TikTok’s ultimatum — shutdown in the U.S. or get a lifeline from the Supreme Court — is the latest plot twist in a whirlwind month that’s left markets in a tailspin. With the app’s future hanging by a thread, marketers are navigating murky waters, scrambling to make sense of what it all means for their plans.

Late last month, Chris (not his real name) fired off an email to his TikTok rep. As the go-to guy for managing client ad spend at his agency, he needed clarity ahead of a critical moment for the app, the looming federal deadline that could force ByteDance to sell TikTok — or face a U.S. ban. The response he got wasn’t just telling, it was practically a confession. TikTok reps were offering make-goods to advertisers locking in ad inventory through the end of the second quarter.

For the first time since whispers of a ban began six years ago, TikTok seemed to be bracing for the possibility that its American swan song might not be far off.

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Meta is borrowing a page from Elon Musk’s X on free speech and censorship, but advertisers aren’t hitting the panic button — yet. 

For now, they’ve brushed off Meta’s decision to scrap its U.S. fact-checking program in favor of a community notes system reminiscent of X’s and to loosen restrictions on contentious topics like immigration and gender identity. 

Instead, marketers are in wait-and see mode, hoping for clearer guidance on what content Meta will still police. So far, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has offered them little beyond vague assurances, leaving the details up in the air.

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As a potential U.S. TikTok ban grows near, creators are adjusting their approach to partnership contracts to avoid being left holding the bag if — or when — the platform goes down.

Although the United States’ impending TikTok ban is not slated to take effect until Jan. 19, it’s already threatening some creators’ brand partnership business. As the deadline approaches, TikTok has become an increasingly risky prospect for advertisers, some of which have said they have slowed their spending on TikTok content accordingly.

“We have refused to sign any new clients on TikTok at all — and that’s been a little concerning, from a business perspective,” said Nicole Rechtszaid, the head of creator partnerships and social strategy for the creative agency Ghost Agency, who told Digiday that her company’s pre-existing TikTok campaigns will continue to run until they are unable to deliver on them. “We’re trying to figure out where else brands can still participate, and it’s been very uncertain terrain for us. As we’ve been navigating it, we do not want to encourage any brands to start that activation there.”

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Several new ad networks joined the bevy of existing (and growing) retail media networks last year with new terminology to match: financial media networks, travel media networks and, as of just last month, the (allegedly) first real estate media network (Re/Max). Ah, 2024, the year that nearly every brand (well, every brand that hadn’t yet done so) realized the potential of an ad network. The thinking seems to go, if everyone else has one — and they’re getting the additional revenue from ad dollars — why shouldn’t my brand have one too?

Re/Max aside, the bulk of 2024 ad network debuts took place during the first half of the year (Chase, Revolut, United Airlines, Expedia, T-Mobile, Costco). The second half was quieter for new entrants (PayPal, Grubhub, Thrive Market), but many of the existing players beefed up their capabilities. Walmart finally finishing its Vizio acquisition was likely the biggest example of this. Could it be that all of the brands that were setting up their ad networks had already done so? Have we finally reached peak ad network?

“While the pace of new ad network launches has slowed, it is unlikely that we have fully reached ‘peak ad network,’” surmised Jim Misener, president of creative consultancy 50,000feet. “Instead, the market is likely entering a phase of consolidation and specialization.”

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This year, chatter concerning mergers and acquisitions is all about whether 2025 will spark a deal frenzy across advertising and ad tech. Here’s the twist: the deal flow never really dried up in 2024.

In fact, the year kicked off with LiveRamp snapping up Habu for $200 million, and the pace of dealmaking steadily picked up — though it never quite became a flood.

Month after month of 2024 delivered notable deals, from Walmart’s February acquisition of Vizio to Outbrain’s August purchase of Teads.

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Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG, announced last month, would make it the world’s largest agency-holding company, with $25 billion in annual ad revenue and over 100,000 employees.

The deal aims to generate $750 million in cost synergies, primarily by consolidating back-office functions and reducing redundancies by potentially cutting 30% of staff. A depressingly familiar page in the corporate playbook.

However, the initial pitch from IPG and Omnicom’s executive teams focused on other outcomes, such as AI and the combination of both entities’ big bets in data-enabled marketing. 

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Another year, another remarkable give and take for the advertising industry. See below for what we think is in store for 2025.

