Digital Marketing in 2025: How Communication Changes Everything

In the history of the world, no one has ever needed to write, produce or generate attention in an ecosystem like ours.

(Do I have your attention?)

Information has never been as available as before. New information has never been as easy to generate.

You can write War and Peace for $15 dollars. No, actually.

This needs to shape the way we communicate in 2025:

• It means a higher bar for value.
• It means more wary information consumers.
• It means that professional communicators are basically screwed.

In this essay, based on recent conversations with other comms pros, I’ll sound off on the concrete steps necessary to cut through in 2025.

Warning: it’s not easy.

Enter the Content Thunderdome in 2025

Here’s what we’re up against:

• Thin, click-bait content: : The digital landscape of 2025 is nothing like what we knew before. SEO content hacked Google’s algorithms but TikTok and YouTube Short content hacks how we process information. Information, now generated at scale, is packaged for consumption, not edification. Memes spread far but substance is lacking.
• Imaginary content : If the packaging wasn’t bad enough, add on top the epic shitstorm of AI-generated content. Far too much, far too little trust.
• Imaginary Trust : Everyone is now an influencer. More and more are, at best, making stuff up. Increasingly, they are just pixels.
• The Gatekeeper Meltdown There always was a lot of junk out there. One of our primary ways to contend with it was to rely on gatekeeper curators. For news, we relied on the New York Times. For reviews, we relied on Consumer Reports.

But global polarization, mistrust in institutions (including the media), PE firms snapping up web properties like Rolling Stone, all led to the same root cause - we don’t trust anything.

Marketer? No one believes your ROI study.

Reporter? Prepare to be challenged by someone with contradictory (fake) social media sources.

This isn’t a content problem – it’s a crisis of attention, trust, and connection.

Excited for 2025 yet?

Don’t worry. There’s a way out. And it only takes 12 words:

Four Ways to Navigate 2025’s Digital Marketing Crisis

1. Invoke credibility
2. Drive value
3. Ensure clarity
4. Have conviction

Credibility Building Digital Trust in the Age of Deep Fakes

If I could invest in only one area for marketing in 2025, it would be credibility .

A reader-writer relationship only happens with trust. And, for the most part, digital trust is basically gone.

Credibility from traditional sources are losing their grip. The NY Times, the US government and Big Business used to go hand in hand with trust. Used to.

But credibility isn’t gone.

As I see it, 2025 has two ways to build credibility:

1. Personal relationships parlayed into digital relationships. Real-world relationships spark trust, far more than unidentified LinkedIn profiles. In the business context, this means that the folks we meet at trade shows - or personal relationships that we established elsewhere - can loan human credibility to digital relationships. Think of this like real-world SEO juice; it’s a high Credibility Score that trickles down.
2. Normative credibility, at scale : Think people or organizations (more people than organizations, tbh) who we know we should trust - Ben Thompson, Tim Urban, Randall Monroe, and Packy McCormick. We don’t know them personally but we know that they are both real people and people we can trust. Some organizations do this well too; we believe we should trust Anthropic more than OpenAI, or Lyft more than Uber.

Let’s unpack them both.

Trust from Personal Relationship

Relationships work. Heck, even fake relationships work. The best proof for the trust available in relationships is…OnlyFans. Yes, OnlyFans.

This fascinating Matthew Bell article breaks down the platform’s 2024 revenue. Note that of $6.3 billion (!) in gross revenues, 60% of spend is based on transactions, not subscriptions…and that 88% of the growth came from transactions.

Transactions, not subscriptions, drive OnlyFans.

Let me explain this.

OnlyFans’s core business model is that you “subscribe” to an OnlyFan person’s feed. But where it really kicks in is that once the user has a quasi-relationship with the OnlyFan creator, the creator then proceeds to reach out with messages offering more perks for additional transactional fees.

But that outreach isn’t really a relationship. It’s a well-known “secret” that most of these accounts are operated by agencies like the one below.

The consumers know this too. But the fake relationship is still that strong.

So if a clearly faked relationship on OnlyFans can build enough trust to pull out a credit card in this day and age, you can damn well bet that a REAL relationship is more effective.

So let’s take this from softcore porn to a business context.

When we have a real-world relationship - someone we had a coffee with, someone that we know really knows their stuff…we trust them. Then those relationships can be evolved into digital trust.

In 2025, the most effective way to create credible and authentic relationships with a company will be a variation of:

1. Meet someone in real life (or, in a watered down version, via zoom)
2. Person establishes a personal relationship
3. Person “loans” real-world credibility to company or other company representatives via digital sharing. In this case, the “target” sees his real-world contact sharing content from another person and loans credibility to that person.

Normative Credibility For Relationships

It’s a good thing real-life meetings aren’t the only way to establish credibility.

Influencers and micro-influencers have managed to build up massive followings without personal relationships. Trump built up his audience by saying he will drain the swamp. People believed him.

It doesn’t need to be mass communication.

Micro-influencers prove that deep expertise in a specific narrow field beats shallow knowledge of everything.

Ben Thompson built up Stratechery’s audience with niche tech insights, cultivated over time. By building direct relationships with readers through his newsletter, he bypassed the algorithmic middleman entirely, with community building with a side of deep industry insight.

When that online relationship scales, it gets scary.

By talking in peoples' ears for three hours an episode, Joe Rogan built up a global audience that is unprecedented. If you walk into a subway car in New York City, of the 200-odd people on it, 2-4 have watched CNN this month.

