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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Marketers are faithfully obsessed with the shiny new thing when it comes to their brand activations. So it’s no surprise that in year two of having generative AI at their disposal, marketers have rushed to use it in their advertising.
But so far, consumers aren’t as enamored with generative AI created ads as marketers have been. Throughout 2024, the marketers who obviously used generative AI to make their ads (Toys R Us, Under Armour, Coca-Cola) or touted the possibilities of generative AI in their ads (like Google’s Olympics ad they pulled following backlash) had their ads panned by the general public, particularly the creative community.
Despite that, the expectation is that marketers and agency execs will continue to (and likely increase) the use of generative AI in 2025. Marketers are regularly asking questions about how creative agencies are using generative AI and how they can integrate it into the creative process for their brands. Creative agency execs, for their part, believe that generative AI is simply a new tool that they’re going to continue to experiment with in various ways – though most don’t see their experiments going fully generative AI powered, at least not yet.
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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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In 2024, generative AI proved itself to be far more than just a buzzword. From the flurry of AI-powered gadgets to the potential regulations, the second year of a massive innovation race advanced alongside scrutiny, with questions about transparency, copyright, and ethical use.
As a follow-up to last year’s AI timeline for 2023, our recap for 2024 highlights some of the most important headlines with a sampling from every month of the year.
The year started off with a bevvy of AI-related announcements at CES 2024, where major tech companies and consumer brands touted new tech: AI chips for laptops and phones, smart TVs, voice assistants for cars, AI-enabled beauty products, and retailer activations. A few weeks later, AI took over NRF 2024 with nearly two dozen exhibitors touting AI.
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2025 is expected to be a hell of a year, if you ask the Digiday staff. After the whirlwind that was 2024, the new year seems to promise a cocktail of chaos and topics the industry can’t escape. Or as Digiday managing editor Sara Jerde puts it, “2025 will be the year of the Twinkies, the cockroaches, TikTok potential ban, and third-party cookies.”
Last year, several rocks were thrown in the water, ripple effects that’ll shake out in 2025 with everything from mergers and acquisitions, a la Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG or BuzzFeed’s sale of First We Feast, to the proliferation of the social media landscape and the TikTok ban.
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We’re wrapping up another eventful year. TikTok has found itself on the positive and negative sides of the news cycle, Google pulled its plans to kill third-party cookies and publishers continued to move the pieces of their revenue puzzles around searching for the right fit.
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Whichever way you look at it, 2024 was a slam dunk year for women’s sports.
The WNBA enjoyed a banner season featuring newly minted superstars such as Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese while the NWSL saw TV audiences rise by almost 20% compared with the previous season, according to CBS.
Advertiser dollars followed. During the 2024-25 broadcast year, GroupM — still the industry’s largest media agency network, at least for now — has driven more client spending toward women’s sports, increasing it 115% by the end of October (a spokesperson declined to share the dollar amount).
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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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It’s been a long year. And there’s a lot to keep straight — what do industry acronyms stand for? How does that affect strategies? With our WTF series, we aim to breakdown what these complex topics mean, so the industry can walk into their meetings prepared for whatever’s next. Catch up below on some of our most popular WTF explainers this year.
(Here’s what resonated in 2023).
The concept of principal media — in which agencies invest in media at non-disclosed prices to resell to clients — was on the rise this year. It became widespread enough that the ANA published a report on it for marketers. Read our explainer here.
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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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AI-generated avatars are further blurring the lines of reality as more life-like characters and animations are integrated into social media and digital platforms.
It’s now possible to generate avatars in minutes using audio, images or videos and produce content with hundreds of different backgrounds, outfits, tones and languages or gestures. But do you as a marketer aim for realism or steer clear of the uncanny valley? Increasingly, they are trying to balance the quirky with the realistic in an avatar’s look and feel to strike the right tone.
The uncanny valley refers to an unease or negative response (that creepy vibe) we feel when encountering something that seems almost human — but it feels off. Think early forms of generative AI-designed avatars that look like a real person, but has no eye movement, or a digital representation that looks exactly like an influencer, but is lacking natural movement or features.
