Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

2025 Predictions vs. reality: A Q1 analysis

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 37

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Remember those bold predictions we made about digital marketing in 2025? Well, we couldn't wait for the year to end before checking how right (or wrong) we were. Turns out, we've been surprisingly on point about some major shifts in the digital landscape.

Google has taken some serious legal hits already this year. After losing their search monopoly case to the DOJ, they're now facing potential remedies that could fundamentally reshape their business—from spinning off Chrome (valued at $15-20 billion) to losing those exclusive deals that keep them as the default search engine on your devices. And just weeks ago, they lost another massive case around their ad tech practices. Could this really be "the beginning of the end" for Google as we predicted? Despite the legal troubles, they still command roughly 90% of search market share, leaving marketers with little choice but to continue using their platforms while dealing with rising costs and diminishing controls.

Meanwhile, our prediction about the continued exodus from X (formerly Twitter) has proven accurate, with user numbers down 15% in the US and 12% in the UK. But where are those users going? Not necessarily where we expected. Threads may have activated advertising, but engagement remains questionable, while LinkedIn shows surprising growth among both Gen Z and Baby Boomers. And what about those predicted social media bans for teenagers? While Australia has implemented restrictions, other countries are still weighing their options—though regulatory pressure is clearly building.

For marketers navigating all of this, our advice remains straightforward: test thoroughly, focus on creating quality content that resonates with your specific audience, and stay adaptable as platforms rise and fall. The fundamental principles of effective marketing persist even as the digital ecosystem evolves around us.

If you ever need more help, check out all of the content on our Resource Hub (including this episode of the podcast), or you can reach out for a free audit. 

Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

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Haydn Woods-Williams:

It feels like ages since we've actually done this. It's been months. Pull our socks up, or pull our trousers up, as I said earlier. Why are they down?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Marketers of the Universe. We are here with Michele Raffaele and Tom Innes, or we are here. I am here with Michele and Tom to look back at our 2025 predictions. This is very much a case of the far too early check-in for those predictions, but I think it's a good chance for us to look at what we said was going to happen and decide if we were talking a load of crap or if we were maybe onto something.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

For now, though, let's get on with the google conversation now. When we were talking, uh back in december, I myself said this is the start of the end for google. Before that, selfie had said something about google coming to a crashing end, and I believe shinru also. At some point last year, um said that google had about 25 years to live, um, but that it was going to be a slow, long death. Tom, I know this is something you've been really kind of keeping an eye on over the first few months of 2025. Can you can you give us a rundown of kind of what's happened since then yeah, sure, absolutely.

Tom Inniss:

And just to use that selfie's actual language, I think he said google was entering their flop era. That'll also demonstrate my own uh, gen z. So yeah, we had a lot of predictions around Google last year. It did feel like Google was one of the main points of conversation. We predicted that they'd be knocked off the top search engine rankings. I don't think there's been any evidence of that so far, but they are. I feel like the clock is against them now.

Tom Inniss:

So at the end of last year it might have been early this year they lost a search monopoly case in the us. The doj took them to court and it was found that they had a monopoly on search, and we've now sort of entered the remedy phases of that, including a proposed spin out of google chrome, their browser, which is a very interesting proposition. I think that would be quite difficult to actually bring to fruition. They say that the business of Google Chrome is worth about $15 to $20 billion. However, people have sort of come out of the woodwork to say, yeah, we'll buy it, including OpenAI and Yahoo, and Perplexity somehow think they have the money to do that, which is quite interesting, but more likely is the loss of, like their ability to buy their way into top positions. So one of the things that came out of that court case was that they had a default deal with Apple to be the default search engine on iPhones, and they pay Apple $20 billion a year just to be the search engine on an iPhone. So those sorts of exclusivity deals are probably going to go away and then there will probably be some kind of spin-off or breakup or the white labeling of google at an extreme end, where they have to share data with their rivals.

