How adland executives are preparing for 2025

News that the UK economy had zero economic growth between July and September 2024 highlights just how tough the commercial environment is at present, and gives a flavour of the challenges that lie ahead as businesses begin the new year.

For the advertising sector, there is a continued focus on the impact the use of generative artificial intelligence will have. At the same time, marketers operate with tighter budgets as they aim to drive efficiency. The end of year news about the Omnicom acquisition of IPG means the whole industry will look different by the end of 2025 too.

In preparation for the year ahead, leading industry executives share the principles they will keep in mind as they navigate the waters ahead.

Becky Verano, Global vice president, Reckitt

2025 will be the year to scale and really see where Gen AI can take us. I am confident that the speed of adoption will be extremely fast. Next year I envisage Gen AI enabling all brands to embrace “true” full funnel communications,” said Reckitt global vice president Becky Verano.

We will be able to move away from the standardised 'matching luggage', to more complicated and intricate content, that amplifies the creative ideas that appeal to our consumers on different platforms. Now that's exciting! This potential may be even greater as the creator economy begins to overtake sponsored content on social. With GenAI poised to elevate creators to new heights, success in social will necessitate a greater emphasis on this "native" content.

Yan Elliott, chief creative officer, UK, Weber Shandwick

I like the idea of yearly trends, but I fear they may have had their time. Isn’t it more about daily trends? As the world moves faster, we must work quicker. Every day we are being challenged to be more reactive. Whether we like it or not this is our work reality, so we need to get ourselves in shape to deal with it.

What this means is adopting more of a Publishing mindset. This is about being more reactive, appearing in a relevant place and at relevant times – adding value with a point of view that gets you noticed. As we find the need to be ‘in touch’ more than ever it’s the same with brands. And let’s not forget that being ‘in touch’ is what brands are continually being judged on.

The ugly, and somewhat depressing, truth is that the advertising mindset of crafting, planning, and creating lasting legacies for brands is disappearing. Especially when you consider brands can be on their way to being made in an afternoon by a clever reaction to a news story.

The Publishing mindset does come with a health and safety warning. It is by no means easier. The skill is to know what to say at the right time. And, as always, if you don’t have anything constructive, helpful or funny to say then you best not say anything at all.

Peter McKenzie Jones, technology and customer experience director, Grey London

Generative AI is firmly part of the mainstream and most of us working in media and advertising will have probably used it as part of our work in some way over the past year. Moving forward we can expect to see Gen AI capabilities stabilise and for agencies and advertisers to adopt at scale where appropriate. Where things start to get interesting is when we think about the world of AI agents. Last year we saw AI tools starting to get rolled out in mainstream devices such as Apple Intelligence in the iPhone, whilst ChatGPT and other similar tools were adopted into the daily lives of many people.

AI players are starting to build on their models’ multi-modal capabilities with tools, or agents, that can interact with the device to get context or even take action. OpenAI is rumoured to be launching an AI agent this year which will likely be able to interact with a device and take actions on behalf of the user (with permission and safeguards hopefully built-in). This signals the start of a period where people ask an agent to perform tasks for them.

The question for advertisers becomes how do we influence the options and decisions the AI makes on behalf of our customers? In 2025 we might need to start finding the answers.

Paul Hewitt, executive creative director, That Lot, Weber Shandwick Collective

2025 is the year of the long-form social content. The length of the average top 10 movie is up from 2 hours in 1993 to 2 hours and 23 minutes in 2023 – albums are longer too. You can now post up to 3 minute videos on Shorts, 1 hour on TikTok and YouTube is about to take over TV as the most-watched platform. People are already watching whole films on TikTok (in 27 parts) and watching 40 minutes video essays from their favourite YouTube Creators. Generation agnostic, in a world of endless doom-scrolling and fast-paced videos, people are seeking more curated, purposeful viewing on social – they are training their algorithm as a basic behaviour and want long-form storytelling. YouTube is underrated, pass it on. Bonus points for serialised content. 

Lynne Deason, head of creative excellence Kantar

Data from Kantar cross media studies shows that campaigns that are integrated (cohesive) and customised to channel are 57 per cent more effective. Kantar data also shows the benefit (and the challenges) that come when you stick to the same creative platform over time. For example, as people more readily associate the idea with your brand, Brand centricity is an important – and often under emphasised – driver of creative effectiveness. Cohesion not only fuels campaign effectiveness, it’s also a catalyst for creating meaningful difference and driving brand growth. Brands exists as a set of associations in people’s heads. The greater the clarity of those associations (especially when they make the brand feel more meaningful and different than others), the more predisposed people will be to choose the brand over other alternatives.