The Future of Advertising Is Now: 5 Key Trends Driving The Media Industry in 2025

This is the golden age of advertising. Brands have more channels to reach consumers, more data to understand their behavior and better tools to grab

The advertising industry is booming. According to Dentsu, global ad spend tracked ahead of the economy in 2024 and shot up 5%. But there's a flip side to every coin. Every step in the advertising cycle—from planning to execution and measurement—has become more complex and thus more prone to costly mistakes.

To help you make informed decisions about your media budget, I've compiled some key forces driving the media industry in 2025, based on our company's competitive advertising intelligence, which we gather around the clock from over 5 million brands.

1. Advertising Today Is Digital, First And Foremost

We just released a new comprehensive report on current media investments in the U.S., and one of the most significant findings is how dominant digital media has become. Digital channels captured $107 billion in media spending for the first eight months of 2024, surging 8% year-over-year. They now account for nearly two-thirds of total media spending in the U.S., and the St. Louis Fed, using recent corporate financial statements and tax returns, just tallied digital channels' economic value at 1.1% of GDP.

Paid search, mobile and paid social are leading the charge, which isn’t all that surprising considering how much time consumers are spending on those channels. They offer seamless engagement, quick conversions and measurable impact, making them indispensable for brands across a variety of industries, including home improvement, department stores, automotive, quick-service restaurants (QSRs), software and financial services. Even if you operate in a different industry, you could do a lot worse than investing in those digital channels in 2025.

2. Traditional Media Is Far From Extinct

Despite the rise of digital media, traditional media is far from being a thing of the past. For instance, linear television saw a 3% increase in media spending in 2024, thanks in large part to high-profile sporting events (the NFL, of course, but also Copa América and the Paris Olympics) and record-breaking political ad spending. According to eMarketer, linear TV "generates more than six times the amount of advertising time spent than CTV..."

Radio, meanwhile, was relatively stable, with local radio, in particular, remaining highly relevant for both local and national advertisers. Print media, however, faced a sizable 11% decline in 2024 as advertisers continue to shift their focus to digital platforms and concentrate their print budgets on fewer major publications.

3. Where Is The Line Today Between Traditional And Digital?

It’s getting harder to draw a line between traditional and digital media. Radio and podcasts, out-of-home (OOH) and digital-OOH, or linear TV and over-the-top (OTT) streaming are increasingly considered two sides of the same coin, not competing options. Consumers don’t make any distinction between traditional and digital, so why should advertisers?

For instance, OTT's advanced targeting capabilities are redefining what advertising means for TV as a whole, not just for streaming, and most traditional media companies have developed their own streaming options or formed strategic alliances in 2024 to expand their footprint and protect their media budgets. At the Upfronts and NewFronts this year, don’t expect streaming to be a sideshow anymore.

4. Will AI Save Or Kill Marketing?

I believe 2025 will be a year for advertisers and agencies to build on early experiments and start to use AI and advanced analytics at scale to automate mundane tasks and enhance campaign design and delivery. Publishers, for their part, will use AI to combat ad fraud and get more value from their specialized audiences.

But AI will also create thorny challenges for the industry. For instance, AI-generated answers on search engines are already pushing traditional search results off the screen, making it harder for sponsored search results to remain visible, especially to younger users who tend to trust AI-generated answers more than others.

It’s time to look past the gloomy headlines (e.g., 11,000 ad agency jobs will be replaced with AI or that AI will take over 95% of marketing work) and get up to speed on the technology to understand its impact on your business and turn it into a competitive advantage.

5. Now More Than Ever, Marketing Is A Balancing Act

As media consumption becomes more fragmented, marketers need to embrace an omnichannel strategy to get their message across. This requires robust data and strategic planning, but the rewards can be enormous.

We’re constantly studying how market leaders and up-and-comer brands (we call them Future Titans) allocate their media dollars across today’s most popular channels, and the common denominator is that they’ve all developed a well-balanced media mix to ensure