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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If anything is clear for 2025, it’s that the cracks in an already fragmented social media landscape are only getting deeper. This year, marketers might be willing to slowly walk away.

“The social media landscape of 2025 will be a difficult place for brands to navigate, harder to monitor, and therefore less appealing to sink resources into,” Stephen Faulkner, director of research and analytics at global creative collective Forsman & Bodenfors New York, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Still yet in 2025, social ad spend is expected to continue to climb, reaching more than $82 billion, significantly up from the $75 billion forecasted for 2024, according to Statista. As expected, Facebook is likely to take the lion’s share of that spend, more than 80%, per Statista, leaving competitors like TikTok and Pinterest, and newcomers like Bluesky and Lemon8, facing off for remaining ad dollars. So even if there are more dollars, that spend will likely be more dispersed than ever.

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Generative AI was a big part of marketing discussions throughout 2024, as brands and agencies became eager to invest in AI tools to do everything from creating internal workflow efficiencies to producing consumer-facing ads. These discussions will continue into 2025, and a lot of the industry hype around the technology revolves around the potential for it to make marketers’ jobs easier, faster and more efficient. But some industry experts say there’s a risk of over-relying on automated ad creation.

Another factor in the AI picture that will carry into the new year is the prospect of AI-generated or altered content being labeled as such. Marketers are hesitant to see “made with AI” labels slapped across their creative campaigns, as such a label doesn’t differentiate between content completely generated by AI or content in which AI tools were simply used to help during the creation process — despite the fact that those are two different things.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at some of the top trends and developments to keep an eye on in 2025.

• The year-in-preview
• Honey’s boo boo
• Netflix’s newest sports deal, Google’s tracking change, Hollywood’s hard times and more

The year-in-preview

If 2024 felt less monumental than recent years when it comes to the TV, streaming and digital video industry, that may be because its ultimate legacy will be to serve as preamble to what may be an especially significant year.

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This edition of the daily CES Briefing looks at how the agentic era of AI looms over CES and then recaps a session that highlights the underlying issue of everything becoming an ad network.

The artificial intelligence age is passing into the so-called “agentic” era, in which large language models power tools that can take actions on people’s behalf, like booking a full trip itinerary. So of course this temporal shift would show up at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas this week.

As with the agentic era overall, its presence at CES has still been pretty nascent as of Monday, technically the day before CES officially kicks off. 

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Yahoo has entered ad tech’s curation fray, focusing on supply-side intelligence tie-ups amid a host of partnership announcements as part of its Consumer Electronic Show activity.  

It’s a positioning it hopes will differentiate it from rival demand-side platforms, such as The Trade Desk, claiming its approach can help simplify the growing complexity of the programmatic ecosystem. 

In particular, Yahoo claims it will help sophisticated advertisers manage transparency challenges and supply path optimization with CTV — an intuitive key topic of conversation at CES — while granting them more control.  

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TikTok may be facing a potential existential crisis here in the U.S., as a Jan. 19 deadline approaches which could possibly see it shut down or sold to another company.

But that’s not stopping Omnicom Media Group from expanding its partnership with the popular social video platform, as the holding company focuses on a series of search-related moves during CES this week. 

Does Omnicom Media Group know something about TikTok’s future that the rest of the world seemingly doesn’t? If so, it’s not saying, as OMG executives declined to comment on TikTok’s impending status, except for chief product officer Megan Pagliuca acknowledging the agency network is “closely monitoring the situation. The way we’re working with them is business as usual. The consumers are still there.” 

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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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Reddit is rolling out several new tools for marketers that aim to demystify the platform and help advertisers engage more with users.

A new free tool for marketers called Reddit Pro Trends aims to help marketers track trends and communities in real time across the platform by analyzing keywords and phrases within Reddit conversations. Reddit also has a new ad format called AMA Ads, which gives marketers more ways to use paid media to reach the right types of users that might be interested in the platform’s “Ask Me Anything” conversations.

The updates, announced on Tuesday at CES, aims to surface contextually relevant real-time mentions of brand, topics and categories so marketers know where they should focus both paid and organic content. Pro Trends is powered by several machine learning tools such as named entity recognition, which uses natural language processing to help advertisers track more than 100,000 “smart” keywords. (For example, it’ll help a marketer know when a user or subreddit is talking about “apple” the fruit versus Apple the company.)

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When Donald Trump becomes president later this month, some news publishers will have updated tactics and strategies in place to cover his second term, ranging from a focus on softer news stories to more social media monitoring and engagement.

One head of social at a political news publisher, who asked to speak anonymously, said they encouraged staff to use some vacation days and take time off to “mentally prepare” for a “very fast and furious 90 days” of Trump’s first few months in office.

But for some publishers, it’s still too early to make any notable changes to editorial strategy. Three editors at top news organizations — who requested anonymity for candor — told Digiday at the end of last year that they felt prepared and poised to cover Trump’s second term and didn’t think it was necessary to shift resources or coverage plans yet.

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For Philadelphia 76ers shooting guard Jared McCain, there’s more to life than basketball. 

