Discover the key advertising trends and opportunities that will impact agencies in 2025.
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As we step into 2025, the marketing landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, presenting both challenges and opportunities for brands. From the shifting sands of technology and regulation to the ever-growing need for transparency and data-driven decision-making, staying ahead in this dynamic environment requires proactive adaptation, and the most successful brands will be those whose strategies are grounded in flexibility, foresight, and collaboration.
Here, we explore three trends that are set to shape digital marketing in 2025, examining their implications while providing actionable predictions to help brands thrive in an unpredictable future.
In 2025, marketers will be operating on markedly uneven ground.
Google’s “opt-in” cookie pivot in Chrome will expedite already-increasing signal loss…but the tech company’s recent decision to allow advertisers’ use of IP addresses for targeting (aka fingerprinting) shows a “one step forward, one step back” approach to user privacy that leaves marketers—and consumers—guessing. Meanwhile, the broader regulatory map differs from platform to platform, browser to browser, and country to country (not to mention from state to state), leading to further fragmentation across marketing activities. And with AI-powered search growing in prominence, how can marketers adjust—and capitalize?
TikTok in the US is still a thing…for now, its fate now in the hands of nine robed Americans. What will happen to those ad dollars if the app is banned? And will those users migrate to Snapchat, Reels, or YouTube? Speaking of social, is X really dead? Is the Bluesky buzz for real? Where does Threads fit into all of this? And how are advertisers supposed to balance their social spend across all those channels (and effectively measure the results)?
CTV is officially a beast, with streaming viewership soaring past linear to become Americans’ favorite way to watch video. With increasing viewership and new advertising opportunities on CTV, should brands finally shift the bulk of their video budgets over to streaming? And how can they measure that performance in the context of a larger campaign?
Then there’s retail media, which is out to prove that everything is, in fact, an ad network. But which of those networks are worth the money, and how can you harness your own data to better leverage theirs?
It all adds up to fragmented, unpredictable marketing sphere, and in this kind of environment, agility will win the day. Brands and their agency partners need the ability to quickly and seamlessly direct (and redirect) ad dollars and assets from on channel or platform to another, seizing on what’s working and better identifying what isn’t.
PREDICTION: With growing fragmentation and an uncertain future, marketers will look for ways to turn the noise into harmony. Expect a run on technology that unifies point solutions and gives marketers a clear view of their media performance, allowing them to better identify winning trends and develop successful strategies.
With apologies to Desiderius Erasmus, for marketers, “In the world of the cookieless, the brand with the first-party data is king.”
First-party data allows brands to better target, retarget, measure, and attribute results across just about every channel. It empowers advertisers to craft campaigns that are more relevant to high-value audiences, identify and reach new audience segments, and derive stronger insights from their reporting. And, of course, it opens up new opportunities to better leverage resources like data clean rooms to engage in privacy-friendly marketing that drives higher ROI, curbs wasted spend, and boosts conversions.
But it also gives brands something that has become increasingly hard to find in today’s fractured and fickle marketing world: control. Owning your data means owning your relationship with customers and prospective customers, providing insights into target audiences, buying patterns, sales tactics, conversion attribution, and an array of other benefits. However, to fully harness that data requires technology like customer relationship management systems (CRMs) and customer data platforms (CDPs), as well as advertising automation platforms that unify campaign planning, performance and reporting to get a holistic picture of all campaign data across all channels.
PREDICTION: Brands will no longer cede control of their campaign data to their agencies. Instead, they’ll seek out partners that provide a more collaborative and brand-focused approach to data ownership, while adopting technology that brings more of the benefits of that data in-house.
For many marketers, transparency has been a digital advertising white whale, one they’ve been hunting for the better part of a decade and that, despite best efforts, has only seemed to grow worse in recent years. Programmatic’s promise of precision across both targeting and measurement came with ambiguity around ad fraud, brand safety, and performance. Hidden fees, opaque fee structures, inconsistent pricing, and a lack of supply path optimization (SPO) have converged to create a general sense of suspicion and mistrust, which in turn can breed resentment of agency partners, walled garden platforms, monopolistic tech giants, and the system itself.
Compounding this is the steady emergence (and grudging acceptance) of a new class of AI-powered tools such as Google’s PMax and Meta’s Advantage+, which purport to offer increased ROAS as long as you agree to give up control over exactly where your ad dollars are going and, of course, stop asking all those pesky questions about transparency.
But the situation has reached a tipping point, and with the increasing importance of data and steady fragmentation of the advertising ecosystem, marketers are growing tired of the endless black boxes.
PREDICTION: When it comes to transparency, brands will start to ask of more from their agency partners—and, unlike previous efforts, they’ll make some progress in doing so. New platforms make it easier to track every aspect of the campaign process, and with agencies eager to showcase their differentiated power of their technology (and to win trust from their clients), brands will gain new levels of clarity and insight across their digital campaigns in 2025.
Enter the New Year with confidence: Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report provides actionable insights on the trends set to shape 2025, examining the latest innovations in commerce media, CTV, AI and search. Explore key ways advertisers can bridge the disconnect between expectations and reality, while maximizing the potential of new innovations to drive impact with their campaigns in the year ahead.