My 2025 Predictions

Media Industry Outlook 2025: Ten Key Predictions

The media landscape is poised for significant transformation in 2025, driven by shifting market dynamics and technological innovation. As industry leaders gather at CES 2025, these trends will likely dominate discussions and shape strategic planning for the coming year. While artificial intelligence's influence is undeniable, deeper currents are reshaping the industry's fundamental structure. Most encouraging is marketers' renewed engagement with policy, privacy, and governance—a development that may finally shepherd some tech companies and publishers back to the proverbial high-road in the coming year. Here are my predictions:

1. Data-Creative Symbiosis

The era of creative directors operating in splendid isolation from outside influences such as performance metrics is coming to a rapid end. While human insight remains paramount in creative development, 2025 will see data analytics and AI-powered versioning become standard tools in creative director’s studio. This marriage of art and science promises more targeted, effective campaigns while preserving creative innovation. As I’ve said for many years, “Marketing is an art that is informed by ever improving science.” Let’s never lose sight of both sides of that equation.

2. Podcast Marketing Comes of Age

Following 2024's "Podcast Election," marketers are awakening to podcasting's unique advantage: discrete, highly engaged audiences united by common interests or viewpoints. Unlike traditional broadcast media's broad-appeal strategy, podcasters cultivate specific demographics. This allows advertisers to reach distinct constituencies authentically, provided they maintain balanced representation across the political spectrum and substantially mitigate the risks of triggering a negative response. As a friend once said to me “you really can’t take a screenshot of podcast content, now can you?”

3. Third-Party Data Renaissance

The industry's fixation with first-party data is giving way to a more nuanced understanding. In mature categories, competitors' first-party data sets are increasingly similar. Third-party data, particularly from the ‘data exhaust’ generated by media expenditures, offers critical differentiation through signals of intent, behavior, and messaging effectiveness—especially valuable for AI-driven customer engagement.

4. Enterprise Integration

Progressive companies are recognizing that consolidating their growth, customer, engagement, analytics and data strategies under unified leadership affords operational efficiencies and will eventually lead to near real-time insights. Central to this integration is a zero-party data strategy where customers voluntarily share their information through transparent value exchanges like promotions or content access. Organizations failing to implement such strategies by year-end risk competitive disadvantage.

5. News Advertising Revival

In 2025, Chief Executives are likely to reassess their retreat from news advertising. Recent research by Stagwell, surveying 50,000 American adults, has debunked concerns about brand safety in news environments. Given news content's superior return on advertising spend and audience quality, the business case for news advertising is becoming difficult to ignore.

6. Transparency Imperative

Three clarifying expectations from marketer will sharpen the need for unprecedented transparency in advertising technology: a) widespread adoption of privacy-by-design principles, b) increased focus on supply path optimization (SPO), and c) the need for high-quality data to train AI models.

a) Privacy-by-Design will be an imperative both from a risk mitigation standpoint but also, in well run organizations, a cultural perspective.

b) The ANA's three-year investigation into media supply chains has armed marketers with specific benchmarking tools to monitor working versus non-working media ratios and combat Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites.

c) As the AI panacea gives way to the earnest implementation of AI powered solutions across the enterprise, organizations will see that high quality, third-party data is a treasure trove of behavioral and interest insights that their own first-party data is lacking and begin to seek out well permissioned, insight rich data sets, including from publishers, to train their AI models and create marketplace advantages.

This confluence may finally deliver the "clean, well-lit environment" long sought by industry veterans, with particular implications for programmatic investment priorities that will disproportionately benefit the ad supported open web.

7. Growth-Centric Metrics

The industry will likely accelerate the retreat from proxy metrics in favor of direct growth indicators. Chief Financial Officers are increasingly demanding clear links between marketing investments and revenue growth while demanding that virtually every investment lead to a reduction in the almighty CAC. This shift will accelerate adoption of outcome-based strategies and rigorous testing of tactics like the "Moveable Middle" approach championed by Joel Rubinson and MMA Global or a “Back to News” (advertising) a GroupM initiative launched in 2023 that will likely be reinvigorate under the leadership of CEO, Brian Lesser.

8. Fediverse Emergence

The federated social media universe—allowing users to maintain sovereignty over their audiences across platforms—is set to challenge traditional social networks' walled gardens. With support from influential players like Flipboard founder, Mike McCue, who’s vision for Flipboard’s Surf APP is a game changerand Meta’s Zuckerberg, who’s investing heavily in the technology, this decentralized approach promises a return to user autonomy and reduced tolerance of the the ills of surveillance capitalism. I’m willing to bet that you’ll fediverse fluent by the end of 2025.

9. Core-to-Core Interoperability

Enterprise partnerships will evolve beyond simple vendor relationships to deep technological integration across customer engagement technology, experience delivery, data sharing and real-time business intelligence. To facilitate this, a "less but better" vendor strategy will be required, emphasizing fewer but more comprehensive partnerships, requiring sophisticated contracting and aligned philosophies on nuanced collaborations around customer experience philosophies and data security expectations. Publishers who can offer multiple value streams—from authenticated audience data, audience collaboration, seamless experience integration and content licensing—will be particularly well-positioned for these enhanced - and increasingly essential - partnerships. Hopefully you are well down some of these paths. Not sure where to start, add some of these topics to your vendor briefs in 2025 and see what you get back.

10. TikTok's Regulatory Navigation

I can't in good conscious make predictions for 2025 without weighing in on the outcome of the TikTok ban. As everyone knows, in an era where bi-partisan congressional agreement has gone the way of the dodo bird, Congress correctly agreed that the unfettered access the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has to TikTok's users' data is a national security risk and gave parent company, ByteDance, a deadline to divest the US TikTok business to a US owned company by the January 19, 2025 or be banned from app stores or updating existing users' TikTok apps in the US. It’s increasingly unlikely the deadline will be met and, barring a ruling from the Supreme Court before then the government will be forced to enforce ban. This is the prediction that I am least sure of but my prediction is that TikTok will be successful in running out the clock on enforcement until at least January 20, 2029.

Recently, President-elect Donald Trump hosted TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Mar-a-Lago to discuss the platform's future, after which Trump expressed a "warm spot" for TikTok, crediting it for helping him connect with younger voters during his campaign. Trump hinted at exploring alternative strategies but provided no specifics. This leads me to believe that the latter offered something of value to the former and future President that led to the immediate softening of his position. Given the next President's willful denial of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, section 9, clause 8 if you're reading this Mr. President) during his last term in office, I will leave it up to you to decide if the thing of value that Mr. Shou offered the President elect benefited him personally or the U.S. on the whole. I am guessing both, with only the latter being publicly revealed. Either way, there's no one more skillful at playing for time in the face of legal jeopardy than President elect Trump and with his marionette like influence over his Republican "colleagues" in Congress he may be able single-handedly orchestrate a term-long delay in enforcement of the only meaningful action of the 118th Congress other than the "Fiscal Responsibility Act" and the "National Defense Authorization Act.

So, there they are, my ten predictions for 2025. I would love your thoughts, pro and con, on what I’ve said and what I may have missed. Most importantly, I hope that everyone who’s read this far enjoys a safe, joy filled and prosperous new year.