Navigating a Shifting Landscape in 2025 and Beyond
As the Trump Administration settles into the White House in 2025, the digital advertising industry stands at a crossroads. After years of rising regulatory scrutiny and growing concern around consumer privacy, the industry now faces a dramatically different political environment—one that promises less scrutiny and diminished federal oversight but, simultaneously, comes with new risks and uncertainty.
For advertising agencies and in-house marketing teams, this shifting landscape presents both significant opportunities and complex challenges, all of which will require strategic foresight and operational agility.
Here, we’ll explore and analyze how the new administration’s policies and priorities are likely to impact the digital advertising ecosystem, examining how expected shifts in regulatory approaches, market dynamics, technological innovation, and brand positioning will reshape marketing in an increasingly polarized world.
The Trump Administration’s return signals a radical realignment in the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley. Unlike the Biden Administration’s aggressive antitrust actions and regulatory initiatives, the new regime is taking a broad deregulatory approach that, in turn, is expected to deliver benefits to major technology platforms and providers.
This reset, already evident in early administration signals, will likely come with several significant implications for the advertising industry:
“At a high level, I think this administration is going to be much more industry-friendly and focused on removing restrictions, so we’ll likely see some deregulation,” says Derek Zolner, General Counsel at Basis. “With Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and, of course, Elon Musk all donating to the Inauguration and cozying up to Trump, I think we could see some preferred treatment of the tech industry in general, which should also carry over to the ad tech space.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean the prospects of federal-level privacy regulation are completely dead. Industry coalitions, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have encouraged Republican lawmakers to introduce and pass a national privacy framework that establishes “a uniform privacy standard” for the United States. The theoretical legislation would likely have similar protections to those found in the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, but fall short of stricter regulations like those in the CPRA. And, perhaps most notably, it would supersede any existing state-level regulations, effectively neutering laws like those in California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Virginia. The odds of such a bill becoming a law are still fairly long, but it does merit monitoring in the coming months.
In the meantime, for digital advertisers, this regulatory recalibration creates some breathing room after years of increased expectations and growing compliance challenges. However, it simultaneously raises the stakes for responsible self-governance, which will be essential to keeping consumer trust in an era where the public’s distrust around data privacy (and broader institutional skepticism) are on the rise. Industry leaders should view this not as an opportunity to revert to problematic practices, but rather to establish meaningful and durable self-regulatory frameworks that can satisfy consumers and weather any potential future political changes.
As federal oversight recedes, state-level regulation will increasingly fill the void, creating a complex patchwork of compliance requirements that may prove more challenging than unified federal standards.
California’s role as a leader in this space will almost certainly continue, and the CPRA’s expanded requirements may even inspire similar legislation in other Democratic-led states, creating an uneven regulatory map that further complicates advertisers’ efforts to reach audiences. “I could see the states that still have blue administrations—California leading among them—still taking very active roles on the privacy front,” says Zolner. “So privacy isn’t going to just ‘go away’ as a concern.”
The implication for advertisers is clear: National (or global) campaigns will need to navigate multiple regulatory standards simultaneously, taking the patchwork of legislation into account when crafting media plans that go beyond any single state’s border. This will require advertisers to continue developing modular approaches to data collection, targeting, and measurement that can adapt to varying compliance requirements across jurisdictions. Forward-thinking agencies and marketing teams will need to embrace technology that allows them to efficiently scale complex campaigns, while also building or onboarding compliance systems that are capable of applying different standards to different audience segments based on geography.
Of course, the impact of the Trump Administration on the advertising industry will extend beyond regulation.
The White House’s emerging economic policies—particularly around international trade, tariffs, and industrial policy—may introduce significant uncertainty into business planning cycles, with cascading effects for advertising budgets and strategies.
New or expanded tariffs could throw global supply chains into disarray, affecting product availability, spiking pricing, and disrupting promotional calendars for advertisers across multiple sectors. And potential tax cuts, paired with dramatic reductions in federal spending, could boost short-term consumer confidence…or, alternatively, create yet more longer-term economic volatility, further complicating media investment planning.
If the changes lead to a downward drift in consumer spending or bring volatility to the stock market, companies may come (as they often do) for marketing budgets, forcing leaders to grapple with increased pressure to demonstrate immediate ROI as businesses adjust to economic uncertainties. One potential result: a renewed focus on performance media over brand building, shifting away from the brandformance trend of the past few years.
In this type of uncertain environment, advertisers will increasingly depend upon advertising approaches and technology that allow them to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions. Future-friendly strategies could include:
The brands that thrive in the coming years will be those that embrace technology that provides a unified look at all of their campaigns and data across all channels and platforms, automation to more seamlessly integrate those solutions, and AI to identify and capitalize upon granular performance details. In doing so, those advertisers can pivot more quickly and effectively toward winning tactics, developing what might be thought of as “strategic reflexes”—or predetermined response patterns that can be activated quickly when economic conditions shift.
The Trump Administration’s pronounced pro-AI stance—paired with extraordinary private sector investment in the technology and reduced fear among marketers regarding AI’s societal and industry impacts—will converge to dramatically accelerate adoption across the advertising ecosystem.
