Tis the Season to be Jolly - How Marketing Operations made it through 2025... the chaos, the curveballs, and the AI hype
It’s that time of year again - when office Slack channels slow down (thanks office holiday parties), email sends drop like the temperature outside, and Marketing Ops leaders everywhere dare to dream about real vacations. But before we collectively power down our dashboards, it’s worth pausing for a moment of introspection. Because 2025 wasn’t just another year in the Marketing Operations playbook. It was a year of pitched battles against broken data, sprinting toward automation nirvana, and learning that the tech stack will never, ever be truly under control.
So here we are: Lights up, tree blinking in the corner, perhaps a mug of eggnog in hand, and the kind of recap only someone who eats spreadsheets for breakfast could appreciate.
The year started like every other: Chaos before calibration
January 2025 arrived with the same energy every Ops Pro knows all too well... too many dashboards, too many priorities, and a tech stack that looked like it had been rebuilt by a committee after every holiday party since 2020.
At the start of the year, the industry was deep into the “Marketing Ops renaissance”: AI wasn’t just a buzzword anymore, it was the promised land. Guys, remember how every whitepaper in Q1 said AI would build, execute, analyse, and (apparently) tuck us into bed? Spoiler: We’re still doing the tucking. But we got closer than ever before.
Your own Sojourn Solutions blog shone early light on this reality with pieces like “AI needs guardrails: Why integrating new tech into your MarTech stack shouldn’t be a leap of faith” and “Building trust in AI: Why MOPs needs human oversight, not just automation.” That wasn’t pessimism, it was pragmatism, a message we’ll thank ourselves for later.
Because if 2025 taught us anything, it’s this: AI without structure is just another buzzword with a terrible memory.
The tech stack got bigger, the problems got smarter
Over the last 12 months, it became painfully clear that a bloated tech stack isn’t a badge of honour. It’s an operational liability.
If your MarTech looks like an overstuffed stocking, overflowing with tools that don’t talk to each other, you’re not alone. Your peers spent the year consolidating, trimming, and asking the tough questions like: Does this dashboard actually tell us something actionable, or is it just shiny? That’s real talk.
Sojourn’s content on “What’s in your stack (that MOPsy could quietly replace)?” and “Scaling without the burnout: Why Marketing Ops needs a new kind of teammate” hit a nerve. They weren’t just hypotheticals, they were diagnostic tools. Because mid-year, when everyone started realizing they were paying subscription fees for pain, these themes became central to real operational planning.
And yes, MOPsy, your AI co-pilot, emerged as the MVP for a lot of teams this year, picking up the grunt work while humans focused on strategy. That wasn’t optional luxury. That was survival.
Data governance wasn’t sexy, but it was necessary
Raise your hand if your biggest headache this year was data hygiene. Anyone? (No judgment... we’re all friends here.)
Data privacy and governance marched up the priority list, not because anyone wanted to deal with GDPR nuances in December, but because it had to be done. With privacy regulations tightening globally, Ops leaders were forced to get smarter about how they collected, stored, and activated data. Compliance wasn’t a checkbox exercise anymore - it was foundational to campaign optimisation and personalisation at scale.
Halfway through the year, teams that previously treated governance as an afterthought were scrambling to build frameworks that supported both creativity and compliance. This wasn’t just about avoiding fines; this was about trust. Trust in your data flows. Trust in your automation logic. Trust in the outcome of your segmentation. And honestly, trust that you weren’t about to send an email to someone who had opted out six months ago.
Personalisation at scale feels great - until it doesn’t
Ah yes, personalisation at scale... the promise that kept us all up at night in Q2.
It sounded good on paper: Hyper-relevant campaigns delivered to each unique buyer persona with the precision of a Swiss watch. But in reality? It looked more like a mad scramble to unify disconnected data sources while marketers shouted over one another about dynamic content blocks and real-time orchestration.
To their credit, Ops teams plowed through. By late summer, organisations were finally stitching together CDPs, CRMs, and automation platforms into a semblance of a unified customer view. And even then, it still felt like someone had tossed extra variables into the mix for fun.
Sure, personalisation levels increased. Campaigns got smarter. But nothing made teams feel more alive than a last-minute pivot because someone “forgot to update the buyer persona logic.” It’s like holiday gift buying, you think you’re done, and then someone remembers Uncle Bob hates socks.
Cross-functional alignment: More than a buzzword
If there was a theme that actually matured this year, it was alignment. Not the kind of alignment you scribble on a sticky note, but the operational alignment between Marketing, Sales, and Customer success.
