What do marketers think is likely to happen in the new year in the world of marketing, digital publicity, influencers, and search? Five predictions follow — each one has a winner and a loser attached. These are not forecasts about technology. They are forecasts about where the money moves, which agency models compress, and which categories of brands compound.
Prediction 1: Influencer marketing keeps growing — but the mid-tier compresses
The influencer economy keeps expanding, but the spending mix shifts inside it. Mid-tier creators in the 50,000-to-500,000 follower range — the entire mid-creator marketplace — face budget compression. The dollars move in two directions: up to long-term named ambassadors with editorial pull-through, and down to micro creators with category specialization.
The mechanism: brands have learned that mid-tier lifestyle generalists are too expensive for testing budgets and too generic to drive meaningful brand association. Named long-tenure ambassadors and category-specific micro creators both produce stronger returns per dollar.
Winners. Micro creators with sustained category specialization. Named-ambassador programs (the luxury houses already model this).
The luxury houses already do this. CPG, beauty, sports, and B2B follow.
Glossier, Olipop, and Liquid Death are early. Expect Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, and L'Oréal to consolidate hundreds of creator partnerships per brand down to eight-to-twelve-name multi-year stacks. The driver: brand association compounds over years. Campaign-based creator partnerships do not produce the same compounding.
B2B follows. Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Atlassian — each will pick six to ten named operator-influencers and run multi-year retainers. The "thought leader of the quarter" model fades because it does not produce lasting category authority.
Winners. Named long-tenure ambassadors. Agencies running ambassador retainers.
Losers. The campaign-based agency model.
Prediction 3: Podcasts overtake conferences as the founder distribution channel
The conference circuit was already showing strain before COVID. The podcast economy was already growing. The combination compresses the calendar of every founder, CMO, and operator who used to spend ten to fifteen days per year on conference stages.
The named long-form interview shows — Lex Fridman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Harry Stebbings, Ben Thompson — produce more category-defining founder coverage per hour of founder time than any conference appearance does. The economics favor the audio shift.
Winners. The named long-form podcast hosts. Founders who pick the right shows and prepare seriously.
Losers. Mid-tier industry conferences. The keynote-circuit business model.
Prediction 4: The press release format gets pressure-tested
The hero-quote-driven release format has been creaking for a decade. The format works when reporters need a packaged angle to write a story; it works less well when reporters have direct access to the company and can build their own angle from interviews and primary documents.
Expect more brands to publish substantive primary-source content on their own newsrooms — research, data, founder essays, executive interviews — and use the wire services for distribution rather than as the primary editorial vehicle.
Winners. Brands with strong owned newsrooms. PR firms that produce substantive primary content.
Losers. Wire-only distribution models. Agencies still writing pure hero-quote releases.
Prediction 5: The end of the third-party cookie reshapes digital ad budgets
Google's commitment to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome — combined with Apple's privacy changes already in motion — restructures how digital advertising works at the targeting layer. The brands that built first-party data infrastructure absorb the transition. The brands that depend on third-party retargeting face rising acquisition costs.
The implication for digital PR: earned media, owned content, and category authority become more valuable as paid acquisition gets more expensive. The brands that built reputation through PR before the cookie deprecation are positioned to absorb the shift.
Winners. Brands with first-party data infrastructure. Brands with strong organic discovery driven by earned media.
Losers. Pure-performance-marketing teams without an earned-media base. DTC brands that built audiences entirely through paid retargeting.
The methodology — how these predictions are scored
Each prediction is rated by three factors:
Probability — likelihood the prediction comes true within the next 18 months, scored 0–100.
Materiality — size of the dollar flow or category shift if it does.
Asymmetry — does early action by brands produce outsized return relative to waiting.
Predictions 2 and 3 score highest on asymmetry: brands that move first capture compounding advantages. Prediction 5 scores highest on materiality. Predictions 1 and 4 are the most consequential for the agency landscape.
What is not on the list
Television advertising becoming obsolete (still a major share of CPG and consumer spend)
A single social platform dominating attention to the exclusion of the others
The death of email as a marketing channel
Print magazines disappearing entirely (the prestige category survives in luxury and specialty)
The operator playbook for the year ahead
Audit creator partnerships. Cut mid-tier generalists. Reinvest in named-ambassador retainers and category micro creators.
Build the podcast strategy. Pick the right shows. Prepare seriously.
Invest in the owned newsroom. Make the brand's site a place reporters and customers actually want to read.
Build first-party data infrastructure now, before the cookie phase-out forces a scramble.
Lock named long-term partnerships across categories. Three-year minimum. Editorial pull-through priority.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
