Omnichannel advertising company Mediaocean recently released the findings from its 2025 Advertising Outlook Report, informed by a survey of nearly 700 marketing professionals. New Digital Age spoke with Mediaocean’s global CMO Aaron Goldman to find out more about the research and learn how contemporary marketers are navigating rapid technological advancements and shifting consumer behaviours…
Why did Mediaocean produce this report?
We produce the report twice a year. This is the seventh edition, so we’ve built up a nice body of knowledge over the past three years, allowing us to spot and track marketplace trends as they develop. The digital media space moves so quickly that every six months or so there is always some meaningful movement to be observed. By producing the report at the beginning and then the mid-point of each year, we think it provides valuable insights. For example, there is usually a gap between what marketers plan to do at the start of each year and what they actually are able to gain momentum with. The report provides us a chance for us to reconcile those two things.
Where are advertisers prioritising their spending on media? Which channels are growing the fastest?
The fastest growing channel is ‘Social’. 68% of people said that they were going to increase their spend across social platforms. Next up is ‘Digital Display & Video’ followed by ‘CTV’. Those three have remained fairly consistent as the top channels across the past four or five times we’ve conducted the research.
The mantra for marketers used to be to spend money wherever your customers are spending their time. The new reality is that people aren’t only spending time on social media and video, they’re also spending serious money as digital media and ecommerce continue to merge.
Conversely, traditional media such as linear television, print and radio were among the slowest growing channels but, interestingly, the majority of marketers are maintaining their levels of investment rather than easing back on those channels.
Is the hype surrounding AI being matched by investment/activity on the ground?
Again, there’s a bit of a gap between how people were planning to use AI and how they are actually using it right now. Initially, people were predicting its use for content development, copywriting, image generation and things like that. For the past three surveys, the top two use cases have remained the same: market research and data analytics.
Our research suggests that AI isn’t being used to generate ad creative directly as much as it’s being used to analyse campaigns, interrogate the data and make better creative decisions. Lots of people are still getting comfortable with letting AI take ownership of some of the processes that humans have controlled up until now. We’re seeing more adoption of AI for sure, but we’re still in the early stages.
What are the big priorities for advertisers at the moment?
If AI is still slowly gaining steam, Automation is the train that has left the station. The top priorities overall remain ‘performance driven paid media’ and ‘measurement & attribution’ but ‘automation’ was the fastest growing priority this time round. If you take those three things together, it tells us that marketers are trying to be more accountable and efficient with their budgets, both in the money they spend to focus on performance channels, but also in tracking the outcomes of that spending.
Is there room for more synchronisation between creative and media processes?
Yes, and we are seeing some progress. In our most recent report, 14% of marketers said they have a fully synchronized process, so that their media, creative processes, and technology stack are fully aligned and in sync. That represents a slight increase on the previous report, where only 12% said the same thing last time round.
Our ad server product Flashtalking by Mediaocean serves billions of impressions every hour and our analysis found that only around 10% of ads are being personalised to any extent. One of our goals at Mediaocean is to bring ad tech solutions together and make it easier for marketers to start to move those numbers a lot higher. Our announced acquisition of Innovid, a CTV ad server, will help us to do that. We’re really focused on providing an independent and neutral offering that allows advertisers to bridge the gap between creative and media and focus on the metrics that matter for their business.
