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In a busy start to the new year! TikTok lifted the lid on how brands can succeed, Google Ads VP Brendon Kraham laid out plans for the year ahead and Amazon launched a new, innovative ad solution for retailers. Meanwhile, analysis reveals consumer frustrations with Google Search results while AI Overviews are getting bigger and page-one rankings correlate with ChatGPT mentions.
TikTok has released its What’s Next 2025 report, which lifts the lid on successful social marketing strategies. “Brand Chem” is the key buzzword for 2025, which TikTok defines as a careful balance of “listening, adapting and transforming”.
“Itʼs not magic; it’s chemistry, or as we call it at TikTok, Brand Chem – a balance of listening, adapting, and transforming. When brands open up to fresh creator communities and intentionally create spaces for real engagement, they’re not just connecting – they’re tapping into the pulse of their audience.”
To achieve Brand Chem in 2025, TikTok is urging brands to prioritise three key areas:
Aside from the fact that people spend more time on TikTok than any other social app, no network has redefined how consumers engage with brands as much as TikTok in recent years. Increasingly, TikTok is where consumer attention is won, but it’s also shaping how brands win attention – across all platforms.
Research carried out by Reddit finds consumers are turning to online communities over traditional search when they want to learn more about products. According to its findings, 47% say irrelevant search results are the most frustrating aspect of product research. Furthermore, when people want “immediate answers to specific questions,” 71% of respondents agreed that Reddit is the top source for reliable information.
Reddit itself is saying that “conversation is the new influencer” and “Reddit conversations are the new landing page for business discovery”. Reddit isn’t simply hyping itself up here, either. This aligns perfectly with TikTok’s insights on brands working with creators and building genuine conversations with consumers.
Our key message throughout 2024 was that visibility on Google alone isn’t enough for brands anymore. People are using a wider variety of tools throughout the consumer journey and, in some cases, specifically seeking out alternatives to Google and traditional search.
Moving away from consumer concerns for a moment, let’s talk about one of the biggest complaints marketers and brands have with Google Search: AI Overviews. Unfortunately, the problem is only getting bigger – quite literally – as analysis finds the pixel height of AI Overviews increased dramatically in 2024. According to BrightEdge, AI Overviews took up 600 vertical pixels of screen space in May 2024, but this increased to over 800px by the end of the year.
The company also finds AI Overviews are showing for more queries with finance topics seeing the biggest increase – from 5% to 20%. Meanwhile, healthcare topics continue to show the highest prevalence of AI Overviews, increasing to 80% from 70% of queries.
Ultimately, AI Overviews are showing for more queries in 2025 and they’re pushing organic results further down the page.
Losing potential traffic to AI Overviews is a major concern to SEOs, marketers and brands. Unfortunately, Google’s live testing of AI Overview prevalence in results and pixel height makes it difficult to measure the impact they have on traffic volumes and adjust strategies.
Amazon is the third-largest (7%) digital advertising platform, behind Alphabet (39%) and Meta (18%). However, Amazon’s latest move could reshuffle those market share percentages.
Amazon’s new Retail Ad Service allows other retailers to run ads on their own websites. In other words, retailers can tap into Amazon’s ad technology, even if they don’t sell their products through Amazon itself.
At this point, Retail Ad Service is still in the beta stage and it’s only available to retailers in the US. However, the current implementation enables retailers to:
Retail Ad Service opens a new kind of advertising opportunity for eCommerce brands. Interestingly, Amazon is offering a product that puts the emphasis back on retailer websites when most tech companies seem to be doing everything they can to keep consumers locked into their own platforms.
A new study from Seer Interactive finds a strong correlation between organic rankings and mentions in LLM responses by tools like ChatGPT.
Testing OpenAI’s GPT4o API, the company analysed 10,000 questions to compare mentions with organic search factors. In its findings, ranking on page one of Google shows the strongest correlations with LLM mentions (~0.65). Meanwhile, it found no significant correlation between backlinks and LLM mentions.
This isn’t the first study to find a correlation between search rankings and generative AI mentions. However, SEOs and marketers need to consider the impact of brand hype, mentions, press coverage, social conversations and other factors as generative AI plays a bigger role in consumer journeys.
Google Ads Vice President, Brendon Kraham, has outlined the advertising giant’s plans for 2025 – namely, preparing for a “seismic shift” in consumer search behaviour.
The VP says Google expects AI to have an even bigger impact on consumer behaviour than mobile devices. That’s a bold statement, but it’s also an attitude that says a lot about Google’s intentions moving forward.
According to Brendon Kraham, Google will be focusing on three key areas:
Essentially, it sounds like Google is going all-in on AI technology for search and advertising.
AI is already redefining the search experience for users, as well as advertising solutions with campaigns like Performance Max. Ultimately, the way people discover and buy products online is changing – and so are the tools advertisers use to reach them.
If you’re worried about any of the latest marketing news, we’re always here to help you make sense of new developments and adapt your strategy, if necessary. Call us on 023 9283 0281 or send us your details below to speak to our team.
Lee has been working in the online arena, leading digital departments since the early 2000s, and oversees all our delivery services at Vertical Leap, having joined back in 2010. Lee joined our company Operations Team in May 2019. Before working at Vertical Leap, Lee completed a degree in Business Management & Communications at Winchester University, headed up the online development and direct marketing department for an international financial services company for ~7 years, and set up/run a limited company providing website design, development and digital marketing solutions. Lee had his first solely authored industry book (Tactical SEO) published in 2016, with 2 further industry books being published in 2019, and can be seen regularly expert contributing to industry websites including State of Digital, Search Engine Journal, The Drum, plus many others. Lee has a passion for management in the digital industry and loves to see the progression of others through personal learning, training and development. Outside the office he looks to help others while challenging himself, having skydived, bungie jumped and abseiled (despite a fear of heights) with many more fundraising and voluntary events completed and on the horizon. As a husband and dad, Lee loves to spend time with his family and friends. His hobbies include exercising, trying new experiences, eating out, playing countless team sports, as well as watching films (Gangster movies in particular – “forget about it”).
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