The 7 Global Advertising & Media Trends Defining 2025

‍Editor's Note: This blog expands upon insights from our earlier piece on display ad trends from 2022, which has now been retired. While the core themes of attention, creative optimization, and data-driven design remain relevant, the pace of change in media and advertising has accelerated significantly — and this update reflects that evolution.

Introduction: Navigating the Shifting Landscape of Media in 2025

The advertising and media landscape has never moved faster. With emerging technologies, shifting consumer behavior, and new regulations reshaping the industry, brands and marketers in 2025 are operating in a fundamentally different ecosystem than just a few years ago. This is not about fleeting fads or buzzwords. It’s about broad, systemic trends that are driving how advertising is created, delivered, measured, and consumed across the globe.

Media, content, and attention are converging in new ways, forcing advertisers to adapt faster than ever. From retail media networks to AI-driven storytelling and from short-form videos to privacy-safe contextual targeting, this year demands a new level of agility. The following seven trends provide a comprehensive, strategic overview of the forces shaping advertising success in 2025.

In this blog, we unpack the seven most widely recognized advertising and media trends that are shaping the future of our industry. These insights are drawn from authoritative sources like WARC, Dentsu, Deloitte, GroupM, McKinsey, Think with Google, and others — reflecting the reality on the ground for agencies, media owners, and brands alike.

1. Creative Efficiency: Do More With Less

Ad budgets are under pressure, but demand for content is rising. Marketers are expected to generate more personalized, platform-native creatives faster — and often with less money. The result is a growing emphasis on creative efficiency: finding scalable production workflows, streamlining feedback loops, and leveraging AI and modular asset systems to maintain quality while increasing volume.

As more media channels emerge and platforms update their formats constantly, creative teams must deliver not just one or two versions, but sometimes hundreds. Creative efficiency means being able to maintain consistency, meet brand guidelines, and localize messaging — all without slowing down time to market.

Expect to see more agile production models, creative ops platforms, DAM integrations, and versioning tools in play. As marketing turns into a content engine, efficiency isn’t a luxury — it’s a core operational capability that separates successful brands from those struggling to keep up.

Source: WARC Creative Impact Toolkit, Deloitte CMO Survey

✨ Where Brainsight fits in

Brainsight enables teams to test and optimize creatives before they go live. This helps reduce budget lost to ineffective formats or poor visibility, increasing efficiency by making predictive eye-tracking a hygiene factor in the creative workflow.

2. Short-Form Video as the Dominant Format

Short-form vertical video is now the dominant content format across major platforms. TikTok set the pace, but YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and even LinkedIn video follow close behind. Consumers are primed to engage with stories in under 60 seconds. For advertisers, this means developing snackable, mobile-first content that grabs attention in the first three seconds.

What’s driving this trend is the algorithmic nature of discovery: platforms now prioritize entertainment, relevance, and engagement over follower count. Virality is democratized. And that puts even more pressure on the quality, hook, and pacing of short-form creatives.

This trend isn’t just about media placement; it affects storytelling itself. Brands must learn to communicate value and emotion quickly, using visuals, music, and motion to tell compressed yet compelling narratives. Brands that succeed often blend utility with personality, delivering value and entertainment without friction.‍

Source: YouTube, Meta for Business, TikTok Trends Report

✨ Where Brainsight fits in‍

Brainsight offers predictive attention analysis for video — full motion and scene by scene. Brands can identify which sequences grab attention and which don’t, helping to trim videos to their most effective core. Benchmarking the first seconds in a social context ensures optimal impact in-feed.

3. Retail Media Explosion

Retail media is now the fastest-growing global ad channel. Platforms like Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, and Carrefour Links are transforming how brands engage with consumers near the point of purchase. What makes retail media so attractive is the combination of high-intent audiences and first-party data, enabling closed-loop measurement of campaigns.

This trend extends beyond e-commerce. Retail media is becoming omnichannel, integrating in-store digital signage, self-checkout screens, loyalty apps, QR-code activations, and beyond. Traditional media players are even partnering with retailers to gain access to this valuable data and context.

For CPG and FMCG brands especially, retail media now sits at the heart of media planning. And as more retailers launch ad networks, the ecosystem will become more fragmented, requiring brands to balance scale with precision.

Source: GroupM Global Mid-Year Forecast, McKinsey Retail Media Whitepaper

✨ Where Brainsight fits in

‍Brainsight can power predictive attention and clarity benchmarks specifically for retail media formats — enabling retailers to offer advertisers a higher standard of visual effectiveness. For brands, it offers a pretesting layer to optimize banners and product displays before they’re deployed.

4. AI in Creative & Campaign Planning

AI isn’t a future promise — it’s already transforming how marketers develop and scale content. Generative AI tools (like GPT, DALL•E, Midjourney, and Runway) are helping teams create copy, visuals, and even video at unprecedented speed. But beyond production, AI is also informing campaign planning: suggesting optimal messaging, predicting outcomes, and even designing dynamic creative based on performance data.

