First vs Second vs Third-Party Data: What Are They and Why They Matter

2025 will be here before you know it, so we’re covering the key marketing trends you need to know about to stay ahead of the competition. If you haven’t checked out part 1, we covered several seismic changes affecting the marketing landscape. From the rise of LinkedIn as the new hot platform to the potential banning of TikTok and the continued evolution of X (formerly known as Twitter), the next year is shaping up to be a very interesting one indeed. That’s not even mentioning how GenAI has completely upended the industry (and the larger world) and will continue to do so. In part 2, we’ll talk about the momentum of CTV in an increasingly cord-cutting world, new search methodologies, nano-influencers, and the growing awareness around data privacy. 

Continuous Growth of CTV

In our modern digital world, Connected TV (ads shown on internet-connected TVs including smart TVs, external devices such as Amazon Fire sticks, gaming consoles, and even traditional TV offshoots like YouTube TV and Hulu with Live TV) has emerged as one of the most effective channels available to marketers. Even though the major social media platforms get most of the shine in digital marketing, CTV is one of the fastest-growing major ad channels in the US: projected to reach roughly $30 billion in 2024, a 22.4% growth from the previous year. That’s almost a third of all TV ad spending as cord-cutting becomes even more mainstream, especially among the younger Gen Z demographic. Linear TV viewership among Gen Z declines by a couple of million people a year, falling below 40 million viewers in 2024. On the other hand, there are 55 million Gen Z CTV viewers and counting. In fact, CTV ad spend is growing faster than the rate at which linear TV ad spend is declining. At some point towards the end of this decade, CTV will likely surpass linear TV altogether. Linear TV is still king for major live events such as the Super Bowl, Olympics, World Cup, etc., but even most of these are now available via CTV (albeit fractured across disparate streamers). This is driven by the fact that people in other generations are also choosing to spend more time watching CTV with their media consumption habits. In 2024, US adults spent 123 minutes per day watching CTV which lagged only mobile devices (235 minutes per day) in usage. CTV ad spend is forecasted to grow double digits through the end of 2027 and already accounts for 10% of ad dollars spent on digital formats. 

Although CTV has “TV” in its name, CTV acts more like other digital channels such as social media rather than linear TV. CTV allows for precise segmentation and targeting based on interests, demographics, and viewing habits. Streamers have leveraged partnerships with retail media networks and other data brokers to get more accurate reporting and better attribution. CTV lets advertisers analyze trends in real time to aid in campaign optimization just like other performance channels. This is a distinct advantage over linear because we can track a consumer’s journey from first impression to purchase. Note that because streamers often exist as their own distinct walled gardens, advanced techniques such as multi-touch attribution are often needed to track a campaign’s performance across different networks. Last but not least, advertisers have a selection of innovative ad formats including shoppable ads that are more aimed at the bottom of the funnel rather than awareness. These also include formats not available in other channels such as overlays and less intrusive ads. 

There are several players in CTV to keep an eye on, but Hulu is the biggest one in the US with $3.8 billion in projected ad revenues in 2024. The company was a first mover in building out an ad tier and live TV offering, so Hulu beat a lot of competitors to the punch when pitching for ad dollars. YouTube comes in second with $3.3 billion and has been aggressively building out its CTV infrastructure to grow that side of its ad business. Amazon has a few CTV products, including Fire Sticks, Fire TVs, Prime Video, and Freevee but is still very much a newer player that’s learning the ropes. Disney+ was able to leverage some of Hulu’s expertise as its corporate owner, but along with Netflix and Max, are still trying to find their footing in the ad-supported game. Notably, Apple TV+ doesn’t yet have a CTV offering, but this may change as the company invests more in digital advertising capabilities. 

Newer Forms of Search

It’s no longer enough to have an SEO strategy in place for traditional search; in recent years voice and social search have emerged as popular alternatives to typing keywords into a search query to get answers. According to PwC, 65% of 25-49-year-olds speak to their voice-enabled devices at least once per day. Although voice-enabled search has been around for some time, recent breakthroughs and the wide adoption of smart speakers have accelerated this trend. In 2023, there were an estimated 200 million plus smart speakers in the U.S. Most smartphones, smart TVs, and an increasing number of connected devices feature voice search. In addition to the long runway of potential users, voice search is often faster and more convenient than typing into a search bar. Voice search is a critical opportunity to capture more organic search traffic, especially among this tech-savvy cohort of users who rely on smartphones and smart speakers to look for products and services. It’s important to note that while the foundational SEO strategies remain the same, voice search queries tend to be more conversational and closer to how we speak in real life. A text search might be phrased as “tacos near me” whereas a voice search might be something like “Where can I get the best tacos near me?” Voice search tends to shift focus toward the intent of the searcher as opposed to simply emphasizing keywords. Search engines also reward websites that optimize for voice searches, so investing in this channel can have positive effects on overall SEO and your site’s ranking. 

