The advertising landscape continues to evolve, with 2025 bringing new challenges and opportunities. As technologies advance and consumer behaviors shift, you’re tasked with adapting and refining your agency’s strategies to remain competitive and drive meaningful results.
In this article, we’ll explore four key trends shaping the future of digital advertising and highlight strategies and solutions to help you succeed in the year ahead:
- The growing importance of rich media formats: How creative automation and AI streamline and transform the creative production process.
- Shifts in the search landscape: The growing influence of social and AI-powered search on helping consumers discover products and services.
- The growth of Connected TV (CTV) advertising: Unlocking new opportunities for expanded reach, advanced targeting, and precise measurement.
- AI agents as a “digital workforce”: The next wave of AI-driven solutions revolutionizing digital advertising workflows and operational efficiency.
These advancements will influence how your agency operates and where to prioritize your efforts in 2025 and beyond. Let’s dive in.
Rich media revolution: scaling creative production with automation and AI
In 2025, rich media formats—like video, interactive, and shoppable ads—will continue flooding the advertising landscape. As channels and formats expand, your agency will face increasing pressure to deliver hyper-targeted content while managing resource constraints. To remain competitive, adopting creative automation and AI will be essential for scaling content production efficiently and delivering high-impact campaigns.
Even the most "text-centric" foundations of search ads are showing increased bias towards more visually appealing ads, as seen by the priority given to Performance Max campaigns. Speculatively, we can infer the impact of strong visual media from social and other networks is driving this change. It's a great move but it can put a new strain on the scalability of your AdOps.
Creative automation streamlines the production of diverse, error-free ad content. This frees your teams to focus on what matters most: meeting the growing demand for dynamic, localized assets across product lines, markets, and audience segments.
Simultaneously, AI is driving innovation in creative development, assisting marketers in crafting fresh concepts and refining targeting strategies. Beyond content creation, AI analyzes creative context and past campaign performance, offering actionable insights to optimize what resonates with audiences. Generative AI takes this further, enabling rapid experimentation so your agency can test, refine, and deploy strategies that drive engagement and build stronger audience connections.
As AI capabilities advance and offer increasingly realistic content generation, advertisers can strategically leverage these tools to test and innovate—within reason. For instance, you could pair real vehicle images with AI-generated scenic backgrounds to build ads for an automotive customer. Bringing in automation tools enables you to create countless ad variations with minimal manual effort.
By positioning AI as a creative collaborator—supported by an internal system of checks and balances—advertisers can produce adaptive content that aligns with audience preferences and keeps pace with emerging trends.
For your team to unlock the full potential of these technologies, your agency must adopt tools that combine the strengths of creative automation and AI. In turn, they can deliver captivating campaigns while maintaining operational efficiency in an ever-changing market.
The new search players: social and AI tools reshape discovery
The search landscape is shifting. Social search has emerged as a preferred discovery tool for younger generations (almost half of Gen Z and 35% of Millennials prefer social media search over traditional search engines).
AI-powered search tools (like Google’s AI-generated overviews and OpenAI’s SearchGPT) are reshaping how users engage with information by providing more conversational responses to queries. Additionally, the rise of voice-enabled digital assistants (e.g. Siri and Alexa) underscores the growing preference for natural, interactive exchanges with technology.
As a result, your agency needs to rethink where and how audiences search for products and services—and how you will adapt to show up where prospects are.
Most AI-powered search tools currently lack robust paid options. However, major AI search industry players are starting to move in the paid space.
For example, Google has already begun incorporating paid ads into its AI overviews. Two major AI tools are also considering how to monetize search features: Perplexity is experimenting with ad placements and OpenAI has not ruled out ads as a future monetization strategy. These advancements will open new opportunities for advertisers to leverage hyper-targeted ads aligned with user intent, seamlessly embedding placements into conversational interactions.
To prepare for these changes, you should be asking these questions:
- Should we refine our keyword strategies?: Focusing on long-tail and question-based keywords that align with conversational search patterns.
- How can we explore contextual targeting capabilities?: Adapting messaging to reflect user intent and context, ensuring ads are relevant and seamlessly integrated into conversations.
- How can we make more time for experimentation?: Testing emerging platforms and formats to gain insights and refine strategies before widespread adoption.
- How will we use content as the driver of AI-generated responses?: Providing richer content to AI engines will likely drive conversational responses in the future.
As search behaviors and tools evolve, automation will play an essential role. With automation, you can efficiently make bulk changes to keywords and messaging across channels and accounts. You can also scale A/B testing by automating trials and applying successful results en masse to maximize impact.
Without the right tools and processes, your agency risks falling behind due to operational constraints. By embracing automation and preparing for ongoing social search and AI-powered search innovations, you can position your agency to succeed in an increasingly complex and fragmented search landscape.
