Marketers were in a state of uncertainty through 2024, with many chapters left unfinished, such as a ban on TikTok and the real impact of genAI on the media landscape.
Global consultancy Forrester, in its media and advertising predictions for 2025, says many of these chapters will come to a conclusion next year.
“Marketers will act more decisively as a result, executing their plans with confidence and getting comfortable with newer activations, like social commerce,” says Forrester
“However, marketers shouldn’t get too comfortable — while some chapters will close, others will open in their stead.”
The predictions:
Google is taking hits on multiple fronts: Adtech vendors deemed Privacy Sandbox non-viable after early tests, marketers think Google is bluffing (only 13% of global B2C marketing decision-makers believe Google will deprecate the third-party cookie), and antitrust regulators scrutinise Google’s every move.
“These pressures will force the company to abandon two hallmarks of its Privacy Sandbox, Topics API and Attribution Reporting API, as it fails to convince doubters that
a solution built by Google, owned by Google, running on Google infrastructure, and measuring ads served by Google is effective,” said Forrester.
AI-integrated search will triple SEO budgets. “GenAI won’t kill Google, but it’ll forever change search engines’ look and feel, as ranked blue links get displaced by genAI-powered summaries,” said Forrester.
This shift will affect paid search, which is increasingly automated, but it upends SEO. Two-thirds (67%) of global B2C marketing decision-makers planned to increase their SEO budgets in 2024, according to Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2024.
“Brands spending tens of millions of dollars a year on paid search often say they’re only spending hundreds of thousands on organic search. SEO has a marketing problem that will only get worse in 2025.
Ten influential global brands will drop DoubleVerify, waving in new brand safety regimes.
“Current brand safety practices are unsustainable, and in 2025, the dam will finally break,” said Forrester.
“Marketers worried about brand safety have defunded news, and even Time’s person of the year, for fear of controversy.
“The few vendor-certified ‘brand safe’ URLs subsequently surged in price, while news organisations created content simply for monetisation because legitimate news contains dicey keywords. New brand safety practices will replace keyword exclusion lists with publisher inclusion lists, dropping legacy brand safety vendor DoubleVerify, and investing in trusted places.”
According to Forrester’s Q3 B2C Marketing CMO Pulse Survey, 2024, 53% of US B2C marketing executives already say they’re getting less “prudish” about brand safety.
Marketers will shift 10% of their performance media budgets into social commerce. “While social commerce is already established in APAC, other regions have been slower to adopt the behaviour,” Forresetr said.
“However, 2025 will be the year social commerce becomes a staple on media plans.”
Forrester’s 2023 data shows nearly half (46%) of US online adults who did back-to-school shopping bought directly from an ad they saw on social media.
TikTok will not get banned or divest in the US in 2025.
“Despite intense pressure from the US government to divest TikTok from Chinese-owned ByteDance, the immensely popular platform is sticking around.
“TikTok’s data collection practices aren’t materially different from US-based social media platforms.”
Forrester’s July 2024 Consumer Pulse Survey found that if TikTok gets banned in the US,
TikTok users would turn to Reels and Shorts instead — exactly what happened when India banned TikTok in 2020.
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