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Speaking of new forms of search, younger generations are turning to social media platforms for discovery as opposed to traditional search engines. Instagram is the top search engine for Gen Z with 67% of surveyed users claiming it as their first choice. TikTok was a close second with 62% and Google came in third with 61%. However, these numbers include YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Images which contribute a healthy amount of search traffic to Google, meaning Google Search is now a distant third for Gen Z. If we were to include Gen Alpha, these numbers would probably skew even heavier towards the social platforms. Although we don’t have official numbers, Google disclosed in 2022 that roughly 40% of youth use TikTok or Instagram to search for things like lunch spots rather than Google. Let’s be clear, we’re not saying this is the death of search engines like Google and Bing, but social media platforms are rising in the ranks as search tools across all demographic groups according to SOCI. This isn’t surprising since social platforms rely on algorithms to serve relevant content to users, so they’re naturally set up to be good search engines. Beyond personalization, social platforms tend to have more UGC and authentic content as opposed to Google results served to you by PPC ads. We expect to see this trend continue as younger generations (and even older ones) who grew up with social media increasingly rely on it for search. 

Nano-Influencers: Small but Mighty

We’re not exactly sure when influencer marketing truly began, but the practice of companies using prominent figures and celebrities to endorse their products can be traced back to the late 19th century. Once social media gained traction in the early 2010s, the modern influencer was born on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and now TikTok. Today, they’ve become an integral part of our digital marketing ecosystem because brands want to leverage the communities and audiences those influencers have cultivated. We can loosely define influencers into a few categories: 

• Mega-influencers: influencers with over 1M followers, usually made up of celebrities, athletes, actors, rising stars, and other prominent public figures. 
• Macro-influencers usually have between 100K and 1M followers
• Micro-influencers then are between 10K and 100K followers
• Nano-influencers have the smallest audience, with somewhere between 1K and 10K followers. 

Nano-influencers are a somewhat new addition to the influencer marketing world as their audiences have traditionally been seen as too small to make a difference. Many of us operate under the false assumption that the biggest names will be the most effective at promoting brands, but if we think about our own day-to-day purchase decisions, we’re often influenced by much smaller niche voices who are either part of our community or an expert that we found through research. These figures, with their smaller followings, are often seen as more trustworthy and relatable than the larger influencers who aren’t as approachable to the average consumer. This is because nano-influencers tend to be ordinary digital creators who have a knack for social media and have amassed a small audience along the way. Their followers consider them almost as peers because nano-influencers are highly authentic, presenting honest views of their lives as opposed to the high production value and glossy content from bigger influencers. The biggest benefit of working with nano-influencers is that they have a much higher engagement level than the other categories of influencers. This is because they have more time to respond and interact with their audience and develop meaningful connections. Nano-influencers generally inhabit a specific niche and have a deep understanding of their followers’ interests and preferences. This means they’re very skilled at creating highly specialized content that resonates deeply with their followers. This combination of high engagement rates and loyal audiences who trust the nano-influencer's recommendations translates into higher conversion rates when they endorse a product or service. Last, but not least, nano-influencers tend to be at the very beginning of their journey so they will be much more cost-effective to work with than bigger creators. Thanks to this lower cost, it’s much easier to get positive ROI on your nano-influencer campaigns without even taking into account the higher conversion rates. Partnering with these creators while they’re still up-and-coming allows for the brand and influencer to grow together and organically, even if they may require more coaching and mentoring upfront to get quality content. According to an internal survey conducted by influencer marketing agency Aspire, 70% of brands are already working with smaller creators. We expect to see this trend continue into the holiday season and beyond.  

