In his first MAD//Insight column, Richard Robinson, Executive Director of Ingenuity+, argues that 2025 will be a year of bold marketing decisions and asks whether brands will take the leap into the unknown or play it safe.

History teaches us a lot, and when the watchmaker Bulova launched the first TV commercial, (watch it below), on July 1st, 1941 before a Dodgers vs Phillies baseball game the world as we know it changed. Their 10 second ad, “Bulova Watch Time, complete with the iconic voiceover “America runs on Bulova time”, transformed how brands communicate and opened the flood gates for every brand to follow, and fund, a new and revolutionary platform – commercial television.

Fast-forward eighty-four years from Ardé Bulova’s decision to commission Milton Biow from The Biow Company to create the ad that changed an industry for $9 ($5 for airtime and $4 for "station charges") and 2025 is already shaping up to be the year of big decisions for marketers. Will you stick to what you know or will you be more like Ardé and take the leap into the unknown.

What we see from the customer is s/he’s consuming more content and now purchasing product whenever and however s/he wants. An often overlooked consequence of Covid is it was the people who digitally transformed first, and business and brands who followed in their wake. The 38-hour week is resigned to history and the 168-hour economy reality, underpinned by the capability and growing confidence of a fast accelerating, never-sleeping, arsenal of martech and adtech. To prove the point marketing spend for the UK rose by 10% to top £40bn in 2024, double that of our closest rival (Germany) with four out of every five pounds spent on digital.

The Pitch to the customer, delivered in real-time and in the blink of an eye, is set to become every marketer’s search for perfection in the year ahead. The big idea delivered with sharp impact, embracing the art and science of optimisation, iteration and risk on a perpetual basis to deliver the growth every investor and stakeholder is impatiently waiting for.

This search for the perfect pitch will naturally migrate to the agencies chosen to deliver and implement the campaigns and experiences necessary to influence customer behaviour. Agencies and brands need to recognise the opportunity to grow may come from the small as well as the big, augmenting a roster to not only bring in fresh thinking for the biggest ideas in media and creativity, but also perfecting the traditionally small budget areas to improve expertise and outcomes in influence, social, design, experience and more. Finding the right agency to optimise your font may be more powerful than changing the idea the font is there to communicate.

So, as we look ahead into a year when 69% of marketing leaders have said they will definitely be pitching some or all of their marketing in the next twelve months, and a further 28% have said they will be potentially following suit, the need to be pitch perfect in everything we do has never been greater. Success will come when all sides recognise the process as mutual, just as Milton Biow did when he said “Ideas from the outside in are usually inside out”.

After all everybody’s new business is somebody’s old business whether you’re the brand, agency or customer.

Richard Robinson, Executive Director of Ingenuity+, will be writing a monthly column for MAD//Insight.

Ingenuity+ is one part of The Ingenuity Group, the UK’s largest connector of brands with agencies and agencies with brands. #Connectingthemarketingworld