Yes, this is another one of those annual prediction columns, breathlessly prognosticating what the new year will bring — or maybe it’s not?
My top five predictions for 2025:
1. Total retail sales in the US doubles year-over-year, as 100 different retail media networks each claim and deliver over 1000% ROI for each and every one of their clients from the $70 billion in ad dollars collectively spent with them.
2. AI singlehandedly creates 500 000 new jobs in the US, as openings for prompt engineers overtake openings for health care workers on all major job sites.
3. Digital ad fraud totally disappears as the major ad verification firms collectively catch, name, shame and shutdown all of the digital ad bot farms, made-for-advertising site producers, and sell-side-platforms that have permitted them to pollute the digital ad ecosystem.
4. Cannes Lions swept by AI engines, as the estates of Mary Wells Lawrence, Leo Burnett, Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy open-source all of their life’s work for use in all of the generative AI engines.
5. Eschewing economic mergers to maximise scale and leverage for principal trading in media, the large marketing services companies and ad holding companies decide to shift their businesses back to driving growth for clients, ad effectiveness and return-on-investment, instead of satisfying short-term procurement demands for lower-priced media and low prices for non-working media services, which is what has been driving them into the arbitrage business.
What do you think?
This story was first published by MediaPost.com and is republished with the permission of the author.
Dave Morgan, a lawyer by training, is the CEO and founder of Simulmedia. He previously founded and ran both TACODA, Inc, an online advertising company that pioneered behavioural online marketing and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media, Inc, one of the world’s first ad serving and online ad network companies and a predecessor to 24/7 Real Media (TFSM), which was later sold to WPP for $649 million. Follow him on Twitter @davemorgannyc