Tom Inniss:

Now that in itself looked bad, um, but everybody was kind of like, oh, a bit interesting, didn't think they were going to lose that one. The case they everybody thought they were going to lose um, and it'd be great to also get like your opinion and um, michele's on this as well was the ad tech lawsuit. Uh, they lost that just in the last couple of weeks, um, and it was essentially alleged that they had anti-competitive practices because they owned the whole ad stack pipeline. Uh, they own double click for publishers. They have adx, which is like ad exchange, and then google ads as well, which is the ad network. So they owned every step of that process and apparently made it exceptionally difficult for any rival competitor to get a look in, and then they favored themselves at every stage as well. So I mean, from your perspective, was this loss actually that shocking? I know, I mean from your perspective, was this loss actually that shocking?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I know, I don't think it was that shocking uh.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

It'll be interesting to see what michele says, because he does spend a little bit more time, uh than me, you know, actually in the platforms and seeing these things but um them it's. It's really shocking, when you actually think about it, that they have that whole ad platform or ad tech stack because they they just shouldn't um. But one of the things I think we've consistently seen over the last couple years is cpcs and cpm just creeping up little by little by little um within google ads um, and I think you know the monopoly is definitely impacting that. I think you know, on top of the fact that they are able to do that because there's not really any competition, they are also doing things that mean that it's easier to spend than ever on Google Ads, but you have less controls than ever. So people are piling their money into google ads, into this monopoly, which it is um, and they're getting less control and they're getting less results and it's getting more expensive. But that's how I kind of see. I know, michelle, have you got anything to add?

Michele Raffaelli:

I see it in a different way. We mentioned monopoly and if we look at market share, they are the only option out there. They can be fined every day of the year. Nothing will change. We can make a class action. We can do everything we want.

Michele Raffaelli:

There is no way we can take them down, and the main reason is Google was built in such a smart way that we will never be able to have any control over it, and this is not only in the US, but even for European users. We will have periods, maybe, where they will change things, to be more complacent with these new regulations, but in the end, the reason why we use google is because it builds the best user experience possible. What was super smart from them is starting from a point where they didn't want to do to make money out of it. They just wanted to give the best experience to the user and as far as they can keep doing that, there is no alternative in the market. We are users of Google, any one of us. Yes, we do download and recommend to use Ecosia to save the planet. At the end of the day, the functionality and the quality of the results that we have on Google it doesn't have comparisons, and this is one side of how we see we look at Google. The other side, we are marketers, we do paid media, we do a lot of paid search and all the other activities in there.

Michele Raffaelli:

What will change? For us, it's probably 1% increase in CPC, which will actually cover any fine they can give them. So what we need to look at is evolution of CPC increase. How many impressions are we going to lose and how these changes eventually are going to cost us more, and, on the second step, how much these will cost more to our clients. Those are the things that we need to pay attention to.

Tom Inniss:

Do you feel that Google does offer the best experience, or do they offer the only experience from the marketer's perspective?

Michele Raffaelli:

As you said, we don't have an alternative. We do run different accounts for our clients. We do advertise on Microsoft Ads. We do have accounts on Yahoo when it's about Japan specific market. We do go on Baidu if our clients want to target in China, so we can diversify. We did used to advertise on Yandex before everything that happened over there. Every single platform is a copycat of Google All the ads platform that you can see. They are basically inspired. Let's use this term by Google. Platform that you can see they are basically inspired. Let's use this term by google because that's the way it works?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

um, better? Yeah, definitely, and I think with marketing and any marketing strategy, you have to go where your audience are and with a 90 market share, as Michele said, there's no choice but to use Google and no matter what client we work with, we have to work with Google.

Tom Inniss:

Yeah, I mean I don't think the market was defined in this way in the court case. But Meta is also a huge advertiser and people especially Gen Z, I'm informed are turning increasingly to social media as a search engine as much as like a means of entertainment. So do you see competition increasing within that sphere? Does metapose an actual threat to google's paid media or linkedin perhaps?

