If 2024 was about disruption, 2025 became the year of reckoning for performance marketing. Privacy-led signal loss, AI-led discovery, fragmented consumer journeys, and mounting pressure on CAC forced marketers to confront long-standing assumptions. Performance could no longer survive as a narrow, bottom-funnel discipline obsessed with dashboards and last-click wins. Instead, it evolved into a broader growth function—intersecting data strategy, creative excellence, measurement intelligence, and brand-building.
Across industries, marketers were compelled to rethink how consumers discover brands, how intent is captured, and how value is measured in a world where precision tracking is fading. AI-driven search, cross-screen consumption, creator-led narratives, and first-party data strategies emerged as defining forces. As 2026 approaches, the question is no longer about optimization alone—but about owning data, insights, and intelligence to drive durable growth.
We asked senior industry leaders to weigh in on how performance marketing was redefined in 2025.
Consumers no longer search; they ask: Abhirup Datta, dentsu India
For Abhirup Datta: CEO, Performance Practice Media Solutions, dentsu India & CEO, Sokrati India, 2025 marked a fundamental shift in how consumers search, discover, and convert. As generative AI tools and voice assistants gained prominence, search behaviour moved from typing keywords to asking questions. This transition pushed brands to rethink traditional SEO, giving rise to Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), where authority, structure, and contextual relevance matter more than keywords alone.
“Consumers are no longer searching; they are asking—and brands need to show up with the right answers at the right moment,” says Datta. He adds that geo-specific relevance and real-time intent signals have become critical as AI-driven discovery compresses decision cycles.
At the bottom of the funnel, Datta points to the growing influence of UGC and GenAI-led creative variants, especially for regional audiences. “Authentic voices and hyper-personalised creatives are now driving 30–50% higher conversions in some campaigns,” he notes. Looking ahead, micro-dramas and first-party data integration will play a larger role across the funnel as marketers prepare for a cookieless future.
Also read: Attribution Puzzle: Why marketers are still struggling to see the full picture
DPDP rules trigger structural re-engineering in performance marketing
AI became central to navigating attribution complexity: Vipul Kedia, Affle
From a programmatic and measurement standpoint, Vipul Kedia, Chief Operating Officer, Affle, describes 2025 as the year performance marketing grew decisively more complex—and more intelligent. Fragmented journeys made single-channel optimisation ineffective, pushing marketers toward outcome-led strategies powered by multi-touch attribution and incrementality modelling.
“Attribution is no longer about credit assignment alone; it’s about understanding true contribution across the journey,” Kedia says. This shift was further reinforced by tightening privacy frameworks, which reduced deterministic tracking and accelerated the adoption of probabilistic and predictive models.
AI, according to Kedia, became central to navigating this complexity. “AI now powers smarter attribution, predictive optimisation, and real-time decision-making across programmatic ecosystems,” he explains.
Looking ahead, Kedia believes the next frontier lies in using AI not just to optimize campaigns, but to actively shape consumer journeys at scale—ensuring every media dollar delivers measurable and incremental value.
Effectiveness of influencer marketing declining: Amit Verma, DigitUp
Amit Verma, Founder, DigitUp, offers a more cautionary perspective, arguing that while AI has accelerated performance marketing, it has also intensified long-standing structural issues. “Performance marketing has been a leading cause of high CAC, poor cash flow, and even business closures,” he says.
Verma points out that many companies still lack robust PII and first-party data strategies, leaving them overly dependent on platforms and algorithms. “Most brands are chasing performance without owning their customer intelligence,” he warns.
He also flags the declining effectiveness of influencer marketing, once considered a cornerstone of performance strategies. Despite technological advancements, Verma believes fundamentals remain weak. “Performance marketing is critical, but without strong data foundations and business discipline, AI alone won’t fix the problem,” he adds.
