In 2025, there are many marketing tactics that are pretty much obsolete—toll booths, the yellow pages, even advertising on Twitter. But we believe it’s time to throw out another once-common strategy: your campaign calendar. Today’s marketers are true innovators, and they want to give the people what they want. But significant challenges are holding them back from real progress.
At Activate Summit 2025 (now available to watch on-demand!), we asked attendees about the state of their marketing programs and whether they feel ready to capture the perfect moment for their customers.
Here are our five takeaways from that survey.
1. The Dirty Secret Is Data
When asked, “How clean and consistent is your data management?”, these were the responses:
- One-in-five (20%) of Activate attendees rated their organization as “decent.”
- Two-thirds (66%) of marketers describe their data management as “inconsistent” or “messy.”
- Only 4% reported strong data hygiene.
- 9% did not know enough about their data to answer.
Keeping customer data clean is clearly easier said than done. Too often, data is fragmented across teams and tools, which makes it difficult to access and manage. This slows marketers down and limits their ability to adapt to their audiences in real-time.
The Solution: To be moment-ready, modern architecture must be cloud-native, API-first, and AI-powered. This ensures that your technologies can vertically integrate into the larger martech ecosystem and activate customer data in real-time for instantaneous decisioning and responsiveness.
2. Personalization Isn’t Real-Time
The biggest blockers to real-time personalization, according to marketers, are:
- Fragmented or poorly tagged data (33%)
- A lack of technical resources to activate data (20%)
- An under-resourced marketing team (18%)
- Teams working in silos (7%)
- All of the above (22%)
Most marketers personalize their messages at least on a basic level, whether it’s by user profile information or purchase history. But even when your data is unified, it’s not easy engaging customers 1:1, at least not in ways that aren’t major time sucks.
The Solution: Using intelligent, modular content design, today’s AI-powered platforms set the proper foundation for personalization. This allows you to centralize your asset management and test AI-driven decisioning, reaching users in real-time.
3. Scheduled Sends Are Still Standard
When asked, “How much of your messaging is still batch-and-blast?”, the answers spanned a wide spectrum:
- 29% of respondents are entirely batch-and-blast (90-100%). Scheduled sends rule their calendars.
- 35% say they’re majority batch-and-blast (70-89%). They’re trying to shift, but they’re not there yet.
- 15% report an even split (50-69%) between batch sends and triggered sends.
- 15% say their triggered messages are gaining ground, with only 30-49% of their messaging as batch-and-blast.
- Only 6% of marketers are mostly moment-based, with less than 30% batch sends.
Batch campaigns especially become a bad habit when they’re isolated to a single channel—an email on Tuesday at 9 a.m., an SMS on Friday at 2 p.m. Your customers don’t interact with brands so rigidly. With how attached we all are to our devices, we’re engaging on all channels all the time. Marketers need technologies that can handle this fluid behavior.
The Solution: Native cross-channel solutions are built to orchestrate all of your marketing—email, push, SMS, in-app, social, and more—in one unified place. Quickly create messages for every screen, so you can execute dynamic, cohesive experiences that drive recognition and continued engagement.
4. Money Talks, Marketers Listen
When it comes to what marketing teams are actually optimizing for, here were the most common business goals:
- 19% of respondents are focused on short-term revenue from one-off campaigns.
- 10% care more about customer acquisition than retention.
- 19% are led by long-term value, such as customer lifetime value or loyalty.
- 33% are revenue-led, but they’re trying to balance other goals.
- 19% are unclear about what they should optimize for.
When you’re tied to your campaign calendar, you get stuck measuring campaign success after the messages get sent, and that’s too late. Marketing should be about setting the right goals and being nimble with your customer engagement, not getting distracted by vanity metrics.
The Solution: Optimizing means more than fine-tuning—it’s about transforming your entire approach with experimentation. AI agents use intelligent decisioning, so they never stop monitoring and analyzing patterns to make proactive adjustments and content adaptations. This always-on strategy keeps you on track with your goals, instead of course-correcting after your latest campaign flop.
5. AI Adoption Is Ramping Up
As for where artificial intelligence is delivering real value for marketers, here’s how Activate attendees are using AI:
- 38% are relying on off-platform tools, like ChatGPT.
- 31% are experimenting with AI tools, but say it’s still early days.
- 22% aren’t using AI meaningfully yet in their organizations.
- 6% are using some embedded AI features within their martech platform.
- Only 3% are using a responsive or conversational AI platform that’s aligned with their goals.
It’s great to see that the vast majority of marketers are already experimenting with AI in some way. But it’s not enough for marketing technology to simply bolt AI onto outdated systems. Martech that makes a real impact will use conversational AI to do the heavy lifting and automate execution.
The Solution: As we announced at Activate Summit, Iterable Nova is our new AI agent for true moments-based engagement. It’s designed to be prescriptive, conversational, and goal-based, so marketers can scale smarter and improve their performance.
Download Our New Guide to Evolve Your Marketing Maturity
If you’re ready to ditch your campaign calendar, we’ve got the guide that walks you through each step of the process.
The New Era of Moments-Based Marketing breaks down the core elements of a moment-oriented experience and gives you the essential tools you need to build one of your own. You’ll gain access to our marketing maturity assessment plus a checklist on how to evolve your operating model and prepare for the AI-powered era.
Download the guide today to turn marketing strategy into action, and customer insights into impact.