Michele Raffaelli:

I remember when the cookie apocalypse was supposed to happen, losing all the data and not being able to advertise anymore on Google. So when the new Safari came out and it was so beautiful and protected that everyone thought, oh, everyone will be using Safari. And then, when Amazon became popular and oh, no one is using search platform, search browser anymore, because people are straight searching in Amazon. And then TikTok arrived and everyone said, oh, no one is using search browser anymore, everyone is searching things on TikTok Voice search as well, on tiktok voice search as well.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Do like when everyone said, like alexis came out and it was like, ah, like five years time, every single person's going to be doing everything by asking their alexa. It's not happened it's.

Michele Raffaelli:

Yes, if you look at the number, there is a little bit of erosion, but we are talking about 0.05 percent of the users um, which may be more noise than the remaining 99 percent. But no, it's not. Gen z, gen x, millennial, different type of searches.

Tom Inniss:

That's not what will happen so do you think there's like a degree of their different markets so paid on social is different from paid on search? But then, further than that, is it just hopeful thinking that this market is going to sort of regulate itself and the court case was correct in that google has a monopoly and needs to be broken up in that regard?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

google 100 does need to be broken up, but that's my personal views rather than anything else and and wanting to see different things come up. But, looking at, looking in comparison, google and Meta they coexist rather than compete. I think it's not a case of should I market on Google or Meta. It's I'll advertise on Google and Meta, and with the collateral that Met has. You know, instagram, whatsapp, um, anything else. Facebook that is where the audience are, um, I think.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Again just been looking up stats for this, this, this conversation, and really shocked to see that actually facebook has been growing, which is ridiculous. Um, I think there's a massive AI issue with these platforms, um, and there's also a massive bot issue when you're a marketer, um, and a spam issue. But again, like you, you have no choice. And actually, if we compare it to kind of traditional billboard marketing, which might be simplifying things, but how many worthless eyes did you get on a billboard marketing, which might be simplifying things, but how many worthless eyes did you get on a billboard? You're having to do that more and more with, with social media and, I imagine, eventually with google as well, and if we're going to look at this from a point of telling marketers what to do.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

It's it's. Don't make any rash decisions like nothing is changing very quickly. Continue to do your research into your audiences, into your kind of ideal profiles, and select platforms that you advertise on, because that's where you can find your audience rather than anything else. And the likelihood is that's going to include google, that's going to include meta, but that's going to include Meta, but actually could that also include Reddit, could that also include TikTok? Could that also include Amazon? So I think you just have to think as a marketer and advertiser and really do your research into who that audience is and how you reach them.

Tom Inniss:

Having mentioned a number of different social media platforms there, uh, the next sort of bucket of predictions that I put together was around social media and social media strategy, and michele actually made this prediction and I, as far as safe predictions go, is possibly the safest and he mentioned that there would be a continuing exodus of X. Now, michele, you've pulled some stats together that sort of demonstrate the obvious, but do you want to talk a little bit about why you made that prediction and what you think is driving that exodus?

Michele Raffaelli:

I felt like the weather forecast on TV, the person that tells you what will be the weather in UK. I'm like that's too easy. The problem with X. Numbers are clear. We looked at 2024. Preferences for social media platforms and we saw where twitter was. We looked at the number that they were released in beginning of april this year and we can see that there was a massive drop.

Michele Raffaelli:

Now the elements that can have caused this exodus from the platform could be identified in three factors. The first factor could be the growth of new alternatives, as we mentioned in some of our podcasts before the new thread platform. Maybe people thought, oh, that's nicer, let's leave Twitter X and move to a new platform. The other one that came out fairly recently was Blue Sky, so that could be one reason people found a nicer platform. The second reason could be the changes that have been made within the platform. If I may quote one of my colleagues, twitter used to be my home. I used to spend most of my time as a young adult on Twitter. Now, since the changes they've made, I don't recognize it anymore and that's why I leave it. And the third reason may fell under something more political, which is the owner of the company, people not aligned with the vision of the new CEO of X may have decided to just leave it, boycott it in a way, and that, for me, are the three reasons why, with my prediction was correct. Just want to reiterate that.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I'm now going to go against Michele a little bit, because if you look at the ad numbers and you know, also interesting you say, like new owner, owner, it was 2022, they bought it, which is outrageous. They had a mass, mass advertiser exodus in 2023, but actually in the last 12 months they've seen a 16 and a half cent growth in advertiser revenue, which means that actually is x on its way back up. Like is anyone really using threads? Is anyone really using blue sky? Like Tom, I'm actually going to ask you because I know you were an avid user of Twitter have you migrated to those platforms?