Not a media problem anymore, but a commercial one: Ashutosh Nagare, Interactive Avenues
Ashutosh Nagare, Head of Performance Marketing, Interactive Avenues, frames 2025 as the year performance marketing finally matured. The industry, he says, moved beyond the illusion that dashboards alone could define success.
“Performance marketing stopped being a media problem and became a commercial one,” Nagare explains, as teams began optimising for LTV/CAC ratios, blended CAC, and sustainable ROAS rather than surface-level metrics.
Creative, he adds, emerged as the primary growth engine. “When targeting narrowed and algorithms equalised, creative was the only variable that truly moved the needle,” he says, pointing to lo-fi, creator-style content and modular creative systems as top performers.
Nagare also highlights a decisive shift from attribution to incrementality. “Directionally right beats precisely wrong,” he notes. In 2026, he expects AI to act as a decision partner, first-party data to become a revenue lever, and brand and performance to merge fully.
Lines between brand and performance permanently blurred: Nikhil Kumar, Mediasmart
Nikhil Kumar, Chief Growth Officer, Mediasmart (an Affle company), believes 2025 permanently blurred the lines between brand and performance. With consumer journeys splintering across screens, marketers realised that engagement—whether on CTV, mobile, in-app, or digital OOH—had to serve both awareness and measurable outcomes.
“Marketers stopped treating brand-building as a soft metric and performance as a purely lower funnel,” Kumar explains. Instead, every touchpoint was expected to contribute to ROI, while performance campaigns were designed to build long-term brand equity.
The rise of CTV as a mainstream medium accelerated this convergence. Kumar notes that brands increasingly used CTV for household-level awareness, followed by mobile-led conversion strategies. “CTV has created a powerful opportunity to bridge storytelling and conversion in a single journey,” he says.
As performance marketing heads into 2026, Kumar sees success belonging to brands that can translate cross-screen engagement into consistent, intent-driven outcomes—where every interaction is designed with measurable impact in mind.
AI-driven video ads delivered over 30% ROI gains: Pradeep Patteti, Co-Founder & CEO at Flutch
Pradeep Patteti, Co-Founder & CEO at Flutch, said 2025 marked a clear inflection point for performance marketing, driven by the rise of creative-led targeting and AI-powered optimisation. “The shift to creative-led targeting meant platforms like Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max began using the ad itself to find the right audience, making strong ideas and storytelling central to performance,” he noted. This recalibration also pushed marketers to move beyond topline growth and focus on profitability, with metrics like POAS aligning media spends more closely with real business outcomes.
AI further dismantled creative bottlenecks. Video-first tools enabled rapid experimentation at scale, reshaping cost structures and speed to market. Citing 2025 HubSpot data, Patteti pointed out that AI-driven video ads delivered over 30% ROI gains for a majority of marketers, while production costs fell sharply.
Looking ahead, Patteti believes performance marketing will become increasingly autonomous and product-led. “Most importantly, marketers are increasingly evolving into product-growth architects—building tools, not just ads, to earn customer trust and first-party data,” he said.
A clear reset driven by three defining shifts: Sayak Mukherjee, Brandwizz Communications
Sayak Mukherjee, Founder & CEO, Brandwizz Communications & Creator Cult Media, views 2025 as a clear reset year, driven by three defining shifts. First, creative-led performance emerged as non-negotiable as privacy changes shrank targeting precision. High-quality storytelling, UGC, and creator-led formats consistently outperformed static, platform-native creatives.
“When data signals weaken, creativity becomes the strongest performance lever,” Mukherjee observes. Second, first-party data moved to the centre of performance strategy, tying media effectiveness directly to how well brands understood and activated their owned audiences.
The third shift was measurement. “Brands stopped obsessing over perfect attribution and started focusing on directional impact—sales uplift, contribution, and business outcomes,” he says.
Looking to 2026, Mukherjee expects AI-led optimisation to evolve into decision support, helping marketers predict fatigue and efficiency earlier. Privacy-first advertising, he adds, will elevate the importance of context, culture, and creativity over micro-segmentation.