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Predictions for 2025

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At the beginning of the year, we pool together predictions from Rain the Growth Agency leaders across disciplines. Some may be more bold than others, but are important to note for brands and advertisers looking for growth in 2025.

Rachel Baker, SVP, Head of Investments & Partnerships

The video marketplace continues to evolve at a rapid pace with spending trends becoming less predictable across many categories. Despite a very strong upfront, overall spending in linear will be down about 13% YoY as ratings continue to erode, leaving less available impressions, and money is pushed to CTV (projected to be up 14%). Q1 2025 saw less options taken than other quarters, which is an indication that upfront advertisers are not planning to take options. When options are taken, it opens up inventory in the scatter market. Since options are not being taken, it’s pushing up scatter premiums.

Linear entertainment will continue to see declines in ratings as viewership shifts towards streaming. But despite the ratings decline, linear TV remains the biggest mass reach vehicle. News is likely to settle down once the first 100 days of Trump’s term is over. However, news cycles are hard to predict. Sports ratings are expected to be stable throughout 2025, but with no summer Olympics we will see a drop in ratings YoY during the summer. NBA begins in their new homes (NBC and Amazon) beginning in November which will likely have an impact on ratings. Availability of live sports is growing, especially for women’s sports, across both linear and streaming. Sports remains the best way to capture a live audience with mass reach which is why demand continues to increase and the fight for rights is a bidding war. Sports are going to be tight and expensive.

With the announcement of Paramount moving away from Nielsen, this is an indication that Videoamp will become a more viable currency. While moving 100% away from Nielsen is a ways off, agencies and advertisers have the opportunity to dig in and learn about VideoAmp and understand the impact of going beyond age and gender and into more advanced audience segments. In the meantime, agencies need to adapt to planning and buying in a multi- currency world.

Mark Brown, Executive Lead

I predict that 2025 will be the year that the marketing industry will begin to realize the benefits of Artificial Intelligence on the one hand, while calling its bluff on the other. Last year, many marketing companies across a broad spectrum—from advertising agencies to media platforms to analytics providers—claimed that they were leveraging AI in some new and unique way. This year those claims will come under even greater scrutiny. It won’t be enough to play the AI card in 2025, marketers are going to demand that it produces a winning hand. Depending on the space in which AI is deployed, that is going to mean improved performance, greater efficiency, or deeper and more actionable insights—preferably some combination of the aforementioned. Those partners who deliver will be rewarded with greater investment and market share. Those who don’t will have to go back to the drawing board, or risk becoming irrelevant.

At the beginning of 2024, I predicted that we would see “continued adoption of media currency alternatives to Nielsen,” but not a “sea change in the industry.” I’m happy to say I think I nailed it, though in hindsight that was not much of a limb to go out on! The Joint Industry Committee certified the three leading Nielsen currency alternatives in 2024 (VideoAmp, ComScore, and eventually iSpot), but none of them received the Media Ratings Council accreditation that I thought might be coming. That didn’t stop more upfront deals being guaranteed on alternate currencies, but the majority remain guaranteed on Nielsen panel data. The biggest news in the space has been the lack of a contract between Nielsen and Paramount Global, which has led to the latter’s adoption of VideoAmp as their primary currency. If that dispute isn’t resolved by this spring, a large chunk of the 2025-26 upfront deals will not be guaranteed by Nielsen.

Robin Cohen, EVP, Integrated Media Investment + Planning

Over the past few years we have seen women’s sports viewership smash record after record, and we expect to see continued growth in 2025. While the growth of viewership topped 50% in 2024, in total, women’s sports represents less than 5% of total sports viewership today, according to eMarketer. With the funding of new leagues, larger rights deals and more advertisers leaning in and locking up inventory, I expect that the viewership and investment will continue to grow across platforms. eMarketer is also predicting 11% growth in viewership—I’m going to put my prediction in the 20-25% range.

Kyle Eckhart, SVP, Growth

There’s been a healthy but quiet shift of priorities towards brand building for many categories. It’s not unusual to see the preference pendulum swinging back and forth between brand and performance on a year-to-year basis. But after decades of inching further to the side that prioritizes short-term outcomes, we’ve definitely felt a larger market correction happening in the industry and with our clients specifically. Brand building strategies and measurement of longer-term outcomes is a welcome renewed priority.