Data Privacy

Five years ago, data privacy was generally considered an afterthought; something your legal team dealt with that wasn’t on the forefront of our minds. Today, that’s changed dramatically as data privacy has become a priority for regulators, consumers, and businesses. Privacy laws such as the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA regulations spurred a chain reaction of other countries and US states passing their own laws. Examples include Brazil’s General Law for Data Protection, Egypt’s Law No. 151, and Canada’s Digital Charter Implementation Act. As of May 2024, 17 US states have passed data privacy regulations, with several more expected to join them. It’s clear the legislative pace will only pick up, but we’ve also seen regulators take a stronger stance on enforcement actions. In 2023, companies were fined over 2 billion euros for violations of the GDPR (more than the past 3 years combined). Large tech companies including Meta, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) have been fined over $3 billion since the passing of GDPR. In the US, the FTC is currently investigating several companies over their use of sensitive data, including geo-location, health, and children’s privacy. One of the most notable cases involves Kochava, a geolocation data broker that the FTC alleges has been selling data that can be used to trace the movements of individuals to and from sensitive locations such as health clinics, shelters, addiction recovery centers, etc. Depending on the outcome of this case, the use of geolocation data may be severely restricted going forward for targeting purposes. 

Another regulatory area to keep an eye on is the development of AI policy by governments worldwide. After ChatGPT exploded in popularity, governments became wary about the need for large amounts of training data to train AI models which could infringe on data privacy. Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT in March 2023 because OpenAI was using personal data to train the model without asking for consent (including children’s data because there weren’t age verification tools implemented at that point). OpenAI did create a form for European users to opt out of their personal data being used to train the model and created an age verification tool, but this did little to assuage the EU’s concerns about data privacy. The European Data Protection Board created a ChatGPT task force to develop suitable AI regulations, with several other countries including the US, UK, and China drafting their own guidelines. 

In late 2023, Google claimed that its plan to completely deprecate third-party cookies was on track for the second half of 2024. However, in April 2024 the company announced that they would be further delaying the sunset of third-party cookies until some time in 2025 (although the exact timing is yet to be determined). Why? The company acknowledged that regulators (especially the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority) and advertisers still had key concerns about the implications of removing cookies. The CMA is concerned that transitioning to the Privacy Sandbox will only strengthen Google’s position at the expense of its competitors. At the same time, agencies and marketers can rest a little easier knowing they have more time to figure out a plan to replace third-party cookies in their strategies. We won’t be holding our breath on when Google will actually phase out cookies, but expect the company to figure out a way to launch Privacy Sandbox with the blessing of regulators. Google still expects to complete this in 2025, but would anyone be surprised at all if they kept delaying it for a few more years? Only time will tell!

Can you believe we’re already over halfway through the year? Before you know it, it’ll be Labor Day, then Halloween, Thanksgiving; I mean it’s basically almost Christmas if you think about it. As we get closer to 2025, the marketing landscape continues to undergo a transformative journey, driven by new technologies, evolving social media platforms and heightened awareness of data privacy, among several other factors. GenAI has emerged as a truly exciting innovation, enabling marketers to create personalized content at an unprecedented scale and speed. Imagine having a virtual assistant who not only understands your brand but also crafts compelling campaigns while you sit back and enjoy your coffee. 

Meanwhile, social media platforms are starting to see glimmers of a world where Facebook no longer dominates the advertising landscape. Just like in Formula 1, platforms are constantly jockeying for pole position to fight for marketer’s advertising dollars. Platforms including LinkedIn and YouTube are making big pushes for relevance as user behavior shifts to adapt to new features and algorithm changes that challenge us to keep up and stay agile. In the past few years, we’ve seen some seismic changes in social media including the rebranding of Twitter to X (plus a variety of other changes instituted since the acquisition led by Elon Musk), a potential US ban of TikTok, and the introduction of Threads to rival X to name just a few. Beyond social, new search methodologies (voice, social) show much promise as opportunities to gain an edge over the competition for the savviest marketers. 

Data privacy is also taking center stage, reshaping how marketers approach targeting and other strategies. Although Google has yet again postponed the phasing out of third-party cookies to early 2025, there is no doubt that the average consumer is increasingly wary of their personal information being used by marketers. In this two-part article, we’ll cover the top marketing trends to keep an eye on going into 2025. 