In
Anti-woke corporate backlash 
Out 
DEI corporate wave

In
Fragmentation of brand safety
Out
Industrialization of brand safety

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Sports marketing spend shot up in 2024. Amid soaring viewership figures for last year’s Olympic Games, worldwide ad spend on sports-related advertising rose to $60.9 billion, according to WARC.

But sports marketing doesn’t always just mean chasing the largest audience possible. In 2025 brand marketers are set to seek audiences via niche, unconventional sports opportunities. Interest among audiences in spots such as padel, pickleball and darts is rising — and in recent months, brand marketers have moved to get in on the game while they’re still emerging.

Best Buy, for example, signed up this winter as one of the principal sponsors of TGL, a televised simulator golf tournament. The new league, set to debut on ESPN (including ESPN+) from Jan. 7, also counts So-Fi and Samsung among its brand partners.

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Judging from the reaction to the news of Omnicom’s planned acquisition of Interpublic Group near the end of 2024, there’s a strong expectation that 2025 will see the biggest of the agency groups get bigger. Size and scale will be vital for them to compete with each other.

But getting so large means seeking out the largest multi-national marketers that need that global heft to execute their media — the P&Gs, Coca-Cola’s and General Motors of the marketing world. Together they make up a large swath of media spend. 

And that leaves a whole world of smaller and mid-sized marketers left on the sidelines of the holdco game — the “Forgotten Middle,” as one independent media agency CEO coined it — and looking for agencies that will bring them their A teams and innovative solutions.

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This year was the year many publishers took formalized stances on AI companies, many of which resulted in deals between the two.

The wave was first kicked off by an agreement between the Associated Press and OpenAI in July 2023, then followed by another deal between OpenAI and Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt owner Axel Springer.

The deals are usually content licensing agreements, where publishers let the AI companies use their content to train the large language models (often including paywalled content). In exchange, publishers get attribution for that content surfaced on the AI companies’ chatbot or search platforms, as well as access to technology that publishers can use to build AI-powered products and features. 

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Snapchat’s subscription play is shaping up to be one of media’s most compelling plotlines in 2025. 

While subscriptions are still a modest slice of Snap’s revenue pie, they’re giving the company’s top line a noticeable lift. Case in point: Snap’s ad revenue climbed 10% to $1.25 billion in its last quarter, but thanks to $123 million in non-ad revenue — largely driven by its member program, Snapchat+ — the company posted a 15% overall revenue jump to $1.37 billion.

It’s a rare win for a platform navigating a precarious business model, heavily dependent on fiercely contested ad dollars.

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Standardized metrics across every site. 
Insights on insights with data so bright.
Incrementality to justify spend.
Data points we can share with all our friends! 
These are a few of advertisers’ favorite things! 

2024 was the year that kept on giving in terms of retail media network expansion. New players entered the space creating everything from financial media networks to travel media networks. Walmart became a breakout star and RMN ad spend surged. 

Still, there are a few things that marketers and advertisers would ask for if Santa were accepting RMN-related wishlists. Digiday talked to four retail media experts about what they’d like to see come out of the retail media boom. Here’s what they said: 

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The polarization of the country has been in sharp focus for some time, especially the second half of the year. That polarization isn’t new: There’s been a brewing — some might say bubbling or even boiling — so-called culture war for years and it’s spewed far beyond the political realm to become a norm that marketers have to contend with for their brands. 

As consumers put brands’ advertising and marketing messages under a microscope, looking for any hint that a brand is making a statement one way or another in the culture war, in which everything is looked at through a political lens, marketers have to be keenly aware of how anything they put out in the world could be interpreted — or misinterpreted. It’s a consideration that marketers and agency execs are aware of with some more vigilant and more worried about potential backlash than others. Getting messaging right is more important than ever as consumers pay closer attention to brands and there is potential for backlash.

What do we mean by brands at the center of a culture war? Let’s recap some recent examples. Jaguar’s rebrand was dubbed “woke” by several publications and incurred ire from consumers that they were making a statement of some kind that their brand may not have intended. Volvo, meanwhile, was recently celebrated for what has been described as a “pro-family” ad with a spot that was typical bread-and-butter storytelling for the carmaker. Another ad from Apple was also dubbed as “pro-family” and celebrated. Again it was standard fare for advertisers.

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With TikTok’s potential U.S. looming ban as early as January, creators and agencies are split: some see it as inevitable, while others are convinced it won’t stick.

