Several Brafton executives, salespeople and managers attended the 2025 Technology for Marketing (TFM) Expo in London this past September. They were there to showcase contentmarketing.ai, but also poke around to learn more about marketers’ AI and content pain points in the current landscape.
After the show, they shared their biggest takeaways and lessons learned.
What Is the Technology for Marketing Expo?
Technology for Marketing is the UK’s largest and most attended AI and marketing tech (martech) event. At the 2025 show, more than 10,000 attendees and 200 solution providers and agencies gathered to explore martech products and services, showcase their expertise and chat with industry leaders and newcomers alike.
It’s the place to be, whether you’re shopping for new AI marketing solutions or you’ve got one to introduce to the market.
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Why We Went + Our Key Takeaways & Lessons Learned
While our team attended to demonstrate contentmarketing.ai’s capabilities at its very first trade show, they were also there to take a pulse check on the industry. By engaging with everyday marketers, we wanted to learn more about their toughest challenges and the solutions they say would help relieve pressure.
Our team discovered that, while many marketers are using AI for content creation in some capacity, their current tools (often the popular choices) still fall short.
Here are four key lessons Braftonites learned at TFM Expo 2025:
1. AI Will Work Its Way Into Every Service Offering Soon Enough
It’s no surprise that AI abounds and exists in nearly every service offering in one form or another. 93% of marketers report that new AI features were added to tools in their tech stacks last year. Brafton’s COO, Adam Barber, confirmed this during his time chatting with others on the trade show floor:
“Everyone I spoke to who is doing content is using AI,” said Adam. “AI is going to be part of every service offering very soon. We either offer that in a compelling way or clients will go elsewhere.”
The challenge — now that marketers and software providers have widely adopted AI or are creating their own tools — is to differentiate themselves from what’s currently out there. Not with another shiny tool designed to ‘interrupt’ the industry, but by creating truly effective solutions that address real and common pain points well.
2. Marketers Aren’t Satisfied With Current Popular AI Solutions
ChatGPT is the largest generative AI chatbot out there today by market share. Swaths of everyday folks and professionals use it to streamline tasks from grocery list making to content creating and strategy outlining, and it’s great for many handy use cases. But ChatGPT (and other popular GenAI tools) doesn’t check every box when it comes to content marketing, and marketers are beginning to realize that.
Cecelia Thornett, contentmarketing.ai Trial Manager, points out just how many users are unsatisfied with current AI solutions for marketing applications:
“What stood out most was the sheer scale of interest in AI for marketing and how so many businesses, regardless of size, are looking for better solutions.”
A Brafton-conducted survey about AI in Marketing from late 2024 revealed marketers’ biggest concerns with AI:
- Generic or bland content that didn’t align with their brand voice (71.7%).
- Thin or irrelevant content that didn’t align with their target audience (42.4%).
The fact that they’re still using AI solutions, though, highlights just how powerful these platforms are, even with popular choices’ current issues.
“Marketing remains a major pain point for so many businesses,” Cecelia said. “AI can genuinely make a difference.”
3. The Future of SEO Is Still Uncertain
Search engine optimization (SEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO) — there are so many “EOs” out there, it’s hard to know what’s what. And while it is becoming increasingly important to optimize for AI in most of its forms, I think the hurry and naming frenzy are also indicative of uncertainty. Where is SEO headed? How big a role will AI ultimately play? And, what do we even call it?
Folks at the expo seemed to agree, as Josh Davies, AVP, EMEA Growth & Client Experience, pointed out:
“[There were] lots of conversations around ‘AEO’, GEO and the future of SEO/PPC,” he said.
We already know that optimizing for Google’s AI Overviews and generative engines like ChatGPT can be worthwhile, but there are still questions around how to approach it, what actually works well and what doesn’t.
“It was great to meet so many like-minded individuals, share tales of our marketing pasts and find out more about their pain points!” Josh said.
The more people talk about the future of SEO — and the more AI companies update their algorithms — the more we’ll learn about AI engine optimization and how to approach it with more certainty.
4. Many Are Using AI To Draft Content, But the Output Needs Lots of Editing
Even though many marketers are challenged with the tools at their disposal, most are still using them. This speaks to both the effectiveness of AI’s ability to streamline tasks (despite common pain points) and marketers’ appetite for solutions, even if they don’t fulfill all of their needs.
It seems as though popular tools excel at one or the other, but rarely both, and marketers are making trade-offs. This is most evident in content creation:
“Marketers are using AI tools to write content, mainly drafts, but need to do a lot of tweaking to ensure the output is on brand,” Ramiro Gonzalez, AVP, Sales & Account Management at Brafton, said. “Prospects need scaled, on-brand content, and tools like ChatGPT are not cutting it.”
Ramiro also noted that interest in solutions that could provide accurately and consistently branded content at scale was the No. 1 wish among those he chatted with.
Applying What We Learned
Most of what our team learned at TFM Expo 2025 confirmed thoughts and feelings they already had after years of working alongside marketers and AI: People want AI solutions and are keen to use them, but current options fall short.
Demoing contentmarketing.ai was our way to show prospects that people are building tools that bridge the gap between efficiency and effectiveness with tools that streamline content creation while keeping everything unique about your brand at the forefront of that content.
We met hundreds of prospects interested in what contentmarketing.ai had to offer, and our team will be scheduling meetings for weeks to come.
If you find yourself in the same camp as most marketers (i.e., eager for AI tools but not completely satisfied with the current standard), let’s get you on our calendar: request your demo here.