Michelle Fallon, SVP, Rainstorm Direct

Linear TV spend will grow and not shrink like others are projecting despite decreasing viewership (and coming out of an election/Olympic year). With recent studies showing that CTV overexposes audiences to the same commercials, high CPMs, and a struggle with measurement, advertisers are moving ad dollars back to linear TV to drive performance. We’ve seen a 20-30% increase in new advertisers in the linear space (especially from the finance and pharma space) and the beginning of Q1 has been oddly tight on inventory. The upfronts were strong this year and programming is getting back to normal after years of dealing with disruptions from the pandemic and writers’/actors’ strikes. Plus studies show that linear TV delivers about six times the amount of ad impressions as CTV and can effectively and measurably drive other channels like branded search, Amazon, and retail.

Dan Gallagher, EVP, Brand & Communications Strategy

Travel Bots: According to Qualtrics, the majority (62%) of people are willing to use AI to book an airline ticket. That said, I think travel will be the first AI usage occasion to see significant consumer engagement and adoption.

Measurable Me: People will continue to measure their health and well-being using the most popular watch in the world, the Apple watch. Personal measurement will now extend beyond steps to emotional metrics as Boomers identify mental health and “feeling well” as the number one health goal, according to Innova Market Insight.

IRL Brand Interactions: As social media continues to drive isolation and loneliness, physical interactions with friends, family and local cultural institutions will begin to take precedence over digital interactions. Brands will need to tap into these moments and offer sensory and emotional uplift.

Modernized Direct Mail: Direct mail will continue to evolve, integrating with digital marketing strategies to create personalized and impactful campaigns. AI will play a significant role in enhancing personalization and creative testing, based on Quad Insights research.

Ryan Gilbert, VP, Digital

We predict increased creation of new media networks in 2025. As cookie-related third-party data sets continue to prove ineffective, advertisers want alternatives to reach more deterministic audiences that are more likely to drive positive performance outcomes with their investment. A media network’s success comes down to their level of data quality, competitive pricing and the ability to reach their customers in a relevant and impactful setting. Media networks will continue to gain relevance if they deliver on all three.

Consolidation would benefit the industry if generating reach within a singular media network is a challenge, but we don’t think it will happen immediately. Several large-scale media networks launched in 2024 and we expect that they will continue to seek to monetize their platforms and data independently. Although in some cases, strategic partnerships could make sense for media networks.

Live shopping has also become a growing trend that will become a larger opportunity for brands in 2025 and I expect it will continue to build on its current momentum in the social space. Content creators and social platforms will continue to place resources into this growing white space as brands continue to see success selling products in this format. The rise of influencer content curation to niche groups makes live shopping an even bigger growth opportunity in 2025. Influencers have the ability to tap into subcultures in a more seamless way, and can provide curated shopping experiences that will appeal to those subcultures authentically. As long as social platforms continue to invest in the tech needed to activate and measure live shopping, we’ll see it continue to rise in the new year.

Kyle Knutsen, Director, Digital Video

We’ll continue to see AI shape the way we purchase and deliver media, both by safe and ethical data collection, and advances in hyper-contextual ad delivery to consumers. Real-time data will continue to shape dynamic creatives, predictive audience targeting will become more relevant based on AI learning of historical patterns and behaviors, and emotion and sentiment will no longer be relegated to keywords. In 2025 I expect that AI will allow buyers to place digital video media in relevant inventory outside of the narrow scope of genre and demo targeting, further aligning messaging seamlessly to content the target audience is consuming.

Artem Peplov, VP, Analytics

In 2025 the marketing industry will continue to rapidly evolve its use of AI across the entire martech stack. I anticipate these key areas to undergo the most dramatic disruption and growth:

  • Any spoken and written-language signals will be interpreted, analyzed and leveraged for optimization, content development and personalized marketing communications. Just like AI-generated Zoom transcripts, brands are hooking in AI listening into all customer communications—chats, phone calls, emails. Sentiment and language is tied to outcomes, with platforms optimizing to these advanced signals. It may be the beginning of the end for static pixel-based optimization as we know it.
  • These AI signals may be the boost that Dynamic Creative Optimization needs to deliver on its promise. I anticipate momentum in this space across a variety of platforms. Themes, content and language will be AI-scraped from a variety of customer touchpoints to feed marketing campaigns.
  • AI enabled across marketers’ tech stacks will also enable more cohesive cross-channel attribution and optimization. Combined with modeling, conversion methods that were previously limited to last-touch deterministic tracking will generate meta-data to enable more sophisticated tracking through the conversion funnel.

While I anticipate meteoric progress continuing for the use of AI in marketing, pockets of restraint will persist in highly regulated sectors like healthcare. Some brand and marketing leaders will continue to be justifiably cautious and place value on constrained automation and require substantial human fingerprints across the process. With these shifts, the marketing industry is poised for a transformative year. However, success will depend on how brands balance innovation with regulation and ensure that human insights remain a core part of their AI-driven strategies.

This article is featured in Media Impact Report No. 61. View the full report here.