After spending much of 2024 recovering from a down period, esports industry executives are stepping on the gas in anticipation of a growth year in 2025.

In 2023, advertisers and investors alike jumped ship from competitive gaming, leading to the so-called esports winter, a period in which esports organizations consolidated or pivoted to new business models in order to stay afloat. Over the past 12 months, however, the industry has recovered, in part thanks to brands coming back into the space, as well as the updated revenue share programs created by the publishers of popular esports games.

Emboldened by the success of new major esports events such as the Esports World Cup — and by an influx of investment by the Saudi Arabian government — esports industry leaders are projecting confidence going into 2025. Here’s a look into the best-case scenario for competitive gaming in the new year.

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The creator economy is gearing up for significant change over the next year — from the rise of AI and creator-founded businesses to the growth of long-term brand partnerships and embrace of long-form content.

As a whole, the creator economy continues to significantly transform, moving beyond simple influencer marketing to a more complex and integrated ecosystem. All signs point to the maturation of influencer marketing, as brands and creators move toward long-term brand ambassador programs replacing one-off influencer collaborations.

As more business opportunities emerge for creators, the industry is also seeing an increase in entrepreneurial opportunities for them — whether it’s starting their own brands and storefronts to hiring talent agents as they scale. By the start of the year, there may be a potential shakeup in the social media landscape as TikTok nears its ban-or-sale deadline.

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This edition of the daily CES Briefing features an interview with Stagwell’s Mark Penn about the landscape for agencies and a recap of a session from OpenAP’s Audience Summit on the disconnect with streaming ad data.

10 Questions with Stagwell’s Mark Penn

AI is one backdrop for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. But the Omnicom-Interpublic Group merger is another, particularly for the advertisers and agencies in attendance, such as Stagwell, which has been billing itself as a challenger to the incumbent agency holding companies. 

On Tuesday, Digiday sat down with Stagwell CEO and chairman Mark Penn to hear how the Omnicom-IPG merger is coloring his company’s conversations with clients, what Stagwell is up to with its own recent M&A activity and what the potential TikTok ban and agentic AI era mean for advertisers.

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For most advertisers, programmatic advertising is a one-stop shop: log into a demand-side platform (DSP), place your bids and call it a day. 

Mars Petcare, however, is doing things differently.

When it comes to CTV, it’s using a supply-side platform — the tool publishers normally use to manage ad sales — to buy ads directly, skipping the usual DSP route altogether. 

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Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL coverage was a hit among viewers and advertisers. Its two holiday games each drew an average of 26.5 million U.S. viewers, according to the Nielsen Big Data + Panel, while ad inventory sold out weeks in advance.

In the short term, that performance will defuse industry concerns over the service’s ability to host major sporting moments, following its glitchy telecast of the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight in November.

“They proved that they can handle the NFL,” said Adam Schwartz, svp, director of video investment, sports at media agency Horizon Media.

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Wrapping up its search-related string of partner deals announced at CES this week, Digiday has learned that Omnicom Media Group has secured access to Roku’s viewer searches on the streaming platform in order to help guide clients better fine-tune their investments and messaging across the CTV space.  

As with all its other partnerships this week — with Google, with Amazon Ads and with TikTok — Omni, the parent company’s central operating platform, will play a major role in the first-to-market deal. Brand-specific audiences created within Omni get sent to Roku’s clean room to get layered with Roku’s anonymized and aggregated search data. It includes data on the most searched programs, content categories, genres and performers. 

Say a consumer searches for Hugh Jackman. Those results will likely yield as much song-and-dance films like The Greatest Showman or time-travel works like Kate & Leopold as it will Wolverine films. That immediately opens the door to insights that can inform spend and content decisioning from sponsorships, tailored creative messaging or even contextual optimization. 

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This week’s Media Briefing hones in on the business areas that publishing execs say they will prioritize this year – and what they are leaving behind in 2024.

• Media execs focused on growing engagement, subscriptions, direct ad revenue and reach
• Meta is bringing back political content, Time staffers are concerned about coziness with Trump and more

2025 look-ahead

This year, media companies will focus on growing engagement, subscriptions, reach and direct ad revenue, according to 16 publishing execs.

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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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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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