It’s that time of year again. The holiday season is full of love and cheer, a time for family, fun, and predictions about what will happen in 2025. Yes, advertising predictions flow in faster than the holiday cards in my mailbox. But whether it’s staring at pictures of your children or thoughts on the future of AI and CTV, I look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts each year. So, in the spirit of holiday tradition, here are my own “predictions” for 2025.

2024 was the year where we talked about the rise of CTV. Technically, so was 2023 and maybe even a little bit of 2022. But in 2025, I predict that simply targeting “CTV inventory” will not be nearly enough. CTV has been a pool that everyone wants to swim in, but now there’s a noticeable difference between the deep and the shallow ends. The inventory will continue to segment and split, and the marketplace will mature with the metrics, tracking, and targeting improving over time. The marketers who use data and speed to find the market inefficiencies within the CTV space will reap the rewards in 2025.

YouTube Shorts wants to take away advertising budget from TikTok. Amazon wants to build a tech stack to compete with Google. Meta has Instagram to rival TikTok, Threads to go after X, and Facebook for the long tail and scale of the open web. Everyone is trying to take from everyone else and they’ve all built data infrastructures to show how successful your ad campaigns can be when you spend with them. But nobody is advertising with just one of these platforms. And in a world where the ad products are becoming more and more similar across different platforms, the ability to connect the dots between the platforms themselves will matter more and more.

I think Google will look vastly different in 2025 (then again, everyone’s been saying that for years), TikTok will continue to mature, segmenting their inventory between premium and long tail, and Amazon will be a powerful player in video advertising, offering massive scale with Prime Video and a world of data to use within in. But I think that any meaningful budget gains by a platform will be offset by a loss somewhere else.

DSP and SSPs will continue to fight with one side leaning on unifying data and the other focusing on leveraging inventory. In the end, I think DSPs will have more of an uphill fight in 2025 as it will be harder to reach and follow users within one, unified buying platform. More and more brands are building out their own data sets and bringing media buying in house. As they continue to build out sophisticated operations, they will focus on targeting specific inventory and platforms at the expense of tracking the user. Five smaller campaigns will win out versus one large one. The trick will be how quickly you optimize between them.

By aligning with consumer aspirations, leveraging data-driven insights, and optimizing ad spend, marketers can transform this often-overlooked period into a powerful growth engine. As the dust settles on Q4 and your competitors pause, stay proactive and meet consumers where they are—ready to engage, reset, and invest in their future.

With an increase in more segmented marketing initiatives, you will see a rise in the number of brands relying Media Mix Modeling and Ad Attribution to better understand success and failure. You will hear a lot about new versions of MMM that are better suited for the new media buying world. But data without direction is just noise and understanding what worked and what did not after a campaign is over doesn’t help as much as it should. In 2025, I’m intrigued by the ability of companies that use attribution analysis and quick media modeling to drive mid-campaign optimizations. MMM is a tool. MMM combined with real-time recommendations is a weapon. The ability to make cross platform, data-informed optimizations will be the biggest win in 2025.

So those are my predictions. I’m never wrong. Except when I am. I hope everyone has a fantastic holiday season and an amazing new year.