The Rise of LinkedIn

Believe it or not, the platform best known for uploading your resume and job hunting has been one of the hottest movers and shakers since the pandemic upended our lives. In 2023, the platform reached 1 billion global users (including an impressive 211M+ in the United States) and 500 million newsletter subscribers. LinkedIn doesn’t share daily or monthly average users, but the company reported that in the spring of 2023, users shared 41% more content than they had in the same period in 2021. That kind of organic growth is hard to fathom for a 22-year-old platform, but LinkedIn has managed to position itself as one of the last places to have professional and increasingly personal conversations due to the changes at X (more on this later). Users who previously would have posted on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter are gravitating towards LinkedIn. Why? Terrified of TikTok eating their lunch, Meta has prioritized their products to emphasize interests instead of friends, moving personal sharing to semiprivate realms such as Stories or direct messages. X on the other hand, has simply become too unstable for many advertisers. Algorithmic changes, the introduction of the paid blue badge, amongst several other unpopular changes have caused brands to flee, bringing their ad dollars with them (a year after the acquisition, X’s ad revenues were down 55% YOY). LinkedIn also saw a huge boost during the pandemic when our personal and work lives became increasingly blurred. Workers felt more comfortable posting vacation pictures and emotional stories, content that previously would’ve been less socially acceptable, often captioned with a hail-mary, vague mention of something work-related (in case the boss sees). The product team at LinkedIn has ridden this wave, introducing new tools for creators and pushing “knowledge-based” content to great success.  

Advertisers have taken note. While B2B marketers have long utilized LinkedIn in their campaigns, B2C marketers are increasing their spending, driving up ad prices and revenues (in some cases by as much as 30%). Business Insider expects LinkedIn’s US ad revenues to increase +14.1% to almost $5B by the end of 2024. While that’s only a small fraction of Meta and Google’s market share, it’s more than double that of Snap and around 4 times that of X. Despite the sky-high prices of impressions on LinkedIn, marketers report very impressive ROI on their campaigns (as much as 20% ROI). Penry Price, LinkedIn’s VP of Marketing Solutions, said that brands are investing more ad spend into LinkedIn because the platform is filled with decision-makers and key stakeholders in buying processes. We expect this trend to continue through the rest of 2024 and into 2025; as Bloomberg so eloquently put it, LinkedIn is cool now. 

Stay up to date with product announcements and exclusive insights by following Northbeam’s Linkedin page here.

The Race to Replace Twitter 

In October 2022, Elon Musk officially acquired Twitter and immediately began dramatically remolding the company to fit his vision. He started by firing several senior executives at Twitter including CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal, eventually laying off 80% of Twitter’s 7,500+ employees. He famously declared that only employees who wanted to engage in “maniacal work” should stay, leading to the resignations of hundreds of staffers (including a large chunk of the trust and safety team, spurring the flight of several large advertisers from the platform). Musk also took Twitter private, officially delisting it from the New York Stock Exchange in November ‘22, giving him the freedom to make changes as he saw fit without having to report to a board or shareholders. He went on to overhaul the verified system by launching a paid $ 8-per-month subscription, allowing anyone to obtain a blue check mark. This led to a wave of impersonations of public figures and brands, leading to mass confusion and misinformation. Musk also controversially reinstituted accounts of several notorious accounts that had previously been banned, including former president Donald Trump. The biggest change came in the summer of 2023 when Musk rebranded Twitter to X seemingly overnight in an attempt to turn the platform into more of an “everything” app similar to WhatsApp. Although it remains to be seen if these changes will benefit X in the long run, there’s no doubt that advertisers have fled the platform in droves. Reports that brand ads were being shown next to controversial and offensive content made marketing teams uncomfortable with continued spending on X (perhaps because the brand safety team had been axed). A year after Musk bought Twitter, ad revenue was down 55% year over year. Musk later named Linda Yaccarino, a former executive at NBCUniversal, as the new CEO of X in a bid to reassure and woo advertisers back to the platform. 

This fall from grace for X has prompted a race to provide an alternative space for users fleeing “Twitter 2.0” for greener pastures. Meta, always keen to take competitor market share, launched Threads in July of 2023 as their take on a text-based social media platform. Threads started hot with a reported 30 million sign-ups within 24 hours of release before hitting 100 million members within the 1-week mark. Members aren’t the same thing as active users, but the latest update from Meta shows Threads has 130 million monthly active users. X currently has 550 million monthly active users, so Threads still has a way to go before dethroning the king, but Meta has made remarkable progress in just one year. Leadership has stated many times that they believe Threads has the potential to become the next billion-user platform. Although there are several other players in the space such as Mastodon and Bluesky, Meta’s expertise in monetizing social media platforms and partnering with advertisers makes them the smart bet to eventually come out on top of this race. 

