Challenges for advertisers in 2025We are not in the dark about these challenges. We can make educated guesses or predictions. But there is a strange way in which the more informed the speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what is not known.
“Hurricane experts are still trying to understand why the current season is so messy. The extreme storminess in July, the sudden lull during the traditional hurricane peak in late August and early September, and the explosion of cyclones in October together suggest that “the moj phone number data climatological rules of the past no longer apply,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. For Truchelut, who has been in the business for 20 years, “there’s a dreamlike reality to living through this time,” as if he no longer lives on the same planet he grew up on. It’s an indication that our collective sense of how hurricane season should proceed is quickly becoming unreliable,” says Allison Zaucha, writing in The Atlantic.
You, irresponsible for reading this anarchic column, will be thinking: What does it have to do with the advertising business? Nothing and everything. Life and events on earth have taken a dizzying pace and more than ever what happened yesterday today is almost ancient history. And nothing makes us imagine that this will stop. Therefore, when the year begins the final curve, when there are only two months left to say goodbye to 2024, in addition to the balance and analysis with critical thinking, it is necessary to interpret what the challenges will be, with the risks that the meaning of this verb presumes, for agencies and industry players in 2025.
Peeking into the future
Without hesitation, we’re ignorant about the future. Agency leaders are under particular pressure to keep up with the disruptions arising from new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, an evolving creator economy, and changing means of reaching consumers. They’re also grappling with how to serve clients, as marketers ask them to dig into the details of their businesses and solve more complex problems. And they’re balancing those demands with trying to retain talent and maintain their own culture. And, increasingly, finding a fair way to pay fees. One that makes everyone happy.
We are not in the dark about these challenges. We can make educated guesses or predictions. But there is a strange way in which the more informed our speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what we don’t know. “The knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we acknowledge,” writes the philosopher Daniel DeNicola in his book Understanding Ignorance. The more we know, the more precisely we can say what we don’t know. This is certainly a good place to start. It is a path of exploration.
Panorama from the bridge
For the first time this year, global ad spend will surpass $1 trillion, up 10.5%, according to Warc’s Global Ad Spending Outlook 2024/25: A Decade of Consolidation . This would be the best performance in six years if the post-Covid recovery in 2021 (+27.9% year-on-year) is ignored.
