Marketing to bots: welcome to the agentic era [Video]

The Drum reports from the Consumer Electronics Show 2025, where advisor, academic and author Shelly Palmer delivered the keynote at the Innovation Series Breakfast.

“First of all, this is the weirdest CES I’ve ever been at,” declared Shelly Palmer as he kicked off his keynote at his Innovation Breakfast at CES 2025. “And the reason is, it’s a super hot mess.” He wasn’t wrong. The Consumer Electronics Show, with its chaos of conflicting visions, felt less like a clear roadmap and more like a free-for-all experiment in the future of technology. But amid the mess, Palmer issued a stark warning: we’re no longer marketing to people. We’re marketing to bots. And this shift is permanent.

The era of marketing to bots

“Every single marketer in this room is going to be marketing to bots. We are going to be marketing to the personas that are on those phones,” Palmer stated. “So, I’ll have a value persona …

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