“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different,” Peter Drucker famously observed. While 2024 was defined by inflation and uncertainty, much of that will be behind us in 2025. We’re close enough to the new year to make some reasonable guesses about the shapes of things to come. With that said, here goes.

The first end-to-end AI marketing campaign 

In 2025, some brave marketing team will task an AI (or team of AIs) to conceive and execute the world’s first completely end-to-end AI-driven marketing campaign. The AIs will handle planning, buying, creative execution, traffic, measurement and optimization. And here’s the kicker. The campaign will require surprisingly little human intervention. It will be stronger than expected. It will drive positive results.

This will not be a harbinger of a dystopian future. Instead, it will mark the dawn of a future in which dozens or even hundreds of small-scale AI test campaigns will run 24/7/365. The new market research will increasingly happen online with real customers. This marks a further shift from costly efforts to predict in advance which consumers might take action, toward building an understanding in real-time about which customers actually will.

Commerce media takes off

It’s not just for retailers such as Walmart and Amazon or Kroger anymore. Commerce media / retail media offerings will double in 2025 to nearly 500 as anyone with a first party-consumer relationship explores this new revenue channel. It will be a boon for the industry: everyone’s offering will be forced to get better and buyers will reward innovation with serious media buys. This will require serious discipline in measurement and planning as every first-party data company is now a media company.

Consumers get a better privacy prompt

Google Chrome will roll out a new consumer prompt that is more friendly than Apple’s—and nearly half of consumers will decide to opt in to receive personalized experiences. 

Ads will get a new chance to prove their value. Marketers must fight to make sure that personalized experiences are useful. Remember, the consumers who say yes to personalized experiences today can just as easily say “no” tomorrow.

And the children shall lead

A groundswell of bipartisan support will result in the next president signing children’s privacy legislation into law in 2025. Despite this, a comprehensive preemptive general data privacy bill will remain elusive. We will end 2025 with more than two-thirds of all states having their own privacy laws.

The streaming experience gets worse before it gets better

Streaming experiences will get worse, following Cory Doctorow’s maxim that while platforms start good, they inevitably begin to abuse their customers to claw back value.

The push for streaming profit will lead to heavier ad loads on ad-supported streaming services, with ineffective targeting. Things will get worse before they get better, and by the end of the year we will see at least one major consolidation.

I hope that by next year, the industry focus will return to dramatically improving the consumer experience. If they don’t, their viewers will begin to look elsewhere.

Incrementality becomes the word of the year

Reach and frequency? These legacy constructs are still gospel in some parts but passé in others.  Attention and business outcomes will continue to gain ground, especially as topline growth takes a back seat to the drive for improved profitability.  Companies will cut surgically at first, but if it’s a tough year for growth, watch for the surgery to get increasingly aggressive.

The creator economy becomes a top 5 job sector

Every revolution in the media always starts small. Chances are, you already follow at least one micro or nano-influencer, and they have more impact on what you buy than you realize. In fact, with their continual rise, the creator economy will move into the top 5 job sectors. Consumers focused on extremely narrow niches—such as music or fashion genres—will find they can earn a living as the industry becomes galvanized around the creator opportunity and establishes significant best practices.

Most dystopian predictions will be wrong 

We’re in a moment of great change, and at such moments everyone thinks of the worst-case scenarios for everything. But if history shows us anything, it’s that challenges are always easier to see in advance than opportunities. Not everything will be rosy, but not everything will be as dark as you fear. Keep calm and carry on.