“Marketing’s no longer about how many clicks or views you get. Now it’s all about brand presence and whether your campaign is actually influencing consumer behavior.”

Marketers listen up! Marketing’s not what it was 2 years ago, let alone 5 or 10. Privacy legislation and the advent of AI have seen marketing practices evolve at breakneck speed.

We spoke to eToro’s Head of Programmatic Advertising Strategy, Shad Alter, who’s at the forefront of this industry, to ask him his views on marketing in 2025 and how marketers need to prep for the future.  

Shad was clear that the ability to ‘adapt’ is the most essential skill for today’s marketers.

“Above all, marketers need to be adaptable. Change is happening fast and it's happening now. You're either going to be up to date and ready for this, or you're not. And if you get left behind, it’ll be very difficult to catch up.”

Wise words all marketers should heed. But what are the trends they need to keep on top of?

“The major trends happening right now are AI, automation, and personalization. All of which will be a huge driving force behind how marketers plan and operate day-to-day.”

“Add to this that privacy and data regulation are set to get a lot stricter, particularly around AI usage, but also across the ecosystem as a whole, and marketers need to have a grasp not just on new tech and innovation, but also regulation and global policy.”

There’s no getting away from the fact that marketers really are treading new territory and with technology continuously advancing and more and more legislation coming into play, the job of a marketer is getting tougher.

Shad notes that up to this point, we’ve had marketers who have focused on one particular channel but going forwards that is going to change. All marketers will be required to have a much broader outlook around how they use different platforms, how they get their messages across, and which tools they use to support their efforts.

And it’s not just about figuring out how and when to use certain platforms and tools but also how to improve marketing content to keep up with the constantly evolving consumer demand.

“Personalization will need to get a lot smarter, because ads are becoming much more integrated into people's lives, and consumers are consequently becoming very desensitized to ads.”

So, where does Shad sit on the creativity versus data debate?  

“Marketing is both an art and a science. You can’t have one without the other. Effective marketing is a blend between artistic creativity and scientific precision. The most successful creatives are backed by data insights. You can have incredible data but without creativity, it's just numbers on a screen. Likewise, you can have incredible creativity but without the data, you wouldn't know how to get it in front of the right people. So it has to be a blend.”

Talking of getting ads in front of the right audience, effective targeting has been a headache for marketers over the last few years following the loss of user-level data.

Yet for Shad, it’s been a ‘blessing in disguise’ because it forced the industry to test new privacy-conscious ways of targeting, buying and measurement.  

When it comes to the depreciation of  third-party cookies, Google’s ‘will they, won’t they’ has become a running industry joke but Shad makes that point that whatever Google does now, it doesn’t matter, because consumers are now much more conscious about data, about privacy, about the cookies. We’ve reached a point where consumers are no longer sharing their data unless they’re clear what they’re getting in return.

eToro’s at the top of its marketing game and has been trying out new ways of doing things for a while. When it comes to marketing measurement, we were delighted to hear that Shad views incrementality and specifically INCRMNTAL’s solution as the ‘future of marketing measurement’.

“I believe in that little slogan of yours and I believe in moving away from legacy attribution models that give marketers the most skewed picture of their marketing campaigns. For me, INCRMNTAL will be the gold standard.”

From eToro’s perspective, we’re moving towards an incrementality and an exposure based approach. So our marketing’s not based on last click and all these multi-touch probabilistic methods. We want to really grasp and understand campaign effectiveness. And this goes together with incrementality and exposure measurement.

But while the rest of the industry is beginning to lean towards Shad and eToro’s way of thinking, it hasn’t been a straightforward process for all.

As Shad says: “It's a big mind shift for campaign managers and marketers to start thinking about measurement differently. It's very difficult to change that mindset. Marketers are very stuck in their ways, and it's not easy, but it's going to have to happen.”

So, what about eToro’s marketing mix - which channels are they using that are driving the most success?

“We look at how we can both impact the user on their decision making process and also be first in mind even before they start thinking about the conversion. So our mix includes branding channels, sports sponsorships, out of home, digital out of home. The channels that portray trust and loyalty. And then we have more aggressive channels further down the line, partnerships, affiliation, programmatic buys, which help to nudge the user along on all their journey.”

Of all the channels they use however, there’s one in particular that stands out for Shad above all others.

“I'm kind of excited about a specific channel, namely digital out of home (DOOH). It's becoming quite popular in the industry now. We've been testing it out for some time, and we've seen some interesting results with it. So that's what I'm excited about, in terms of success.”

Thanks to measurement solutions like INCRMNTAL that can accurately measure the success of DOOH campaigns, we’re seeing many more marketers utilize this channel, which previously may have been overlooked.

When asked which KPIs are the important for you to measure, Shad had this to say: “When it comes to marketing success though, it looks different for every brand. Obviously we have our hard KPIs, but we also look much further down the funnel. LTV is extremely important. Everything ties back to lifetime value, from marketing spend to product changes."

So there we have it; eToro’s recipe for marketing success. And as one of the world’s biggest social trading and investment platforms, we know they’ve got their marketing on point!

NOTE: 
The views and opinions expressed in this interview are solely those of the interviewee and do not reflect the official position or policy of eToro. eToro does not endorse or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented in this interview.