Specifically, there’s 4.4 million followers on TikTok and 1.5 million on Instagram watching as the 20-year-old ballplayer dances, makes skits and posts sponsored content on behalf of Amazon and Yahoo.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know McCain isn’t an exception. Over the last 12 months, football players and brothers Jason and Travis Kelce inked a $100 million podcasting deal with Wondery; soccer stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Jude Bellingham launched YouTube channels; and Angel Reese capped a breakthrough season in the WNBA by launching her own interview podcast.

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One subplot worth tracking as M&A ramps up this year: brand advertising — or, more accurately, its metamorphosis into a marketing-entertainment mashup.

The days of this being mere theory are over. WPP teaming up with Universal Music Group for ad-fueled entertainment, talent agencies muscling into the ad industry, and the rise of new players like Common Interest all make one thing clear: the brand dollars are no longer waiting — they’re already there and moving fast.

“For a long while, we’ve been witnessing the death of the campaign and the birth of the cultural moment. Traditional advertising is entertainment’s understudy, while brands are learning merely to be protagonists in culture stories,” James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic, explained.

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Predicting what will and won’t be popular throughout the year is a fool’s errand. Whatever you think will be the big thing may not be. Something you never could’ve predicted will probably be the biggest story of the year. And yet we do it anyway.

It’s a table setter for how we’re thinking about the year, what’s to come and what we expect to happen. When we inevitably look back on the previous year’s effort, there is often some truth and something missed that helps give us a sense of what’s changed.

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Fast food and quick service restaurant brands had a rough go over the past few years as shoppers have tried to save a few bucks amidst rising grocery prices and inflation. Seemingly, parts of the brand playbook are seeing a rewrite with things like $5 deals to make consumers feel they’re getting more bang for their buck.

It’s a tale all too familiar to Domino’s, the more than 60-year-old pizza brand that has marketed its way through brand lulls to try and win back customers who have pulled back on dining out. There were the “30 minutes or less” campaigns of the 90s, Pizza Turnaround in 2010 (when the pizza chain acknowledged the recipe needed work) Paving for Pizza in 2018, where Domino’s paved roads to ensure pizzas arrived to customers in good condition, and today’s Emergency Pizza, a pizza giveaway for so-called emergencies like burned dinner.

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Omnicom continued to focus on advances and changes in search during CES this week, announcing a partnership with Amazon Ads and Omnicom’s Flywheel unit that enables access to five years of purchase data — a move Amazon is announcing today for its Amazon Marketing Cloud clean-room solution, and an expansion from the current 13 months of data.

The deal gives Omnicom Media Group and Flywheel first-to-market access in the U.S. to the expanded data, with the goal to extend it globally. Again, much of the flow of information will also run through Omnicom’s operating platform Omni, as it did with Omnicom’s announced search deal with Google yesterday.

Via a beta test, Flywheel customers are able to access five years of purchase history to see how consumers’ purchase habits and conversions have evolved or changed in that time, which allows brands to adjust their strategies accordingly.

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As it has done at most major media tentpole events the last few years, Omnicom and its media arm, Omnicom Media Group, will take advantage of the attention around the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas to unveil a series of partnerships with major platforms.

This year’s focus for OMG going into CES revolves around search — given the research the company conducted in late 2024 that reveals just how much search is changing.

The first of four partnerships, Digiday has learned, is with Google — the granddaddy of search. OMG and Google have struck a two-pronged partnership that starts with a planning tool and ends with AI-driven agentic support for investment and creative decisions for search-driven efforts.

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If Perplexity wants to make a mark on advertising, Andrew Beck will be one to watch.

As head of business development, he’s been at the forefront of convincing advertisers (so far) to buy in — a task he took on just months before the company began selling ads around its search results.

And what a task it is: leading the AI startup’s bold attempt to challenge Google’s auction-based ad system, where marketers bid for sponsored links against search queries. Instead, Perplexity’s model lets marketers sponsor questions, generating AI-produced answers approved by the advertiser. The twist is its reliance on CPMs over CPCs, an unexpected approach for an AI-powered search engine.

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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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Every December, the industry churns out breathless predictions about what’s next in media and advertising. Spoiler alert: most of it won’t happen. 

Unified CTV measurement? Influencers with integrity? Ad tech that’s not a black hole for your budget? Dream on. 

Instead of joining the prediction parade, let’s talk about the things we know won’t materialize in 2025 — because some traditions are just too persistent to break.

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Billy (not his real name) is the kind of senior marketer who usually has a hot take for every occasion. Brand safety? He’ll unravel the industrial complex behind it. Transparency? Buckle up; he’ll spill it all.

However, when it comes to Interpublic Group’s Acxiom, Billy’s take is conspicuously missing. It’s not because he’s uninformed; he just doesn’t think IPG has offered enough answers to form an opinion worth having. 

“It [Acxiom] was always much stronger in the U.S. compared to Europe in terms of the IDs at its disposal, so there wasn’t really enough we could’ve done with them,” said Billy, who is one of IPG’s clients. “And even then, it was us pushing for it, not them [IPG].”

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