75 would have listened to Rogan.

It gets crazier. This digital normative relationship can even survive the jump to AI relationships. Lennybot – Lenny Rachitsky’s experiment in extending human credibility into AI territory, shows that authentic voices can survive in an increasingly synthetic world.

Eroded credibility will impact marketers in 2025, including:

• Expect IRL to be more important, then focusing on moving that credibility online
• An increased need to leverage REAL employees for distribution
• A push for more authentic content (selfie videos instead of polished videos, customer LinkedIn posts instead of press releases).

This type of authentic connection is incredibly difficult to build. A great website design is increasingly commoditized. If no one believes there’s someone behind that, it’s worthless.

The Bridge From Personal to Institutional Credibility

One motion that can bridge the institutional and personal relationship formation process is leveraging a mostly-believable person from large institutions. For example, an authentically filmed Zoom case study with someone from a large, trustworthy company may just trump a flashy sizzle reel.

On the flip side, as was recently pointed out to me by Nir of SaySo, a large company might not be willing to really compromise on quality to build that connection. Instead, the personality and authenticity should be manifested in the content of the interview instead of relying on easier-to-achieve authenticity from a low-fi Tik-tok style filming that would reflect badly on the content.

Think a combination of both:

1. Trustworthy, first-person relationship humans
2. Consistent and valuable relationships with trustworthy organizations

Enough said.

Let’s move on to the second differentiator - value. Just because someone believes you doesn’t mean they want to listen to you.

Value Delivery: The New Marketing Currency

One other way to build that credibility is cutting through the noise with clear communications and using it to drive concrete value. This, to some extent, can actually compensate for the previous point - having a relationship with the reader. The right data could be better than the right relationship…as long as the user trusts it.

Here’s an example.

If you run a stock trading app like, say, Charles Schwab, and the data is wrong once, you might be looking for a new app. But even if you have no relationship with an app but the value is there every damn time you log in, you’ll trust it. And you’ll come back. In other words, a content relationship.

This relationship works if the reader feels like they are getting something from it. It might be entertainment, it might be education, and it might just be them feeling like they are being seen. The value must be there.

Because in a world where content creation costs nothing, value becomes everything. Gong gets this better than most – they’re not just pushing out content about sales; they’re sharing data-backed insights from millions of actual sales conversations. It’s the difference between someone telling you their theory about what works in sales and someone showing you their receipts.

Incidentally, this is why I believe that data marketing works - it builds trust over time and keeps users reeled in. When an AI can write a decent blog post in seconds, your human insights need to really count.

Clear Communication in an AI-Driven World

If we talked about what you say and who is saying it, now it’s time to look at how it’s being said.

If you have a message, you need to say it quickly and clearly.

The 19th century may have sucked for cellphone reception but it kicked ass at concise clarity. Back in the telegraph era, people paid by the word, forcing a kind of brutal clarity that we could use more of today.

The Declaration of Independence was 1,320 words long. The US - Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act of 2024 was nearly 200,000. Words are cheap.

This usually means being concise as a form of valuing your readers' time.

• Axios, who sell a https://www.axioshq.com/pricing/training to teach you how to write clearly and concisely
• The Skimm, who describe their mission as “a digital media company, dedicated to succinctly giving women the information they need to make confident decisions.”
• Morning Brew, who do the same (but with more high-fives)

But clear doesn’t need to mean brief.

Take Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletter, the antithesis of algorithm-optimized content.

It thrives because it brings crystalline clarity to complex financial topics. When everyone else is throwing spaghetti at the wall, Levine is serving perfectly plated (but very, very large) pasta.

Marketing with Conviction: Standing Out in 2025O

One last element that can take you much, much farther is conviction.

In the noise of 2025, having a clear stance isn’t just brave – it’s necessary. Basecamp’s unapologetic position on productivity and work culture shows how conviction cuts through chaos. Even when you disagree with them, you know exactly where they stand.

For another example, take a look at Stripe Press (disclaimer, I own nearly every book they’ve printed). When the entire content world went short-form, they literally printed (incredible) books. It’s a unique take. It works.

In a world that is full of the same trite junk, having a strong and novel opinion can actually make all the difference. Working on a research report? If it sticks out with a truly fresh take, it may be your fastest track to being different.

This remains Elon Musk’s go-to motion. One tweet that he loses respect for anyone on LinkedIn and the world loses its collective brain (or so says 40 million views). When you share something that pokes against convention, it gets shared.

This doesn’t mean I support the “Unpopular opinion” LinkedIn posts. Those are still trash.

Making It Work in 2025

Let’s wrap it up.

Communicating in 2025 is not about choosing between human connection and algorithmic reach. We need to thread the needle between both.

It means writing with the clarity of a telegram, the value density of a research paper, and the tangibility of a letter to a friend.

In 2025’s ecosystem, marketing success will come from things like:

• Building real credibility in a world of synthetic relationships through personal relationships
• Delivering concrete value that those real users share, even though content is essentially free
• Communicating with true clarity when noise is infinite
• Standing for something real when everyone else is playing it safe
• And perhaps most importantly, remembering that in a world of infinite noise, the clearest signal from a real human being wins… but only if that signal delivers genuine value.

Want to learn more about surviving in this new world? Check out my guides on creating standout content in an AI world, finding your AI brand voice, and building your personal GPT.

The tools and platforms will keep changing. The fundamental need for authentic, valuable communication never will.