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GenAI and social are set to heavily influence the UK commerce and advertising landscape in 2025, while thrifty consumer behaviors persist and video viewing shifts to mostly digital.

Consumers are willing to spend on travel—under the right circumstances: Cruises, premium travel, and concert tourism are all seeing healthy demand despite industry headwinds.

The trend: From luxury fashion to outdoor gear, a flurry of mergers and acquisitions is underway in retail as companies streamline their portfolios and expand into adjacent segments. Tapestry struck a deal to sell its Stuart Weitzman brand to footwear conglomerate Caleres, parent of Allen Edmonds, Sam Edelman, and Vince, per The Wall Street Journal.

This fall, Rakuten will launch Rakuten+, an invite-only, premium rewards program offering a guaranteed 10% cash back on items from luxury brands. Rakuten will aim its outreach at users who have a history of buying luxury goods through its rewards platform. It also chose the brands partly by using data about which ones its biggest-spending customers showed the greatest interest in.

Airlines leveraging digital surfaces in airport lounges or seat-back screens on planes to reach passengers based on ticket status or destination, e.g., luxury goods advertised to first-class passengers during a flight.

On today’s podcast episode, we discuss how department stores are getting on, how they’re evolving, and what the contemporary department store needs to do to stick around. Listen to the conversation with our Senior Analyst Sara Lebow as she hosts Vice President of Content Suzy Davidkhanian and Senior Analyst Carina Perkins.

GenAI tool Jacquard helped luxury apparel marketplace Farfetch test creative with segments and personalize email copy. Optimizing paid search (medium impact, easy to implement). Why genAI? Advertisers buy search ads on keywords or word combinations. Search advertisers can use genAI to identify new keywords, group them in novel ways, and assess match levels that they may not have considered.

Our take: Luxury companies are girding themselves for a more difficult operating environment in 2025, as challenges in China and uncertainty in the US throw up considerable roadblocks to growth.