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 U.S. 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 thousand new jobs in the U.S., 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.
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5. Eschewing economic mergers to maximize 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?