Paid Media News & Opinion #108 - Our 2025 Predictions!

Happy New Year! We hope that you all had a lovely, restful festive period!

Looking Ahead: Our Predictions for 2025

This year, we’re shifting focus from reporting news to sharing predictions for the year ahead. From video’s growing role in shopping and in-game ads to the critical need for better attribution, 2025 promises rapid change in paid media. Explore the trends we believe will shape the industry—and how to stay ahead.

Shopping becomes interactive

The rise of video as a dominant form of content across digital channels is set to continue to an even greater extent in 2025.

Google has already tried video assets within the shopping inventory back in 2018. Now it’s been testing video-enabled shopping ads in search results with a new video functionality, featuring a play icon that changes to a “watch” button upon hover.

A clear sign of this trend towards video accelerating.

For 2025 we predict a shift in the shopping experience across Google and Microsoft. Search results prioritising engaging videos and rich media advertising formats over static ads, potentially offering advertisers more engaging ways to showcase products.

Videos can not only attract more impressions, particularly in industries where visuals play an important role, but also allow your brand to showcase its personality, values, and drive engagement. However, this could impact advertisers' overall traffic, with Google aiming to keep more users on search results pages instead of clicking through. 

Google's Merchant Center now includes a 'Video Link' attribute, enabling advertisers to add product-specific videos to their feeds, if you haven’t started experimenting with video yet, it has to be a serious consideration in 2025, early adopters are likely to benefit from increased visibility.

Programmatic audio and OOH advertising in immersive video game worlds will take off

An existing technology that could blow up on a global scale. Immersive, open-world video games like Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6), or others with potential ad space such as FIFA, could have ads seamlessly woven into the game’s environments.

For games such as GTA 6, large billboards that tower over roads, highways and street corners could make use of dynamic ads purchased on a real-time bidding auction basis, while radio stations could integrate programmatic audio ads just like Spotify and digital radio in real-life.

Some may call this the high of consumerism and capitalism but there is an element of realism with having genuine ads that are highly-relevant and non-instrusive. A reported 40% of gamers say non-interruption is a must-have for ads.

For advertisers, this would be a huge opportunity thanks to high viewability and audibility for this kind of inventory.

Marketers prioritise their attribution tech stack

Attribution has been in marketers thoughts for some time now, but we’re fast approaching crunch time. The phase out of cookies is still expected to happen at some point, and in 2024 there were regular updates around GDPR and privacy, with ad platforms making lots of adjustments to ensure they’re compliant with the latest legislature.

There’s also the age-old challenge of multi-channel attribution. Often multiple channels play an important role in the buying cycle, but with platform-only attribution it’s not always easy to identify which touch points were critical. 

There also seemed to be a large increase in the number of conversions given credit via view-through windows in 2024. Views are important and should be considered, but the increase in total credit taken by some ad channels has been significant. We have increasingly reverted to click-only conversion windows for reporting and decision-making purposes to combat this.

Enhancing your attribution tech stack should be a definite priority in 2025, and will help you navigate a cookie-less future; the increasingly stringent privacy and GDPR regulations; and multi-channel attribution challenges. Investing in Media Mix Modeling and other attribution tools will be crucial to improving the accuracy of your reporting and making good decisions.