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POSSIBLE 2025 put performance under the spotlight. Across keynotes and corridors, marketers zeroed in on what’s driving real results. This is your full debrief—starting with the shift that set the tone.

▶ POSSIBLE, In Retrospect – Editor’s Note

POSSIBLE 2025 showed how far the industry has moved away from complexity-for-complexity’s-sake. Across sessions, brands, and side-stage conversations, the strongest themes pointed toward simplification, integration, and accountability. The marketing stack may be growing, but the pressure is on to make it work harder, not bigger.

One consistent thread was the need for fewer tools that do more. Marketing teams are investing in solutions that combine planning, activation, and measurement in a single workflow. This is in response to fragmentation fatigue, with marketers reporting tool inefficiencies as a top challenge to performance. According to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey, CMOs are prioritizing productivity and impact from their marketing technology investments—even as MarTech budget allocations decline from 25.4% in 2023 to 23.8% in 2024.

Another shift was the renewed focus on creative as a growth driver. AI and automation were widely discussed, but the emphasis landed on how these technologies support decision-making and content efficiency, not replace original brand thinking. The most talked-about campaigns this week were the ones with a clear creative point of view, tailored to audience signals, and distributed in spaces that allowed feedback to shape the next step.

Retail media networks featured heavily across the agenda. They were no longer positioned as ad placements but as levers for brand discovery and business impact. Brands like LEGO and Unilever presented retail media as a way to build consistency across digital, in-store, and social, backed by clear performance metrics. At the same time, measurement expectations are shifting, with teams prioritizing closed-loop insights and full-funnel attribution over legacy MMM models. Platforms like Fospha give online retailers a unified, privacy-safe view of performance—combining machine learning attribution with daily MMM to help marketers make faster, smarter investment decisions.

For all the investment in new tools, one thing became clear: the human element matters more, not less. Founders who told unfiltered stories, marketers who shared working experiments, and brands that owned their flaws attracted the most attention. This year’s conversations suggested that strategy and culture are just as important as the tech stack—and that both need to work together to deliver results.

 💬 A Few More Things from the Stage

💡 Raising the Bar: Storytelling in the AI Era
Google • R/GA

In one of the most anticipated sessions of POSSIBLE, Google CMO Lorraine Twohill and R/GA’s Tiffany Rolfe broke down what marketing’s new era really looks like: faster, more collaborative, and still fiercely human.

Key takeaways:

⚡ Speed + safeguards.
Google is producing hundreds of thousands of personalized assets—but every one still gets reviewed by a human. It’s about acceleration with accountability.

🧠 Creative briefs are evolving.
Marketing isn’t about one-off campaigns anymore—it’s about systems. Teams are building modular creative that can flex, test, and adapt across platforms in real time.

🎨 Experimentation is the new norm.
Tools like Circle to Search and dynamic video are in the mix—and everyone’s expected to play. Whether you’re an engineer or a marketer, if you’re on the team, you’re in the sandbox.

🔥 Creativity still leads.
AI helps marketers move faster—but only people can give a campaign soul. The big wins still come from human insight and emotional clarity.

And as brands experiment more with upper-funnel storytelling, the question of what’s actually driving results is top of mind. That’s where solutions like Fospha’s Halo come in—helping marketers finally connect the dots between top-of-funnel platforms like TikTok and real revenue on Amazon. Unified ROAS, simplified.

🧠 Lorraine’s advice to CMOs and creatives?
Get hands-on with the tools. Build a culture of testing and learning. And always lead with the story—because that’s still what moves people.

💡 Getting Out Of Your Own Way: Creative at the Speed of Culture
Smartly • TikTok • Nutrafol • Wpromote • eMarketer

Legacy processes are holding marketers back. If your media and creative teams are still working in silos—or if your campaign approvals take longer than a TikTok trend lasts—you’re already behind.

Takeaways from the session:

🎯 Brand + performance is not a trade-off.
Stop separating teams, workflows, and goals. Performance creative can still build love—and brand storytelling can still drive measurable outcomes. The winning formula? Brandformance.

🧠 Creative iteration is now a system.
Nutrafol’s team now meets weekly across paid and organic to remix what’s working and reformat creative in real time. One brand on TikTok even went from trend ID to campaign live in just three days.

📹 TikTok = culture, commerce, and signal.
It’s where trends start and sales happen. TikTok’s Lorry Destainville put it best: “Let creators lead.” The brands seeing real results are those that move fast, embrace risk, and treat creators as collaborators.

But real-time creative is only half the story. Behind the scenes, Fospha is giving marketing teams the confidence to invest in upper-funnel platforms by showing how activity on platforms like TikTok, Snap, Meta and more actually drives results across the funnel. In a world where creative moves fast, you need measurement that proves it’s working.

💡 Igniting Brand Growth: A Fireside Chat on the Future of Creator Partnerships

YouTube turned 20 this year—but don’t mistake age for irrelevance. In one of POSSIBLE’s most refreshing sessions, YouTube’s Anne Marie Nelson-Bogle sat down with Haley Kalil, model and content creator, and Ryan Detert, CEO of Influential, to explore what’s next for creator-brand partnerships.

👥 Why Creators Still Win Trust
YouTube creators are essentially community-builders. Kalil, who built her audience from scratch by posting five Shorts a day for a year and a half, said fans feel like “childhood friends” who’ve grown with her. That emotional connection is the X-factor brands can’t fake.

💡 Smart Brands Know the Assignment
Detert broke it down: today’s most effective campaigns are creator-led, not brand-scripted. Brands need to think less like broadcasters and more like collaborators. That means giving creators the freedom to sound like themselves, not a boardroom.

🌍 Creators Everywhere, Impact Anywhere
The future? More creators, smarter tools, and tighter loops between content and commerce. As Kalil put it: creators are becoming full-on production houses—with AI tools, platform support, and built-in audiences. Brands that show up with trust, flexibility, and a plan to measure real outcomes? Those are the ones that win.

👀 What Others Are Saying

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Looking for the highlight reel? The POSSIBLE team captured some of the biggest moments across all three days — here’s a quick scroll through what had everyone talking.

Missed a recap or just catching up? More takeaways are coming your way — and who knows, maybe we’ll see you at the next big one!

The Unofficially POSSIBLE Team

Independently Created. Not affiliated with POSSIBLE.

ClickZ is a ClickZ Media publication in the Events division