The rift has simmered since TikTok’s future was first questioned but has only intensified as the stakes climb — highlighted by the Supreme Court’s decision this week (Dec. 19) to take up the app’s appeal against a U.S. law that could pull the plug next month. 

As organizations put contingency plans in place, some creators and marketers say they aren’t all that worried about TikTok getting pulled. 

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LinkedIn may be chasing the deep pockets of mainstream brands these days, but it’s not neglecting the lifeblood of its ad business. B2B companies are still front and center of its latest market pitch. 

Specifically when it comes to its own AI-powered campaign tool Accelerate. Unlike the offerings from Google and Meta, this tool is designed with B2B marketers in mind.

As LinkedIn’s vp of product management, Abhishek Shrivastava, explained: “B2B marketers have to make do with how to fit their own needs into the existing B2C tools.”

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AI search engine Perplexity introduced a new revenue share model back in July, amid the wave of deals between AI tech companies and publishers this year. But the way Perplexity is sharing ad revenue with publishers depends on a number of factors, according to information from Perplexity and conversations with five publishing execs, who declined to speak with attribution.

Here’s how Perplexity calculates revenue share for publishers: A publisher that is formally part of Perplexity’s program receives a certain percentage of the revenue Perplexity makes from an ad served in a response to a user’s query, when one of the publisher’s webpages is cited as a source for that response. (Perplexity has said 20 publishers have signed up).

But that range for each publisher varies, up to a double digit percentage, said Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity, who did not provide exact figures. That revenue increases for a publisher based on the number of links cited.

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TikTok’s turbulent year in the U.S. barely rattled marketers — until now. As the app enters its final countdown, marketers are taking the ban more seriously than ever because it’s looking increasingly like TikTok, at least in its current guise, is on borrowed time.

Earlier this month, the app’s U.S. prospects hit a new low. A federal appeals court ruled that national security concerns outweigh First Amendment protections, forcing ByteDance to divest TiKTok if it wants to remain in the market.

Although TikTok plans to appeal, there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court will take the case. Historically the court defers to Congress on national security matters, and a bipartisan coalition has framed TikTok as a risk to Americans’ data privacy and a potential tool for manipulating its powerful recommendation algorithms.

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There’s been a lot of speculation about Acxiom’s potential role in Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG, but an ongoing lawsuit could end up a wildcard, depending on its outcome.

In a case against IPG’s data warehouse Acxiom and performance marketing agency Kinesso, legal filings in recent weeks give a timely glimpse into allegations of the IPG companies allegedly misusing data to build their Real ID identity-resolution product. The lawsuit, filed in April by data firm Adstra, claims Kinesso and Acxiom breached a master data-supply agreement and used Adstra data to create a competing product. It also puts Acxiom’s offerings under a legal microscope, which could reveal strengths and weaknesses not spun by corporate statements or marketing materials.

The case has the potential to shape where Acxiom and Kinesso fit into IPG and Omnicom’s plans to bolster their combined adtech stack with new options for alternative IDs. Acxiom’s identity-resolution products are seen as a cornerstone of IPG’s data strategy that could help it compete with WPP and Publicis. However, a court ruling in favor of Adstra could bring potential financial, operational, and reputational risks.

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Ever since whispers surfaced about Omnicom making moves to snap up rival IPG Ryan Kangisser’s phone has been practically vibrating off his desk for clarity on what this means for the industry.

As chief strategy officer at Mediasense, the media advisory firm tasked with untangling this industry’s endless plot twists, he’s someone marketers call when they need answers. And right now, that’s in short supply. 

“We’ve had a few people reach out to us [since the news],” said Kangisser, playing coy about naming names.

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In what is likely to be one of the year’s biggest media stories, Omnicom Group has announced plans to acquire The Interpublic Group of Companies in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $13 billion.

This merger is set to create the world’s largest advertising conglomerate, combining renowned agencies such as BBDO, TBWA Worldwide, and McCann Worldgroup under one umbrella, after the two entities’ respective leadership teams decided that scale is the way forward on Madison Avenue.

According to official filings, the combined entity is projected to generate annual revenues exceeding $25 billion with an adjusted EBITA of $3.9 billion and free cash flow of $3.3 billion. Individually, Omnicom’s full-year revenue for 2023 was $14.69 billion, reflecting growth of 4.1%, while IPG’s was $10.89 billion, down from $10.93 billion in 2022.

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