AI is now embedded across the full marketing workflow — from predictive audience modeling to automated A/B testing to performance optimization. It’s helping planners identify underperforming segments, while empowering creatives to brainstorm faster and explore new directions.

Forward-looking marketers are embracing AI not just as a tool, but as a collaborator in the creative process. In 2025, ignoring it means falling behind — not just creatively, but operationally.

Source: Think with Google, Forrester, WARC AI Trend Reports

✨ Where Brainsight fits in

In a world where AI generates ads at scale, Brainsight ensures those ads are visually effective, not just present. It helps avoid cluttered, non-salient designs by automatically flagging creatives that underperform on visual KPIs — and can integrate via API into creative automation stacks.

5. Contextual Targeting Makes a Comeback

As third-party cookies phase out, the industry is rediscovering the power of contextual relevance. Instead of targeting users based on past behavior, advertisers are aligning their messages with the content, tone, and themes of the environment where their ads appear.

This trend is more than a technical workaround. Contextual targeting is proving to be a powerful approach in environments where user data is limited or privacy rules are tightening. AI-enhanced semantic analysis allows advertisers to detect not just keywords but emotional nuance, sentiment, and cultural cues.

The renewed interest in context goes hand-in-hand with brand safety, especially as news cycles become more polarized. Advertisers want more control over the environments where their messages appear — and context is proving a reliable, scalable signal.

Source: IAB Europe, The Trade Desk, Digiday

✨ Where Brainsight fits in

While Brainsight doesn’t target content environments or audience segments directly, it does help optimize visual clarity and standout in highly contextual placements. You can benchmark your creative’s visual attention performance against industry-specific norms — giving your message a higher chance of standing out in crowded or native-looking environments. Audience targeting remains the advertiser’s responsibility, but Brainsight ensures the creative is maximally effective within that context.

6. Measuring Real Human Attention

Impressions and viewability are no longer enough. Industry leaders are shifting toward attention-based metrics to understand true ad effectiveness. Attention, as defined by platforms like Dentsu, Amplified Intelligence, and Lumen, measures whether an ad was actively looked at — not just whether it was served.

Attention metrics go beyond visibility — they provide a window into how long users engage, where they focus within the creative, and whether those exposures correlate with lift in awareness or action. Brands are integrating these insights into planning, optimization, and even programmatic buying strategies.

As advertisers demand greater accountability from media spend, attention-based planning is becoming a serious alternative to CTRs and CPMs — reframing the definition of media value around quality of exposure.

Source: Dentsu Attention Economy Reports, WARC Guide to Attention

✨ Where Brainsight fits in

‍Brainsight fills the critical gap between viewability and performance with its BAS Metric (Brainsight Attention Score) — offering a predictive metric for attention before a campaign launches. This enables smarter media planning, tighter creative selection, and less ad waste.

7. DOOH Becomes Smart, Dynamic, and Programmatic

Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising is entering its intelligent era. Dynamic DOOH allows brands to deliver tailored creative based on triggers like time of day, weather, or location. Programmatic platforms are making OOH as flexible and data-driven as digital display.

The power of DOOH lies in its scale and physical presence, now enhanced by digital agility. Campaigns can be updated in real time across thousands of screens. Localized creative can be scheduled based on proximity to stores, events, or audience flow.

Measurement is also improving. Computer vision, mobile sensor fusion, and attention modeling are being applied to DOOH environments, enabling advertisers to better understand performance and optimize in real time. As footfall and dwell time become digitized, DOOH is becoming both a branding and performance channel.

Source: JCDecaux, Vistar Media, Outfront Media Trends 2025

✨ Where Brainsight fits in

DOOH campaigns have fewer real-time feedback loops. Brainsight offers in-context pretesting and benchmarking for clarity and attention in DOOH environments — ensuring visual standout and reducing ad spend inefficiencies.

Key Takeaways: Preparing for the Future of Advertising

1. Efficiency is no longer optional: From creative ops to AI-powered content generation, speed and scalability are defining competitive advantage.
2. Video storytelling must evolve: Short, mobile-native, and emotionally resonant content wins.
3. Retail media is a must-have, not a nice-to-have: It combines data, intent, and conversion.
4. AI is your co-pilot: Not just for automation, but for insight, creation, and optimization.
5. Privacy boosts context: Contextual targeting is regaining power in a cookieless future.
6. Attention is the new effectiveness metric: Seen > served. Engagement > exposure.
7. DOOH goes real-time: Smarter screens, programmatic buying, and measurable outcomes.

These trends don’t just reflect where the market is going — they reveal what today’s leading brands are already doing. In the next phase of this series, we’ll explore how predictive attention technologies and tools can plug directly into these developments to help brands stay ahead.

Stay tuned.

👉 If you’d like to explore how predictive attention insights can support your own campaigns — whether you're optimizing for video, DOOH, retail media, or creative clarity — feel free to get in touch for a personal walkthrough or an extended free trial of Brainsight.

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