Executive Briefing: Friday 18 September

Executive summary Generative AI is redefining marketing roles and content strategies, demanding new skills and quality outputs amidst increasing social media saturation. Simultaneously, marketers face escalating data privacy compliance needs with new regulations and platform shifts in ad placement and integrated commerce experiences. Australia's creative sector also sees a shift towards multi-skilled talent. AI reshapes marketing roles and content strategies Marketing has changed more in the past year than in the decade before it due to generative AI, impacting the buyer's journey, tools, and job roles. The shift from content creation to content engineering is evident, moving from content creation to designing systems that produce good articles. New AI-native marketing job titles like 'ai marketing director' and 'marketing ai engineer' have appeared since 2025. 80% of marketers now use AI for content creation, employing it for tasks like drafting copy, brainstorming ideas, and personalising messaging at scale, though results still require reality checks and testing. Intensified data privacy compliance demands New regulatory landscapes are emerging, with New Jersey's new data broker law creating a "data collector" category. This requires companies that sell or license personal data to a data broker to register and potentially pay annual fees ranging from $5,000 to $1.5 million. The law also bans the sale of sensitive data, including precise geolocation and financial information, without a consent exception. In Australia, upcoming privacy reforms will mandate transparency for automated decisions and introduce stronger consent standards, placing marketing teams at the centre of data governance. Despite many websites having a Consent Management Platform, 79% of audited US websites still loaded targeting or advertising tags after a user opted out, highlighting persistent compliance challenges from misconfigured systems or unmonitored tags. Platform control shifts in advertising Meta is increasingly moving advertisers towards Advantage+ Placements by removing manual placement controls at the ad set level, with tests showing this typically leads to better results and higher-quality leads, and approximately 60% of ad spend flowing to Instagram. Concurrently, Amazon is consolidating its media ecosystem, integrating premium entertainment (such as Prime Video, which reaches 5.5 million ad-supported Australians monthly, and live sport) with commerce, first-party audience data, and AI-powered tools. This push aims to simplify the advertiser experience and enhance measurability, offering new formats like Dynamic TV Creative and location-based interactive CTV ads to bridge content with shopping behaviour. Social media saturation demands quality over volume The social media landscape is marked by significant saturation, with over 5.5 billion people worldwide using social media and average attention spans for screen content dropping to 47 seconds in 2023. Brands are posting an average of 9.5 times daily across networks, intensifying content production pressures. This saturation is exacerbated by a flood of AI-generated "slop" content, with platforms like LinkedIn seeing over 1 million flags for such content in under a month. To break through this noise, marketers must pivot from creating content for content’s sake to focusing on quality, attention-earning strategies that resonate with audiences. Australia's creative sector talent needs evolve Australia's creative industry is undergoing a significant talent shift, characterised by a reduction in available roles alongside an increase in candidate supply. There is a growing demand for multi-skilled talent proficient across brand, digital, design, and motion, while traditional, non-hands-on creative director positions are seeing the sharpest drop. The market favours performance marketers who own spend and revenue, content leaders capable of end-to-end strategy and production, and graphic designers with animation skills and AI fluency. This indicates a broader move towards leaner, broader-skilled teams and flatter organisational structures, with some finished art roles decreasing by 2.3% year-on-year.