OMR 2025 takeaways: Marketers weigh in on AI automation, performance marketing, and podcasts
Illustration by Dave Cole / Getty / The Current
At this year’s OMR conference in Hamburg — Europe’s largest gathering of marketing and tech leaders — one theme emerged: Advertisers are growing increasingly skeptical of the AI-automated world envisioned by Big Tech.
Many are also starting to rethink performance marketing’s outsized role in the mix. From the rising demand for transparency to the growing appeal of podcasts, the mood at OMR 2025 was one of recalibration.
Here are the key takeaways.
AI’s black box faces resistance
At OMR, the desire for more transparency was clear. Many marketers are no longer content with just standing back and letting an intelligent black box do all their bidding.
This shift is already underway: Google recently announced it would offer more transparent reporting for marketers using Performance Max (PMax).
“No one thought this would happen one or two years ago,” said Christian Scharmüller, chief client officer at Austrian agency smec, during the conference.
“Standard shopping campaigns account for 20% [of all campaigns run] and were actually increasing recently,” Scharmüller said, citing an analysis of 500 client accounts and 4,000 campaigns.
In other words, advertisers are beginning to shift away from fully automated solutions like Performance Max and back to standard campaigns — tools that give them relatively more visibility and control.
Big Tech’s latest generation of AI-powered ad products — Google’s Performance Max , Meta’s Advantage+, Amazon’s Performance+, TikTok’s Smart+ and even Pinterest’s Performance+ — promise to make life easier for advertisers. But what’s gained in convenience is often lost in control.
Meta’s recent push to automate advertising end to end, as laid out by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sparked concerns that the company was trying to remove agencies from the process. Meta leaders fired back after the ensuing firestorm, but it struck a nerve for many marketers.
The wider macroeconomic context is also a factor. A potential global economic crisis is pushing advertisers to demand transparency and clear ROI from their media investments — something black box AI systems still struggle to deliver.
Performance marketing is being reconsidered
Advertisers aren’t just pushing back against AI automating performance marketing. They’re also questioning its very value.
“As many others, we got very used to the drug of performance marketing,” said Geoff Seeley, CMO at PayPal, during a panel at OMR. “But we need to win hearts and minds, and we won’t do that just with performance marketing.”
That’s because “conversions” are now happening at all stages of the marketing funnel, which, as The Current recently reported, now looks more like a loop.
Even Google is diversifying beyond last-click attribution. Google EMEA President Debbie Weinstein touted Google Lens, Gemini Live and “circle to search” as innovations showcasing the future of AI in search.
The search giant is betting the future of search could be just as much outside of the web browser as inside.
Podcasts are as sought after as ever
If there was one media channel that got marketers talking at OMR 2025, it was podcasts.
“The media of 2025 is podcasts,” proclaimed Scott Galloway, marketing luminary and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “The average age of a cable news viewer is 70; the average age of a podcast listener is 34. This person is worth many times more to advertisers,” he said.
As more consumers shift time and attention outside of walled gardens, podcasts are emerging as a compelling alternative — open, premium and story-driven.
Even Netflix, the king of streaming, is eyeing the opportunity. “You’ll see in the future, as podcasts are more video-forward, maybe some of that content showing up on Netflix,” Netflix CMO Marian Lee said during the conference, echoing comments made by co-CEO Ted Sarandos in the company’s latest earnings call.