By Debbie Oates, Director of Customer Engagement, Experian Marketing Services
As the marketing landscape continues to evolve, brands are presented with new opportunities and challenges as they roll out their 2025 strategies. What are the key trends marketers and advertisers need to stay ahead of, and build into their campaigns, this year to successfully connect with their customers?
Navigating changes in data signals and capitalising on emerging channels like Connected TV (CTV) will be crucial as well as staying ahead of shifts in technology, privacy regulations, and consumer behaviours.
Signal Loss: Despite Google’s pause in cookie deprecation, third-party cookies are already restricted on major browsers like Safari and Firefox. Additionally, more people are actively managing their privacy settings and opting out of cookie tracking. These shifts necessitate a rethinking of how brands identify and reach audiences across digital channels.
The focus is now on first-party data strategies and identity solutions that connect online and offline interactions. As consumer engagement spans multiple devices and platforms, traditional tracking methods fall short. To address signal loss, it’s essential to establish a robust data foundation that links various touchpoints in a compliant and scalable way. What this means is that this is an ideal time for marketers to revisit audience strategies and explore identity solutions that honour consumer privacy while ensuring effective campaign performance.
Curation: Publishers and media owners are increasingly focused on how they package their inventory to offer more value to advertisers. Curation, particularly through private marketplaces (PMPs), is becoming a key strategy for driving inventory addressability and establishing more targeted media opportunities.
Curated PMPs leverage first-party data segments overlaid with audience data that advertisers can access in real-time. This provides a flexible, DSP-agnostic way for brands to reach their desired audiences while maintaining control over where their ads appear.
As curation evolves, advertisers will need to evaluate their media partnerships to ensure they’re accessing quality inventory coupled with robust audience data with the right level of transparency and control.
CTV: Connected TV (CTV) is rapidly emerging as a cornerstone of digital media strategies. It combines the extensive reach of traditional television with the precise targeting and measurement capabilities of digital advertising. In the UK, CTV is set to grow significantly in 2025, with the market expected to surpass £0.9 billion in ad spend. With 74% of UK adults now watching CTV, the opportunity to engage audiences through streaming platforms is expanding.
Brands are increasingly turning to CTV to deliver personalised, relevant content to viewers in a relaxed environment. However, defining and measuring CTV audiences remains a challenge, particularly in fragmented European markets where standards are still evolving. Leveraging audience data in addition to programme context will allow greater personalisation and is proven to boost key metrics.
As CTV adoption rises, marketers will drive increased demand for audience definitions which will enable advertisers to reach viewers with consistent messaging cross device. This will add increased precision to make the channel more effective and engaging.
Privacy-first Collaboration: With increasing privacy regulations, there is a growing shift towards secure methods of data sharing among brands, publishers, and technology partners. Data clean rooms are becoming essential in this context, providing a secure environment where multiple parties can match their data without exposing raw information.
Clean rooms enable brands to collaborate on audience insights, campaign measurement, and attribution while adhering to privacy rules. These environments are particularly valuable for creating enriched audience segments and enhancing media planning, as they offer a privacy-safe way to extract more insights from first-party data.
The adoption of clean rooms have been slow up until now as they were limited in how they match between first party data sources. Now clean room collaborations can be more effective as there are tools available to link identity data in a privacy-first way and enable data overlays to improve match rates between first-party data sets across organisations. For brands and agencies, the rise of clean rooms also underscores the importance of having a data strategy that goes beyond merely collecting first-party data.
Omnichannel Marketing: Consumers engage with brands through various touchpoints—viewing ads on their phones, browsing products on their laptops, and making purchases in-store. With that in mind, marketers are becoming more sophisticated, shifting from channel-specific campaigns to audience-led strategies that engage consumers across multiple platforms. This omnichannel approach will be even more critical in 2025 as channels like Connected TV (CTV) and Retail Media Networks (RMNs) become integral parts of the media mix.
Omnichannel campaigns provide marketers with the opportunity to build stronger customer relationships through relevant, personalised experiences. By placing the audience at the centre of their planning, marketers can deliver a cohesive and consistent message that truly resonates.
By staying informed and adapting to these trends, brands and agencies can navigate the evolving advertising and marketing landscape and achieve success in 2025 and beyond.