Tom Inniss:

I was on the record as saying that threads was going to be the X killer and everybody was going to move over to threads, and McKellie told me that I was dreaming and he was right, because Threads is just a bit of a dead echo chamber. It's really quite gross. I mean, we're going to talk about Threads and Blue Sky a little bit later, but I don't think that that has materialized in the way that we had hoped. However, blue Sky is looking a lot fresher. Um, it has pulled over a lot of academics and news organizations now who are sort of moving away from x, like just not to well. Yeah, to contradict you, hayden ads advertisers may have come back.

Tom Inniss:

I mean, there are question marks around whether or not they were coerced due to Elon's sort of new political position, but there are stats out there that say that users are down 15% in the US, they're down 12% in the UK and average time has fallen by 20% since 2022.

Tom Inniss:

So, even if things are climbing back up, it's a best managed decline and it's quite hard to see how X is going to come back when and, like I know, we're trying desperately to sort of dance around the fact that Elon Musk owns it, but the reality is Elon Musk owns X. He's owned it since 2022. And in that time he has managed to erode a lot of brand trust, a lot of brand safety around x and his own sort of brand, and the cult status of elon has also taken a severe hammering. But all of these things have compounded the fact that there are certain classes, certain groups, certain like constituents that are not going to want to use X anymore, like the stat that really stood out to me was one from SimilarWeb that had X in terms of users sitting below threads.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Yeah, I'd be interested to see that in active users, because threads or meta almost not tricked people, but a lot of people joined threads and have never gone back there.

Tom Inniss:

I'll ask and you shall receive. Michele has just posted that social app active users in 2024 by billions. Facebook obviously sits at the top with 3.06, and then you've got youtube, whatsapp, instagram, tiktok, wechat, snapchat, reddit, qq, which I've never even heard of, then pinterest, then x at 0.38 billion. So, according to this, threads does not appear at all, but that could have been the case that they weren't really announcing active users at that time, whereas I suspect we are going to hear a lot more about active users on threads because they have just this week turned on advertising for threads one thing that we should not neglect is how much linkedin has grown um.

Michele Raffaelli:

So maybe as marketers we should consider, especially if we work a lot in b2b, we can maybe forget a bit of Twitter and move more on LinkedIn.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

One of the interesting facts I saw a couple of months ago was actually the growth in Gen Z going on LinkedIn. Obviously it makes sense because they're the ones entering the workforce, but it's interesting to see how LinkedIn has changed because of that growing audience. It's interesting to see how LinkedIn has changed because of that growing audience. I think interestingly as well. Their second biggest audience and I'm using the terminology was baby boomers. Jen said first baby boomers, second.

Tom Inniss:

How old is a baby boomer? Have they sort of retired now?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I think, they're approaching retirement Depends on which country Depends on which country. It does depend on which country. 64 was the last one. What's that in maths? 61. Yeah, it's still kind of slightly too early for retirement. Yeah, the older ones.

Tom Inniss:

Yeah. In the UK they're basically young workforce At 60 is the new 40. Forever and ever you will work. I just want to very quickly go back to advertising in threads. Michele, as a paid ad manager, do you have any interest in advertising on threads? Do you see it as an actual, genuine competitor to any of the other surfaces that you might push ads to?

Michele Raffaelli:

At the moment I do not have enough data to answer this question. What we try to do is to suggest some client to test it, but we weren't able to convince anyone to do it.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

We had the option, the option, we proposed it, but our b2b client would like to explore different platform before experimenting on threads I think, um, the big differences as well is you're like, yes, ads have been added to threads, but it's still part of the meta universe, or, in my opinion anyway, it's not going to be that big opportunity that advertising on facebook was 10 years ago or 15 years ago. It's not going to be the big opportunity that advertising on reddit was two years ago, because it's basically just an added bit of ad collateral to the, the kind of meta business suite, um, so I really don't see it having that big of an impact other than just expanding the, uh, the placements in your, your meta ads it's a bit like when google released discovery placement and in the end they send traffic there without telling you if you are not attentive.

