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The marketing technology machine is being torn apart at the joints. According to legendary tech analyst and Forrester founder George Colony, we’ve just entered technology’s Seventh Wave. Its arrival presages an AI-led upheaval that renders the internet, mobile, and cloud revolutions warm-up acts. Colony says this isn’t just another tech cycle. It’s a structural reset. One that brings chaos first, then a new order. And marketers, agencies, and media owners are standing right in the blast zone. Traditional SaaS pricing? Breaking down. Legacy vendors? Scrambling to slap AI lipstick on an increasingly wobbly pig. Beneath it all, a deeper reckoning is underway: Agentic AI underpinning autonomous systems that learn, adapt and act is poised to flatten the marketing stack entirely. That’s a direct threat to platforms, but it’s also a moment of generational opportunity for brands ready to play offense. His contrarian advice, though, keep your powder dry. Meanwhile, Google’s monopoly on search is fraying, (despite its latest financial results). SEO as a channel is dying. The open web? It’s morphing into something like AM radio, he says, still there, but barely relevant. In its place: a new set of cartels forming around large language models, or whatever they spawn. Colony warns that these players are moving fast to capture territory, lock in advantage, and rewrite the terms of engagement. For marketers, the implications are existential. The decisions they make now will define who wins the next decade, and beyond.

Brands with high cultural relevance grow six times more than brands with low cultural relevance, according to Kantar data. But that same data shows the volume of Australian brands achieving meaningful difference has literally halved over the last decade – with at least half of marketers creating work that’s literally too dull to make any difference. Meanwhile the pace of cultural change is causing a rolling polycrisis – and most brands aren’t keeping up. That has significant implications for pricing power and knock-on effects for marketing budgets, per Kantar managing partner, Mark Kennedy. He believes we’re confronting an era of brand building like no other. Problem is, Australia is over-indexing on performance or lower funnel marketing versus the rest of the world. Kantar’s data suggests brands that shift from a 70:30 performance to brand ratio to 50:50 will get a 10 per cent lift in sales. But the advertising also has to be good – Kantar’s data shows at least half is wasted.