Infillion’s Top Ad Tech Predictions for 2025

2024 has been a year of immense change and growth in the ad tech industry. The buzzword on everyone’s lips – again – has been artificial intelligence, and brands have been hard at work figuring out how to operate in a cookieless future even though Google backtracked on its cookie deprecation plans.

If we compare this current transitional era to the process of building a house, 2024 would’ve been the year of gathering supplies, hiring the team, and beginning to set the foundation. In 2025, the real construction will begin.

So with all that in mind, here are Infillion’s top 5 trend predictions for the ad tech industry over the next year.

1: The continued rise of AI
86% of advertisers report that they’re already using AI-enabled tools in their roles. And in 2025, we’ll start to see four main areas where AI will make an impact on the very foundations of this industry — for better or for worse:

• Creative innovation: 2025 will be a true test for AI-generated creative. So far, big brands are still skittish about taking this avenue, but in 2025, we’ll start to see more established smaller brands taking advantage of this inexpensive solution to creating content. Generative AI also opens up opportunities for an ad to be made with many multiple variants of creative, allowing for more tailored, customized experiences for the user. Over the next year, we’ll see this technology continue to evolve… and face scrutiny from consumers.
• Targeting tactics: AI and machine learning are allowing for more sophisticated targeting plans that deliver contextually-specific advertising for each user’s experience. Beyond that, AI-enabled ad curation will optimize media packages for performance, improving outcomes and ROI.
• Automation: The most transformative use of AI in this coming year will be its ability to automate workflow processes, freeing up time and bandwidth for advertisers. As new automated tools evolve and catch on, the industry will evolve with it.
• Sustainability: Addressing the environmental impact of AI will only grow more unavoidable. As the industry deals with backlash, they will look for more sustainable solutions that minimize the environmental impact of their work.

2: Goodbye cookies, hello omnichannel solutions
In 2024, the industry dealt with a long-anticipated change: the death of the cookie. Even though Google walked back its decision to fully phase out cookies, users are opting out in massive numbers: 76% of iOS users have chosen to opt-out, depreciating the value of third-party audiences.

But this death-by-consumer-choice could be seen as a blessing in disguise. Now that brands can’t rely on any one-stop shop for data, they’re diversifying their advertising buys to build holistic, privacy-forward strategies that pull from various sources of data and platforms to optimize for success. AI is also playing a big role in ensuring that this type of collaboration works seamlessly and efficiently.

3: Are you paying attention?
As brands build their omnichannel solutions, they’re also evaluating the efficacy of their current placements — and a lot of them are not liking what they see. Given the growing rise of made-for-advertising sites and low-quality placements that use smoke-and-mirror tactics to inflate their measurements, brands are considering whether to trade their use of traditional metrics for new metrics rooted in attention. Especially as the ecosystem becomes more reliant on programmatic and automated placements, it’s more important than ever that brands can trust that they’re getting high-quality placements that encourage attention and interactivity.

Beyond that, the drive for attention is leading to increasingly creative innovations. Multi-sensory OOH experiences and interactive ads are growing in popularity as advertisers figure out how to cut through the noise of the very cluttered digital ecosystem. Expect to see an explosion of out-of-the-box creative campaigns in 2025 as advertisers utilize the new landscape of tools to build smart, effective strategies.

4: All hail the new rulers of digital advertising: Out Of Home (OOH) and CTV
Both OOH and CTV advertising saw huge bumps in 2024, and both will only continue to grow in 2025. Programmatic digital OOH billboards and banners are becoming increasingly common, and thanks to automated processes and the diversification of media planning, it’s getting easier for brands to take advantage of a plethora of OOH data (foot traffic, car/traffic data, and more) and thus actually track the efficacy of OOH campaigns accurately.

CTV will perhaps see the biggest growth in 2025. Many streamers introduced ad-supported tiers in 2022 and have spent the past 2 years steadily growing those audiences. Now, Disney+ will have 36% of its users on ad-supported tiers in 2025 compared to 3% 2 years ago. This has cracked open the CTV landscape, leading to more inventory and innovation in the space.

The fact that a large percentage of CTV inventory is login-enabled provides an additional level of reassurance for advertisers that their ads are actually being viewed and paid attention to by audiences. That’s a big reason why political ad budgets this past year earmarked 13% of their total ad budgets to CTV, compared to 2.7% in 2022.

5: The exponential growth of retail media
Retail media spend is set to hit $170 billion in 2025 — and it won’t stop there. Retail’s share in incremental digital ad spending is expected to hit 60% in 2028 as retail brands take advantage of their more-valuable-than-ever first party data and we see more innovations in the space thanks to AI and machine learning.

Already, we’re seeing platforms like Amazon and Peacock make it easier than ever for brands to advertise specific products during their programming with in-episode shopping, bringing relevant content directly to their core consumers. And further interactive and dynamic innovations — such as Infillion’s Live Price Check, which dynamically swaps out featured retailer links based on where the product is in stock at the time the user is viewing the experience — will only make the online shopping experience more seamless and customized to the user’s taste.

Ready to get a jump on innovative ad strategies for 2025 and beyond? Reach out to the Infillion team today.