Here are a few of the positives marketers can anticipate in the coming years:
For advertising professionals, this acceleration presents transformative opportunities. Unfortunately, it also comes with serious risks and somber ethical considerations. The rising adoption and sophistication of AI, coupled with fewer guardrails and a proliferation of synthetic content, will almost certainly lead to a corresponding spike in AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, and MFA-esque content and websites. Altogether, it could create unprecedented brand safety challenges, as deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation become increasingly indistinguishable from authentic content, making it all the more essential for advertisers to adopt robust brand safety and ad fraud protections and to cultivate connections with trustworthy, premium publishers.
In the absence of regulatory guidance, brands and agencies should prioritize the establishment of specific internal ethical frameworks for AI usage. Marketing leaders must develop their own principles for the responsible use of AI in customer targeting, messaging, engagement, and measurement—considering not just what is technically possible, but what maintains consumer trust.
“You will always have some players in the market that are willing to walk up as close to the line of what's either legally or self-regulatorily acceptable, because they see extra margin there,” says Zolner. “But ultimately, success depends upon the health of the industry and the individual businesses, and it’s always better to not be a target for public anger.”
While perhaps not as immediately visible or prevalent as during President Trump’s previous term, political polarization remains high across the US, and it's expected to further intensify under the new administration. Additionally, the White House, Republican attorneys general, and conservative activists around the US have made their displeasure known by explicitly targeting companies that openly embrace and promote policies like DEI and LGBTQIA+ inclusivity.
In this charged environment, brands could face heightened risks when engaging with social issues or political topics. Consequently, we are likely to witness a significant corporate retreat from public positions on controversial matters.
Many brands—including Target, Meta, Walmart, McDonald’s, and others—have begun to pivot away from some of the purpose-driven positioning and internal policies they had adopted (or highlighted) in recent years. In turn, diversity-focused advertising efforts could see a corresponding downward cycle. For most brands (save historical outliers like Nike or Patagonia), cause-based marketing efforts will likely shift away from politically charged topics and toward less controversial issues. Meanwhile, those companies that do maintain more progressive or inclusive internal policies are likely to communicate those policies less prominently toward external audiences, instead embracing a more neutral public position in the hopes of avoiding consumer controversy and governmental wrath.
For marketing and advertising professionals, this environment requires more sophisticated and nuanced approaches to positioning and issues management, and should prompt brands to pursue a firmer grounding in authenticity and company values rather than trend-hopping, clout chasing, or virtue signaling.
To ensure consistent strategic alignment, leaders should craft and adopt clearly articulated internal frameworks that identify which issues align with core values, and which fall outside their legitimate scope. From a paid media perspective, advertisers can focus on both tailored messaging and refined targeting efforts to facilitate more granular audience segmentation, which can enable brands to communicate different aspects of their values to different consumer groups.
Of course, even for those brands that try to stay apolitical, there is always a risk of unexpected backlash. In today’s hyper-charged political environment, even seemingly innocuous campaigns have the potential to trigger a significant response, so advanced preparation and robust crisis response capabilities could prove essential.
In all, the most successful brands will not chase every social trend, but neither will they remain entirely silent. Instead, marketers should identify specific issues that are closely aligned with their core business and stakeholder interests and strategically evaluate where they can make authentic contributions.
Perhaps the greatest immediate concern for marketers in this new political era is brand safety. With content moderation standards beginning to loosen across major platforms and AI enabling more prevalent and sophisticated forms of harmful content, brand safety challenges could intensify dramatically in the years ahead.
These mounting risks to brand safety have already begun. Meta began the year by joining Musk’s X in ending its fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram, instead turning to “Community Notes” for content moderation. It also updated its Hateful Content guidelines to allow users to post controversial and/or offensive content that was previously banned, including “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,” and granting tacit approval to posts referring to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it.’”
Then there’s the problem of AI-powered disinformation, as synthetic content creates unprecedented challenges in distinguishing between legitimate publishers/real users and bad actors. Research indicates that marketing and advertising professionals have already universally acknowledged and accepted AI’s brand safety risks, and those concerns will only intensify over the course of this new presidential term.
In the end, brand safety is not merely about avoiding reputational damage, but about fundamentally maintaining consumer trust in fragmented information environments. As such, marketing and advertising leaders will need to exercise caution and take proactive measure to navigate this challenging environment.
With different platforms taking different approaches to content moderation, advertisers need to deliberately evaluate and strategize around their use of individual social platforms for specific campaigns and audiences, leveraging any and all brand safety tools while doing so. Additionally, rather than relying solely on those platform standards, brands must also articulate their own definitions of acceptable adjacent content, developing proprietary brand safety frameworks to help avoid undesired context and uninvited controversy.
Sophisticated brand safety and ad fraud tools will become increasingly essential, while AI-powered contextual targeting will help advertisers implement their more nuanced strategies and avoid non-suitable content. Lastly, the premium inventory and curation trend that began in 2024 will remain a hot topic, as direct relationships with vetted publishers provide advertisers with a much-desired safe harbor in a chaotic content sea.
As the industry navigates the shifts brought on by the new Trump Administration, several strategic imperatives have begun to emerge for advertising agencies and in-house marketing teams:
In this environment of growing complexity and diminished federal oversight, industry leaders will need to carefully evaluate their tech stacks, their talent, and their internal frameworks to increase their likelihood of success and achieve marketing goals. Those who view the moment as an opportunity to establish more durable and responsible approaches to marketing—rather than an excuse to revert to problematic practices and exploit regulatory openings—will be in the best position to succeed over the long term, and to build lasting competitive advantages.
After all, while a successful campaign can deliver short-term value, consumer trust remains the industry’s most valuable and vulnerable asset—regardless of which party controls Washington.