CTV’s continued growth: precision targeting meets broadcast reach
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is rapidly gaining traction as more consumers turn to streaming platforms for on-demand content. CTV uniquely combines the precision targeting of digital advertising with the expansive reach of broadcast TV, enabling brands to deliver ads tailored to specific demographics, behaviors, and content contexts. Additionally, CTV’s advanced measurement tools offer advertisers detailed performance tracking and real-time campaign optimization that traditional TV will never match.
In 2025, CTV is projected to account for one-fifth of US adults’ daily media consumption, making it an essential channel for advertisers to include in their media strategies. Platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime are expanding their ad-supported tiers, driving a surge in inventory and opening doors for advertisers across a wide range of budgets.
For agencies, this expanded inventory means new opportunities to offer tailored CTV strategies to clients. You’ll be able to tap into broader audiences with precision targeting and advanced measurement. Your agency can diversify its services by integrating CTV into cross-channel campaigns and exploring new revenue streams from clients eager to expand into this high-growth channel.
However, as CTV becomes more accessible, managing the complexity of campaigns across multiple platforms and formats will require robust tools. Automation is key to scaling CTV offerings without overwhelming your teams. You’ll be able to efficiently manage ad placements, optimize performance, and deliver impactful results for your clients.
Want to make an even bigger impact? Consider adopting an AdTech solution that integrates programmatic CTV ads with all other campaign types and data sources. This approach unlocks operational efficiencies, eliminates silos, and enhances campaign performance. For example, integrating real-time performance data into your strategies ensures that ads reach the right audience with maximum impact. These tools also ensure that a cohesive, compliant strategy is consistently applied across every channel—including CTV.
AI agents: redefining efficiency in advertising operations
In 2025, AI will solidify its role as an indispensable partner for advertisers. Nearly half of advertisers now completely or mostly trust AI-powered AdTech to make decisions about campaigns. This number will likely continue growing as AI tools become increasingly sophisticated and accessible.
Specialized AI agents enter the digital advertising landscape
One of the most significant advancements in AI for digital advertising is the emergence of specialized AI agents. Engineered to replicate specific technical skill sets, they function as an extension of your team: a digital workforce designed to handle common ad operations tasks with precision and scale.
As a result, your team gains speed and efficiency beyond human capacity.
Some examples of specialized AI agents in advertising include:
- "Data Scientist" Agent: Analyzes extensive datasets, generates actionable insights, and adjusts campaigns based on approved recommendations to optimize performance.
- "Ad Optimization" Agent: Dynamically allocates budgets, conducts multivariate creative tests to identify top-performing combinations, and proactively flags potential performance issues before they escalate.
- "Ad Copy" Agent: Instantly updates ad copy across hundreds or thousands of accounts in response to new offers or promotions.
- "Media Planner" Agent: Interprets campaign briefs to create detailed media plans with budget allocations and strategic recommendations.
These AI agents excel at managing data-heavy, repetitive tasks. With AI chugging through the mundane work, your team can focus on high-value activities like developing innovative strategies, optimizing creative work, and building meaningful audience connections.
A note on thoughtful implementation for safe and effective AI usage
While AI agents offer transformative potential, successfully adopting them requires thoughtful implementation to maintain compliance, safety, and effectiveness. Pairing AI with automation is crucial to achieving this balance:
- Compliance safeguards: Automation enforces compliance policies by implementing review workflows that prevent questionable AI outputs from being published.
- Data quality assurance: Automation normalizes and cleans data before processing. This ensures high-quality inputs that yield accurate and reliable outputs across workflows like optimization, reporting, and budgeting.
When paired with thoughtful automation strategies, AI can enhance day-to-day workflows while empowering your agency to push the boundaries of what’s possible in digital advertising.
Technology is your compass for advertising navigating complexity in 2025
As 2025 unfolds, the ad landscape is rich with opportunities but marked by growing complexity. To help your agency stay ahead, embracing innovation is essential.
Success in this evolving environment depends on adopting the right technologies for your team. As you look at your agency’s biggest challenges on the horizon, consider how AI-powered AdOps workflows, automated creative generation, or more testing time for emerging opportunities like social search and CTV will help your team stay ahead. Agility, efficiency, and strategic thinking will distinguish thriving agencies from those who fall behind.
Want to tackle these challenges holistically instead of in pieces? Consider a comprehensive digital advertising operating system (DAOS). These advanced solutions unify campaigns across channels, streamline operations, and empower teams to deliver results at scale. A DAOS can help address your biggest challenges today while providing a flexible foundation to adapt to tomorrow’s unknowns.
Your agency must evolve alongside the biggest changes in the advertising industry. By acting now, your team can confidently embrace advancements, drive meaningful growth, and stay ahead in 2025 and beyond.