Michele Raffaelli:

So they will make money and say, oh look, how many people are advertising on us, and then you realize no one wanted actively to reach it. It's just they didn't set properly the campaign and they were spending money there that's.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I think that's gonna. That's gonna be true of so many things, and I think fred's will be included in that. There'll be so like people advertising on fred's who don't even know they're advertising on threads. So much more of this is now AI driven or has less kind of controls for you to steer audiences. Then you know, threat is a great place to be. Embrace those tools that allow you to use them ai to optimize. If you're in a more niche area b2b is a good example then you probably need to do a little bit more work to work out whether your audience is there and potentially look at excluding things like threads out of your ad placements.

Michele Raffaelli:

If you don't know it, test it. What we are saying yes, people are leaving Twitter or X more users are on thread, but they are inactive. Those are just numbers. You need to find out what's actually working for you, so test it. Allocate a proper test, certain amount of budget, go out there. Do it properly. If you don't know how to do it, reach out. We can help you set up a strategy for testing.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

See what's worked for your company completely agree with what michele said, um, adding a tiny bit to it as well. The one thing that makes you stand out in all of these platforms like you can advertise on anything. If you have crap content and you don't invest money into creating content that is relevant and timely to your audience, then it doesn't matter what platform you're on. You're going to like linger slowly, spending money, not really seeing results. So spend time investing into your content and if you follow that and you do your testing on these platforms, you will see success. And if you are a generalist, reach out to agencies, because they have people who do this day in, day out. And yes, the ads platforms are easier to use these days, but to really make the most out of them, you need someone who's able to spend every day in those platforms so with everybody's attention sort of being uh competed for.

Tom Inniss:

We have started to see legislators around the world ban tick uh, not tiktok um ban social media platforms or ban teens from using social media. Obviously, australia is the only country so far that has actually banned social media for those um under the age of 16, I believe. But EU countries are starting to weigh up options as well. In the UK we have seen Ofcom now require social media companies, from July I believe, block harmful content for under 18s and they need to have ways of identifying people's ages and then allow young people to easily report harmful content that they do happen to see. But otherwise the algorithm needs to be able to filter all of that out for young people altogether. So that was the prediction further social media bans for teens.

Tom Inniss:

I think we can kind of say not yet, but we are starting to see the walls close in on social media and this isn't a marketing question, it's very much like an actual social question. But, hayden, you have a young girl. How do you feel about her one day joining Instagram or TikTok? Are you already having to think longer term about her interactions with social media and technology and smartphones? Are you stressing about that at all yet?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

with social media and technology and smartphones. Are you stressing about that at all? Yeah, that's a deep question that wasn't expecting. But yes and no. Yes because I think as a parent you have to be aware of the things that are going to be like damaging or they're going to be at risk.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I think it's a lot less scary with the internet as a as a parent of a girl, because you know there's the adolescent adolescence uh tv show that's come out and I know it's not it's. It's a little bit controversial on whether or not it's. It's kind of portraying the reality. But you know, I have a few friends who work in in second education in the uk and there is a very, very real narrative that is being pushed through to young males in the uk and it's scary. That scares me more than protecting um, my daughter from from using the platforms, because actually the platforms that are used now may not be in use when she is at the age of having a phone and actually, like the, the parental locks seem to be reasonably effective. I think the hardest thing is how do you know what is harmful content and what is deemed and who is making those decisions and what is harmful content? Because that.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That scares me more than seeing harmful content, if that makes sense this sort of more insidious, subtle influences that an individual might have yeah, exactly, exactly, and maybe that's me being a little bit like conspiracy theorist, but I think it's a very dangerous when you have people kind of policing what is right and what is wrong. I think I'm going a little bit in the circle here.