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The so-called TikTok-ification of social media, in which the platform’s short-form, viral, and algorithm-driven content, has fueled the exponential growth of the influencer marketplace and creator economy. As it swells, marketers are tasked with allocating ad dollars to maximize return on investment. As it stands, smaller, more niche creators are delivering the best bang for buck, according to five influencer marketing execs Digiday spoke to for this story.
That means general lifestyle influencers have to adapt and find a niche or run the risk of fizzling out.
“It’s attention, really,” said Sophie Crowther, global talent partnerships director at Billion Dollar Boy, and head of creators at FiveTwoNine, the influencer marketing shop’s creator community membership program. “Attention is in new formats, new creators that are tapping into something completely brand new, basically.”
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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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This is a bonus behind-the-scenes look at our conversations with executives for Digiday’s 2024 Media Agency Report, which examined the current and future state of media agencies, from the perspective of total client spending and spending by media channel, and delved into the impact of retail media on the agency landscape.
Digiday hosted a focus group of eight senior media agency executives who oversee media investment at holding company-owned and independent media agencies to gather first-person accounts of client spending. Agencies and networks that participated in the focus group were:
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After a difficult period in 2023, the esports industry bounced back in 2024.
Over the past year, esports league operators such as Blast and ESL/FACEIT Group developed closer ties with publishers, allowing them to scale up their business and become profitable; publishers stepped up their revenue share programs, helping some teams achieve stability; and, perhaps most importantly, brands and marketers upped their spending in the space, encouraged by the rise of international events such as the Esports World Cup.
If 2023 was esports winter — a time of austerity caused by brands pulling back on their marketing spend in the space — then 2024 marked the beginning of esports spring, or at least somewhat of a thaw. As advertisers once again opened their wallets for esports inventory, the entire industry breathed a collective sigh of relief. However, esports is not yet a standard category in advertising spend forecasts, and it’s unclear exactly what proportion of brands’ gaming marketing dollars went towards the competitive side of the space over the past year. For now, tales of the recovery of esports in 2024 remain largely anecdotal.
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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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Hold on tight. The rollercoaster that was 2024 is finally coming to an end.
Marketers may find themselves dizzy from the many ups and downs the industry experienced this year. 2024 saw more ads on streaming platforms, but also an ad price correction that favored ad buyers’ wallets. There was also the generative AI boom (or bauble, depending on who you ask). Of course, there was Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies, in which the tech giant decided to keep cookies after all but let users decide if they want to opt in or not. And who could forget the 2024 presidential election, the gift that kept on giving to news publishers.
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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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The fragmented social landscape continued to splinter in 2024, as traffic from social media platforms sent to publishers’ sites continued its steady decline this year.
The bright spot? Largely Google. Publishers saw increases in traffic from Google Discover — and Google Search’s generative AI feature hasn’t had a negative impact on the traffic to publishers’ sites.
Other than Facebook, social platforms like Instagram, Reddit and Threads are all driving marginal traffic to publishers’ sites, according to Chartbeat’s data from about 3,750 sites.
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As gaming takes a central role in the rise of transmedia content, a team of writers is using DC Comics superheroes to demonstrate the benefits of direct interplay between a TV series and a video game.
Last month, Digiday covered the launch of “DC Heroes United,” a cartoon series featuring classic DC characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The show, which kicked off on Nov. 20, allows fans to vote on the outcomes of the narrative by playing a parallel mobile game, which is itself part of the framing narrative of the series. It’s the most direct connection between a television series and video game yet — and thanks to the show’s use of popular DC characters, hundreds of thousands of viewers have already tuned in across streaming platforms such as Tubi and YouTube.
So far, five of the series’ 16 planned episodes have come out. After the release of the first two episodes, Digiday spoke to the creative team behind the series to learn more about how they factored gamers’ decisions and preferences into the series’ narrative in real time. This is the transmedia story of “DC Heroes United.”
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