year difficult had nothing to do with your skills or effort.

Sometimes, the general business environment changes in wild and unpredictable ways, and 2025 is one of the years where that happened.

To be clear—I’m not just telling you this to make you feel better. Nor do I want you to give into despair, because good products and services pitched to people with good messaging will always have a chance to succeed.

It’s that I earnestly believe there are three major systemic changes that made marketing harder than it needed to be this year. Not a single one is your fault, and I think they’re worth spelling out, because we’re all now in a position to be much more proactive this year than last.

Let's start with the big one: conversion attribution in 2025 is an absolute mess.

According to a data report issued by Supermetrics, “41% of marketers say they can't effectively measure marketing across channels.” If anything, that’s a wild underestimate because there are a lot of factors working together to make measuring marketing ROI harder than it’s been in a long time:

All this means that someone could see your Facebook ad, hear a podcast mention your brand, remember your name while scrolling Reddit three days later, and then Google you directly. Then it could show up in your analytics as "organic" or "direct/none." Your Facebook campaign gets zero credit even though it planted the seed. And you're supposed to defend your budget with this data.

I can’t emphasize how different this is than, say, 2017. It’s also not a brand new issue either, as it’s been slowly building for years. The measurement infrastructure marketers relied on in the 2010s just simply doesn’t work anymore.

Without getting into all the odd ways that can play out, one thing is true: stakeholders want proof that marketing drives revenue. And if you don’t have the tools to do that, you get a lump of coal in your stocking, rather than the kind of financial investment your team needs to properly run marketing channels.

But there is a silver lining here which smart marketers will be paying attention to in 2026. Namely, old-school measurement techniques like marketing lift testing and Marketing Mix Modeling are making a comeback. When the new infrastructure fails, the old methods still work.

Here's a fun stat: 74% of newly published web pages show AI fingerprints according to Ahrefs. That means three out of every four pages you see online were generated or heavily assisted by tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

Making mediocre content was always faster than making good content. But in the last couple of years, it’s become nearly instantaneous and virtually free. So naturally, the internet got flooded with mediocre, AI-generated content in 2025.

Your competitors can now publish 10x more content in the same amount of time.

As can you, as can everyone else. We’re in an arms race, basically.

There’s an odd little paradox at play here. Namely, AI has made many aspects of marketing so much easier that they have become worthless. A 2,000 blog post isn’t impressive on its own any more.

Standing out now requires what Lisa Benson at DeBella DeBall Designs called "increasingly sophisticated, human-crafted storytelling." She goes on to say that her clients are having to invest in more authentic, deep-dive content in order to stand out among the noise.

Personally, I love that there’s an incentive to push toward more experience- and expertise-driven content. But let’s not kid ourselves here: that kind of writing takes more time, more skill, and more resources than churning out SEO-optimized long-form content did even before ChatGPT came out in late 2022.

And make no mistake here: Google is continuously working to prioritize helpful, original, experience-rich content. But because AI is so good at summarizing facts, you have to lean more into original and experience-rich content than ever before, which is pretty new, because the path of least resistance used to be writing “explainer” pieces.

So if you’re struggling, you should know that it’s not a “skill issue” on your part. The whole marketing industry—writers, SEO professionals, search engines, etc.—is being disrupted by a brand-new technology that we don’t have social norms for yet.

If you only looked at the S&P 500, you’d think the stock market was doing OK. Even amid the tariff rollout of April 2025, the line kept going up.

From January to September alone, US tariff rates changed 20 times. It all started with a universal 10% baseline tariff. China was threatened with a 145% tariff at one point, which went back down to 45%, only for threats of a 130% tariff coming back in October. The exemption that let your Temu and Shein orders under $800 (de minimis) got eliminated in late August too.

Santa and all his elves couldn’t even keep up.

With rates changing that fast, just about every business that has physical products has to pay attention. They’re either manufacturing outside of the US or they depend on supplies from outside of the US. And if you don’t know how much your inputs are going to cost, you can’t know what your profit is going to look like. Plus, you don’t want to make your price go up and down and confuse customers.

So a lot of businesses chose to slash their marketing budgets.

And at the exact same time, platform costs surged.

Social media CPMs rose across Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, with TikTok leading at 15.6% year-over-year growth. The average Google Ads CPC hit $5.26 in 2025, with Google Generic Search showing dramatic increases—CPM up 45.60% and CPC up 20.15%. Much this is downstream of conversion tracking issues, which have turned marketing into an exercise in guessing and hoping.

So in sum, a lot of businesses have struggled to know what their per-unit profit margins will be. And marketing channels have gone up in price.

Man, that’s just a lot.

This meant harder choices about which channels to cut. More pressure to justify every dollar. Less room for testing and experimentation—the exact things that make brilliant marketing possible.

None of this was within your control. Tariff uncertainty and recession fears were global forces. Platform costs rose due to increased competition and shrinking ad inventory.

As a typical marketer or business owner, you didn't cause any of this. You just did your best to muddle through.

If you felt like you were running uphill last year, that is completely OK. There were a lot of things in flux in 2025, and they skewed toward systemic challenges that affected every marketer, regardless of skill level. The fanciest marketing offices on Madison Avenue struggled with the issues I just listed here too.

And yet: you kept showing up. You adapted to constant change, or you gave it your level best.

That deserves credit. And it deserves honor.

Make no mistake: the year 2026 will bring its own challenges. Every year does.

But if the tough parts of 2025 caught you off guard, then hear me here: it’s completely OK to acknowledge that this year was hard for reasons beyond your control.

No matter what your CTR look like this year, you earned that much.