On 2nd July, IAB Europe hosted a roundtable in partnership with TikTok, bringing together senior industry leaders to explore how modern marketing is changing as AI, social platforms, creators and commerce become increasingly connected across the consumer journey.
Participants included representatives from Influencer, LiveRamp, Onyx, and members of IAB Europe’s Retail & Commerce Media Committee.
The session, titled The Multiplier Effect: Rethinking How Modern Marketing Powers ROI, focused on a central challenge for marketers today: as growth becomes the result of an interconnected ecosystem rather than isolated channels, how should businesses rethink the way they build, measure and optimise performance?
Across the discussion, one theme was clear. The traditional boundaries that once helped organise marketing activity are becoming increasingly blurred. Paid and organic content, brand and performance, creators and commerce, discovery and purchase are no longer separate parts of the journey. For consumers, they are often part of one connected experience.
Below are the key takeaways from the roundtable discussion, covering how these shifts are influencing the consumer journey, content strategy, measurement, data readiness and collaboration across the wider marketing ecosystem.
AI, social platforms, creators, commerce and Retail Media are making the traditional funnel far less predictable. Discovery, evaluation and purchase are increasingly happening across connected touchpoints, sometimes at the same time.
For marketers, this means linear planning models are becoming less applicable. The focus is shifting from isolated channels to interconnected ecosystems, where each touchpoint plays a role in driving the overall customer journey and business outcome.
Creators, social commerce and live shopping are becoming more central to how consumers discover, engage with and buy from brands.
Creator-led content can now influence trust, consideration, product discovery and purchase intent in one experience. Live shopping also offers brands a more interactive, retail-like environment, giving them the opportunity to explain products, answer questions and build engagement in real time.
To succeed, brands need the right content strategies, creator partnerships, infrastructure and measurement approaches to understand the wider impact across online and offline touchpoints.
Paid and Organic Are Becoming Harder to Separate
The line between paid, organic, user-generated and creator-led content is becoming increasingly blurred.
Consumers do not necessarily distinguish between these formats; they experience them as part of one broader brand interaction. Yet many organisations still plan, budget and measure them separately.
A more blended content strategy is needed, with greater focus on whether content is effective, relevant and connected to business outcomes, rather than whether it is classed as paid or organic.
Measurement remains one of the biggest challenges in modern marketing.
As consumer journeys become more fragmented and AI-powered, traditional attribution models can struggle to reflect how value is created. Last-click attribution and platform-specific metrics often provide only a partial view.
More unified measurement, incrementality testing and in-flight optimisation will be essential to help marketers understand how different touchpoints work together and capture the multiplier effect of connected activity.
AI is changing how consumers search for information, discover products and make decisions.
As AI-powered tools become more embedded in the journey, brands need to ensure their content and product information are clear, structured and easy to understand across environments. Content needs to be both human-centric and readable within AI-driven systems.
The session also reinforced the need to balance automation with human oversight. AI can support optimisation, performance and decision-making, but its effectiveness depends on high-quality data, clear objectives and strong governance.
No single part of the ecosystem can solve these challenges alone.
As marketing becomes more interconnected, collaboration between brands, agencies, platforms, retailers, creators, measurement providers and technology partners will be critical.
Privacy-safe data sharing, consistent standards and greater transparency will all help the industry better understand what works and why.
Experimentation will also be key. Organisations will need to test, learn and adapt quickly, while rethinking structures, investment models and KPIs built for a more linear era.
The IAB Europe and TikTok roundtable highlighted both the complexity and the opportunity facing marketers today.
AI, creators, commerce and social platforms are changing how people discover, evaluate and buy. For marketers, this creates a clear need to move beyond traditional silos and build strategies that better reflect how consumers actually behave.
The organisations best placed to succeed will be those that can connect content, data, media and commerce more effectively; measure impact across the full journey; and collaborate across the ecosystem as marketing enters a more integrated, AI-first future.
The findings from the roundtable will be used to develop a playbook, which will be released later this year.
Register your interest here to be among the first to hear when it launches.
