Weekly Digital Marketing Brief: August 10–16, 2025
August 2025 has not been quiet in the digital marketing space. The landscape is changing fast and to keep up now means more than chasing tools or trends. It means reading the market, knowing your audience and knowing when you need to change. It is no longer only about technology but how well you connect with your audience and effectively respond to change. For marketers this may mean trying new formats, reflecting on previous habits and refining skills with something practical like an SEO course in India. In the last week, we have experienced some interesting updates that highlight how varied and difficult this space can be so let’s explore them a bit further.
Personalization 2.0 – Meeting Rising Expectations
Digital Silk’s August 14, 2025 report put into words what most of us have been watching happen for a while now: personalization has stopped being an optional extra. It’s not a “bonus” feature you add at the end of a campaign. It’s the baseline. People expect the brands they interact with to know what they care about, to speak to them in a way that feels relevant, and to do it consistently.
The big shift is that this isn’t about data buckets anymore. Age ranges, postcodes, and browsing history will only get you so far. The winning brands are figuring out how to connect in ways that feel human, content that understands the mood someone is in, not just the product they clicked on last week.
Getting there isn’t easy. It means listening harder, using AI and analytics to actually understand behaviour, and building strategies that can flex in real time. When it works, it doesn’t feel like “personalization” at all. It just feels like the brand gets you. And once people feel that, they’re a lot harder to lose.
Source: Digital Silk Releases Updated Personalization Statistics Highlighting 2025 Consumer Expectations
Regional Contrast – Thailand’s Digital Ad Slowdown
On August 14, 2025, the Digital Advertising Association of Thailand took a hard look at the numbers and made a call nobody likes to make — they halved their 2025 growth forecast. What was expected to be a healthy 10% bump in digital ad spending is now sitting at just 5%, the lowest growth rate outside the pandemic years.
The reasons aren’t mysterious. Consumer confidence has been shaky for months, weighed down by slower economic activity and tighter household budgets. When people hesitate to spend, brands hesitate to advertise, and the first cuts often hit marketing budgets. That ripple effect is now showing up in the country’s digital ad performance.
It’s a reminder that even an industry with global momentum isn’t immune to local realities. The tools might be the same, but the environment they operate in can be completely different. For marketers, the takeaway is clear: don’t lift a global strategy and drop it into every market expecting the same result. Pay attention to the local economy, the cultural climate, and the pace of consumer adoption. In Thailand right now, the smart move is to adapt, not push harder with a plan built for different conditions.
The Bigger Picture – Adtech’s Global Boom
Globally, the adtech industry isn’t slowing down. According to the reports, the market is expected to climb from about $828.6 billion this year to roughly $1.86 trillion by 2031. That’s not a small jump, it’s more than doubling in less than a decade.
Part of that momentum comes from better targeting driven by AI, ongoing rollout of programmatic advertising, and continued increased pressure on brands to show that they are pushing more effectively towards omnichannel campaigns. Stated simply, ads are improving at finding the right audience, they are executing in more automated ways, and they are reaching us at more touchpoints.
Here, however, is the nuance: just because the global curve is going up does not mean that each individual country is part of that same boom. For example, Thailand has slowed down in terms of digital ad growth this year, highlighting that local economies, regulations, and consumer behavior can pull a market in a different direction, despite the global boom.
A homegrown Indian agency marks 17 years with style
August 15 wasn’t just about India’s Independence Day this year, it was also a milestone for Ritz Media World. The homegrown agency completed 17 years in the business, and they marked it in a way that reflects exactly why they’ve lasted this long. Starting out as a small setup with big ideas, Ritz Media World carved a niche for itself by turning radio into more than just background noise. To them, radio served as a platform to tell stories, build brands, and create memories for listeners.
Over the years, while plenty of people had written off radio as a fading medium, Ritz took a creative approach to the medium. They went along with listener habits, found ways to introduce digital touchpoints, and kept radio exciting while maintaining that unique intimacy of the medium. Seventeen years later, they demonstrated that traditional channels can remain not only relevant but influential, if you know how to adapt.
Their anniversary isn’t just an anniversary for the company, it’s a reminder for the industry that consistency, creativity, and courage to reinvent can make even the most “old-school” platforms keep their place in the storybook of success.
Live Commerce and Cultural Fit – TikTok Shop in Japan
When TikTok Shop started to enter Japan, it quickly realized that the playbook from China wasn’t going to work perfectly. Japan’s buyers are famously cautious to buy what they see in live streams. They have a deep-rooted group preference for trust, brand history, and discreet service, something that fast, flashy selling doesn’t always provide. And for some groups, there is also the fact that TikTok is owned by a company out of China, which can be problematic in a current political context.
Logistics also became a headache. Japan has high expectations around packaging, delivery timing, and product quality, which means the supply chain does not allow for mistakes. In China, live commerce has morphed into a multi-billion, impulse-buying habit, where consumers will purchase from influencers in seconds. Japan, on the other hand, has a distinct tempo, achieving credibility can take years, not seconds.
The take away is simple; global expansion is not just a mere plug in for a platform into another market. It requires reading the room, honoring local purchasing culture, and changing every layer of a brand and consumer journey (Marketing tone, visual design tone, delivery speed) as necessary before expecting real traction.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/0c2b4658-4292-437e-87fb-0213745bb7f9?utm_source=chatgpt.com
If you want to catch up on the top digital marketing news from last week, click here to read this blog: https://bostoninstituteofanalytics.org/blog/5-digital-marketing-updates-you-cant-miss-august-3-9-2025/
Conclusion – Adaptation Is the New Norm
As you think about marketing five years into the future, certain themes emerge. Personalization has left the world of tech capabilities and become a way of creating moments that feel genuine to people. Markets are able to grow at different rates across regions, adopting disparate routes for living up to their potential as we move into a future nowhere near normal.
Adtech continues to leap, traditional channels like print and radio are suddenly being opened new again, and global expansion seems to work best when there is a respect for local culture.
Adaptation becomes the rigorous thread connected to all the themes. The marketers who will be in charge in the future are not just chasing the latest tools, they are reading the room and tapping into social, communities, cultural signals and are very comfortable as they adapt, adjust, improvise or pivot. This is really continuity learning, and it doesn’t matter if you are developing skills through the best digital marketing course in mumbai or developing them in the real world. Those that blend innovation with cultural intelligence will run the race.
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