Dentsu’s future-facing study, Consumer Vision 2035: The Era of the Insight-to-Foresight Pivot, leverages a survey of 30,000 global consumers to predict that brands will need to become ‘perceptive’ in order to grow and differentiate in the 2030s. That means they’ll need to anticipate their customers’ expectations and proactively provide offers before they are sought by audiences. Are Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) aligned with this vision? And how do they expect the business landscape to take shape in their future?

We surveyed over 1,900 marketing leaders to learn their perspectives and plans around the future marketing landscape and published our findings in the Global CMO Navigator: CX Edition. The following series of questions and answers explores to what extent CMOs’ and consumers’ vision for the future align.

Q. Are CMOs and consumers aligned on the future direction of entertainment content?

A. Yes – the vast majority of both CMOs and consumers agree that, in the next five years, audiences will spend more time engaging with user-generated content (such as video essays, reviews, podcasts, and livestreams) than engaging with mainstream/studio content. This means that platforms featuring creator content will continue to grow and brands will need to lean into partnerships with creators who are seen as trusted sources by their customers in order to garner their attention.

Q. What type of experiences will consumers expect brands to deliver in the near future? And which crucial strategies will CMOs need to prioritize to meet these expectations?

A. Consumers and CMOs concur that, ten years from now, most of the offers and promotions brands send to their customers will be personalized to reflect customers’ real-time personal context (such as the entertainment content individuals are watching at a given moment, the stores they are driving by, etc.) To live up to these expectations, organizations will need to:

1. Build value exchange-based experiences. Access to customers’ data will be required to deliver individualized personalization. In the age of AI, concerns over data privacy will not go away, but consumers will have an enhanced understanding of how much their personal data is worth to brands and media platforms. Marketers will need to deliver experiences that offer a significant value exchange to their customers in order to access the data signals needed to achieve the level of personalization that will be expected of them.
2. Enrich customer data platforms with identity solutions. Customer data platforms help enterprises build and maintain a real-time customer profile that harvests all digital signals from an individual consumer. First-party identity data improves the accuracy of these profiles thanks to person-level identifiers and larger sets of attributes that ultimately enhance the effectiveness of experience orchestration platforms.
3. Leverage generative AI for scalable content production. To live up to these expectations, brands will need to deliver relevant, personal, and localized experiences to all key customer segments while appearing as a single brand. This means that they will require a content production engine that can meet scale demands while also producing an output that feels bespoke and tailored for the individual. 

Q. Speaking of AI, to what extent do CMOs and consumers align on its role in our day-to-day in the near future?

A. Most global consumers believe that ten years from now we will delegate most of our shopping, administrative, and communication activities to AI agents. The share of CMOs believing the future will be characterized by extensive digital delegation is even more overwhelming. Ultimately, this means that many interactions with brands will be handled by AI entities that sift through offers and promotions on our behalf. Enterprises will need to develop ‘reasons to believe’ that speak to algorithms, as well as more relatable messages that speak to our emotional side when AI agents let them interact with the human individual that sits behind them.

Q. How will this revolutionized future impact the business landscape?

A. Almost 2 in 3 CMOs think that, five years from now, more than half of their organization’s revenue will come from products, services, or businesses that don’t yet exist.

The correlation between this expectation and CMOs’ alignment with consumers’ vision of the future ten years from now is evident. Marketers need to double down on technology and innovation investments now in order to prepare their organizations for a highly competitive landscape where their customer expectations will reach unprecedented heights.