In 2025, silos didn’t just collapse, they were actively dismantled. Ops teams stepped up as the connective tissue in enterprise organizations, ushering in workflows that enabled smooth handoffs and shared visibility across teams. This wasn’t just about dashboards that everyone could see, it was about processes that everyone used.
You could smell change in the air by Q3, when campaigns that used to get stuck between departments suddenly had a roadmap, a set of owners, and, dare we say it, accountability.
Team communications improved. Predictive analytics started informing pipeline conversations. And suddenly, marketing wasn’t throwing leads over a wall; they were partnering.
The AI reality check: Hype meets humility
If early 2025 was the year of AI will solve everything, then late 2025 was the year of AI will solve some things, but good luck without human context.
That was the real takeaway from countless industry discussions this year, from Cannes Lions panels to internal Ops boardrooms. Leaders weren’t asking if AI would matter anymore, they were asking how to blend it with human intelligence effectively. We saw numerous discussions around striking that balance: Letting AI automate where it makes sense, and letting humans drive empathy, strategy, and narrative.
Your own commentary on “Building trust in AI” and the need for collaboration between humans and machines wasn’t just philosophical, it was foundational strategy.
Because let’s face it: AI can suggest subject lines that perform well by the numbers, but only humans can tell when those subject lines read like they were written by - well - an AI.
Trends that moved the needle (and the eyeballs)
Let’s rewind the tape and talk trends... the ones that didn’t just make noise, but shaped actual operational decisions.
One of the clearest industry shifts this year has been toward depth over breadth. Marketing moved beyond shallow reach and big audiences, focusing instead on building meaningful resonance with smaller, more engaged segments. This isn’t just nostalgia for better days. It’s a pragmatic response to consumer fatigue with generic, spray-and-pray tactics. Brands realised that resonance matters more than reach.
Another trend was the return of escapism in marketing narratives, making campaigns emotionally engaging and creatively rich rather than purely performance focused. This tied into the broader push for storytelling that doesn’t feel like it’s from the same template everyone else used.
And let’s not forget the continued evolution of personalisation. This year, personalisation wasn’t just about first-name tokens in emails... it was about anticipating customer needs with predictive analytics and using machine learning to fine-tune journeys in real time. It was messy, it was imperfect, but it worked - when done right.
The wins: What Ops actually achieved
Okay, time to stop talking about trends and talk about results, the stuff that actually matters in the trenches.
By year-end:
Most Marketing Ops teams finally tamed parts of their tech stack, pruning tools that didn’t deliver ROI and folding others into more coherent ecosystems.
Cross-functional alignment became a workable reality, not just a PowerPoint slide.
Data governance went from check-the-box to operational backbone, and compliance didn’t derail campaigns as often as feared.
Automation didn’t eliminate jobs, it elevated them. Campaign builders startted to become strategic architects rather than ticket responders.
AI got smart enough to take on repetitive toil, but humans still drove narrative strategy, interpretation, and value alignment.
These are not small wins. These are the kinds of outcomes that move teams from firefighting mode to strategic growth mode.
What went sideways (and what we learned)
But let’s keep it real: It wasn’t all miracles and green lights.
There were months when personalisation logic broke mid-campaign. There were tech migrations that felt like they rattled the very fabric of time. There were dashboards no one looked at but everyone felt like they had to maintain. And yes, there were meetings that could have been emails... and should have been emails.
But from each setback came a lesson:
Poor data hygiene cripples even the best strategies.
Tools without governance become liabilities.
AI without context is noise.
Alignment without ownership is confusion.
And most importantly: A resilient Ops team beats a perfect plan every time.
Looking ahead: 2026 is already calling
As you close your laptop and side-eye that last holiday email, remember this: 2026 isn’t a blank slate. It’s a loaded one... with AI that’s smarter, buyer expectations that are higher, and operational complexity that will continue to grow.
Some shifts to watch for:
Even deeper integration of AI into your campaigns, but with explainability baked in.
A continued push for personalisation that feels human.
Operational maturity becoming a competitive advantage, not a luxury.
And possibly a few surprises from emerging tech that will make us all go, “oh, that’s how we do it now.”
Whatever comes next, one thing’s certain: Marketing Operations isn’t going anywhere. It’s not a support function. It’s the engine.
And this year, that engine didn’t just run. It powered through. Despite the chaos, the curveballs, and the relentless innovation cycle, you made things work. That deserves more than a pat on the back - it deserves a moment of pride.
So deck the halls, set your OOO, and know this: Uou survived. You learned. You grew.
And 2026 doesn’t stand a chance.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays or whatever politically correct way it is these days of just wishing everyone a wonderful time of year... but most importantly, Congratulations on making it through another wild ride of a year in MOPs!
