By Adam Weiler Photo Credit: This is Engineering (Pexels)

Recently, it seems like every year we look back and we can say the same three things: Fragmentation and consolidation have permanently changed the landscape, data is changing the way we do business, and there’s a new platform/technology/consumer behavior that we need to adapt to.  All three of those things hold true for 2025, but the real overriding trend is that these are not trends – these are constants. The grind of evolution is part of the DNA of our industry, rewriting the rules day-by-day.

The bottom line is that 2025 was…a lot. Somewhere between AI agents taking over optimization, retail media swallowing entire 2025 budgets, and Nielsen going from “the” currency to “a” currency, the industry shifted into a new phase. Not a new era — a new way of working.

And the remarkable part is how silently it happened amid the blaze of headlines. Let’s dig into a few of the key areas where we saw transformation become foundational.

Artificial Intelligence: From Promise to Practice

This year we saw that AI went from “interesting” to “making decisions before we do.” Every major platform moved from machine learning to machine doing. Optimization is automated. Creative is automated. Audience refinement is automated. Attribution and measurement is also increasingly automated. Not perfected, just scaled and integrated into ways of working.  The big players responded by building their own AI operating systems, each more ambitious (and acronym-heavy) than the last. What sort of incrementality will your LLM-supported, multi-modal, agentic mesh, custom GPT full-stack integrated, synthesize to your could-based, cross-channel activation platform operating system provide?

But for most brands, the question shifted from “What is your tech stack” and “What data do you have?” to “Do you understand how all of this actually works?” And let’s be clear – that’s not a question about process. That’s a question about outcomes.

AI didn’t eliminate the needs for humans. If anything, it highlights the need to eliminate lazy humans. Deep knowledge, strong intent and a relentless focus on outcomes mean that judgement, and to some extent, taste, matter more now, not less.

Measurement: A Work In Continual Progress

You might assume that measurement is automated and folded into process, but in fact, it has become atomized across even more surfaces and is more complex than ever. 2025 gave us a multi-currency marketplace that looked more like a commodities exchange than the media world we grew up in. Nielsen. VideoAmp. iSpot. ComScore. Attention metrics. Outcome guarantees. Panel-plus-big-data. Big-data-minus-panel.  That doesn’t mean that we have better answers. It means that we need better interpretation of the answers that come from multiple places. Truth might be more subjective than ever despite the proliferation of data and automation.

Identity: Holding Up a Mirror to Complexity

Identity is an area where we see increased fragmentation and integration. Remarkably the only constant is cookies. After what seems like an eternity of “What’s next?” the answer could still be the humble cookie.

But while cookies survived, coherence did not. Retail identity graphs surged, anonymous traffic grew, and despite the huge wave of identity solutions we see the rise of synthetic audiences surging to meet the gaps by using modeling and prediction to fill the gaps that mountains of solutions can’t. The idea of a single customer view is as much a myth as it is a legend. And we see brands responding by asking that outcomes-based question: Which identities actually move our business? It’s one of the reasons NOVUS is building our own Data Spine, so that we can help clients navigate identity in the ways that matter most to them.

And of course, there’s even more opportunities to activate that data. 2025 was the year that retail media became the gravitational center. The category didn’t just grow – it reorganized the map. Retail media does not just mean lower funnel or even just media anymore.

Retail Media: Reshaping The Media Multiverse

Retail media is its own ecosystem that mirrors the outside world with capabilities in search, display, CTV, with capabilities across paid, owned, shared and earned and is reshaping the requirements of the creative side of our industry as well. And it does so with deterministic data and closed-loop measurement that make every other channel sweat a little.

For the biggest companies, this meant building entire departments to keep up further fragmenting marketing into even more specialties.  For everyone else that means finding ways to integrate retail into existing ways of working, focusing on relevance, not scale.

Social Media:  The Only Constant Is Change

And then we have our old friend social media. Social kept breaking and rebuilding itself on a monthly cycle: TikTok’s political cliffhangers, Meta’s algorithm detox, YouTube Shorts doubling TV viewership, creators and influencers becoming commerce engines, and AI content flooding feeds.

“The Algorithm” has proved unpredictable which means consumers respond unpredictably, which means that creative has to be more authentic and resilient – and responsive – than ever. For social media, and increasingly other channels, volatility isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

Here’s the real story of 2025: we stopped pretending the old world was coming back.

Despite the mega mergers of both holding companies and big media, it’s clear that what will be rewarded moving forward is clarity, adaptability, discretion, speed, integrated thinking, and flexibility.  Legacy assumptions have been left in the dustbin of history. And the future will belong to brands and agencies who can navigate multiple systems without being consumed by them – or beholden to them.

2025 wasn’t the year the industry transformed. It was the year we finally acknowledged that the transformation has already happened. 2026 is going to reward the teams who can operate confidently whether they have the best tools, scale or data. Because in a year where the giants assembled data, tech, and creativity into some version of a modern-day marketing Voltron, the real advantage will not belong to the biggest machine; it will belong to the people that know how to drive the machines.

The road ahead will not end, but it will continue to rise and fall and twist and turn, so keep your hands on the wheel.

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