Check out Northbeam’s twitter account here. 

Bye Bye TikTok?

During the pandemic, TikTok emerged as a powerhouse and social media darling as the platform raced to over a billion monthly active users worldwide by September 2021. TikTok is largely responsible for the popularity of short-form video content in the US, primarily based on its powerful recommendation algorithm that’s adept at showing users more of what they enjoy. Owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, TikTok has courted plenty of controversy in the past as politicians have accused of it being a tool for propaganda and a national security risk. Many American lawmakers are worried that the Chinese regime could “weaponize” TikTok and spy on US citizens including military and government personnel. Many universities and government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels began enacting bans on the app from official work devices. The Trump administration attempted to force a sale, but efforts were largely unsuccessful until April 2024 when President Biden signed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” The bill stipulated that ByteDance has 9 months (until January 2025) to find a buyer for TikTok with the possibility of a 3-month extension if meaningful progress is made toward a sale. As of the writing of this article (summer 2024), TikTok has responded by suing the US government on First Amendment grounds. The case will almost certainly take more than a year to resolve, but as marketers, we can’t afford to be caught without a contingency plan in case TikTok does get banned by early January of next year. Creators are already beefing up their Instagram Reels presences in response, but YouTube Shorts has emerged as a promising contender to the big two. In early 2023 Shorts crossed the 50 billion daily views mark, which although still short of Meta’s combined 140 billion daily views across Facebook and Instagram, is starting to garner significant traction with advertisers. Interestingly enough, YouTube seems committed to longer-form content with the intent of using Shorts to drive engagement towards that content. The company is intent on chasing TV ad dollars instead of just digital ones given that YouTube owns more than 50% of ad-supported streaming watch time on TVs. This runs counter to the fact that Shorts isn’t designed for a TV experience (it’s optimized for mobile), but it’s useful for creators to have the option to create shorter content that can boost traffic to longer videos. While we’ll have to see who comes out on top of this short-form video war, this signals that YouTube believes its core value is in the longer video content that’s historically been its bread and butter. 

The Elephant in the Room: GenAI

We would be remiss to talk about marketing trends without mentioning GenAI. Ever since ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, marketers have been salivating over the potential of using GenAI to create text, images, video, and audio. With GenAI, marketers can create personalized content at scale, producing tailored ads, social media posts, email campaigns, etc. that will resonate more deeply with target audiences. These AI-driven tools can analyze vast amounts of customer data to generate insights into behavior, preferences, and trends, allowing for more precise segmentation and messaging. Beyond that, GenAI can significantly streamline the content creation process, reducing the need to hire expensive agencies for good old-fashioned photo and video shoots. It can write decent copy, design graphics, and even generate videos, freeing up human resources to focus on strategy and creative oversight. GenAI has even empowered us to conduct A/B testing and optimize campaigns faster and more effectively than before. However, while content creation was the first widely adopted use case, another development could be more impactful to a wider range of users. In May 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews: its AI-powered search engine (formerly known as Search Generative Experience). AI Overviews is designed to improve user interaction and engagement by offering conversational and contextually relevant search results in a UI similar to ChatGPT’s prompt system. When users search on Google using AI Overviews, they will no longer see highly-ranked links first. Instead, they will first get a summarized overview of the prompt before scrolling down to see which links contributed to that answer. As a result, AI Overviews tends to prioritize summarized content over publisher links which now get placements below the Overviews chatbox. Publishers have seen a substantial decline of up to 60% in organic search traffic, translating to an estimated $2 billion loss in ad revenue within Google’s pilot version of AI Overviews. It’s too soon to say for sure, but the release of Overviews may upend all of our traditional SEO strategies if we’re to stay relevant in this new era. Since GenAI can generate large amounts of low-quality content, we’ll likely need to focus on high-quality content that provides clear and valuable information to get our content featured in Contextual Summaries. It remains to be seen if SEO tactics will be as effective if getting highly-ranked pages is not nearly as impactful due to AI Overviews eating up most of the real estate on screen. 

2024 has shaped up to be an exciting year already, and we can’t wait to see what 2025 brings us. Is your team keeping an eye on these trends? If so, watch out for Part 2 of our 2025 Marketing Trends deep dive, coming soon!