Tom Inniss:

No, I get what you mean. So we can all agree, for instance, that eating disorders and self-harm and anorexia, for instance, are all deemed harmful content that young people or I would say anybody, but young people, especially young girls, do not need to see. And then the sort of Andrew Taits of the world, those who are now pushing a particular ideology and sort of indoctrinating young people and young men, especially around what it is to be a man, or the types of people who you want to protect or involve or exclude from society and your own social circles. Those are harder to track and harder to immediately identify as harmful, but the impacts of them are such that, you know, in a generation we could have very damaged young men and young people?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

yeah, definitely, um, and you know, on top of that, like all everyone's feeds, even what they're advertised is is personalized. It's it's an echo chamber, um. So again going back to what I was saying about who is controlling those, I take it as necessarily one person who's evilly controlling the world. It's more that they may not be seeing what those 12 to 18 year olds are seeing. What is terrifying is advertise teens on youtube very easily. Advertise the children on YouTube very easily. Got deep here, but there's a moral choice for marketers.

Tom Inniss:

I think we've spoken in the past around the moral obligations that marketers have, and perhaps there's something that we do need to come back to, because I think we looked at it specifically from a mental health perspective. But just more generally, some of the more insidious marketing practices that you can quite easily deploy on these platforms is terrifying, and while the like the euai act will to some extent sort of stem your ability to use ai to hyper personalize, there's still a lot of data out there and you don't need to do a lot of like connecting of the dots to be able to very specifically profile individuals absolutely, and we're all.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

We're all giving this data freely, like we're all using google to sign into every tool. I'm at the sun. We used to do it with facebook and twitter, but google has so much data I feel like we should probably stop going down this hole now yes, I was actually going to say should we wrap up here?

Tom Inniss:

um, I mean, we've gone deep in a lot of different warrens here and um, this was only meant to be like a very light. Hey, how did we do over the first four months of this year in predicting how the world was going to go one way or another? But I'm yeah. Let's just quickly summarize what we predicted. So we originally started with Google and we spoke a lot about Google, how they were going to lose their ad tech lawsuit, how this was essentially going to be the end of Google, and I think, on the whole, we can say that we got that prediction right.

Tom Inniss:

We have definitely seen a marked decline in Google's social standing and definitely from a legal perspective, they are kind of getting slapped all over the place in the courts at the moment and I can't see that changing any time soon. We also predicted that there was going to be a shift in dominance in social media platforms, specifically the continued exodus of x, and that also has come true. So that's two nil to to us. And I predicted that Threads and Blue Sky were going to turn on ads, and I was 50% right there, because Threads finally did turn on ads as well. Further social media bans for teens, tbc. To be honest, we only briefly mentioned it, but I think the new Netflix series, adolescence, is definitely going to push the narrative in certain states. We're starting to see the tide turn in the UK. Australia is obviously doubling down on it and EU countries are also weighing it up as well. So I tallied that up as a pretty good performance from the marketers of the universe. I would say we got a lot of those pretty accurate.

Tom Inniss:

Yeah, and the ones we didn't mention got wrong yeah, yeah, we made a lot of predictions, but we have cherry-picked, uh, the ones that we got right, because that is our prerogative. But we will come back, uh, maybe in the next quarter, to see how some of these have progressed. And some of the ones we excluded are also like longer term. I don't think we'll see necessarily the impact of them until maybe even the end of the year. But there you go, listen to subscribe and you'll be the first to know when we return to this topic.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Cool. So this is all we have time for today. Thank you for listening to the podcast. We hope you found what we've been talking about useful. I know it's not quite as actionable as we usually do, but still I think it's some very, very important conversations to be had. We love that you've made it this far for your listen. We do love making this content. We would love it if you can recommend the show to one friend or colleague or family member even who you think would enjoy listening. Thank you, as always, to the Brew Digital team for their research and input in today's session, particularly Tom Innes, who has worked his socks off to pull this together for us. Make sure to check out our past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to our podcasts and we'll see you on the next one.

Tom Inniss:

I'm Hayden and these are the marketers of the universe, groovy mckay. Anything to add to that? Before we move on, I'd like to go to eat.

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