2025: a year to remember?
Opinion
Nick Manning despairs at what’s happened to adland over the past 12 months, but insists there’s plenty to reflect on, and that signs of positivity do exist.
For those fortunate enough to have seen A Night at the Opera, you may remember Groucho Marx explaining a contract’s ‘sanity clause’ to Chico. His reply: “There ain’t no sanity clause”.
This vaguely Christmas-themed joke prompts reflections on the madcap world of advertising in 2025.
It is incredible that those channels that are arguably among the least effective for advertisers, large and small, are taking the lion’s share of advertising revenue.
It is remarkable that the more effective channels in both the short and long term are being starved and are having to consolidate.
It is extraordinary that the content produced by respected and responsible publishers is being expropriated by AI operators, depriving the originators of referral traffic and revenue.
It is also bizarre that some of the big platforms, funded by advertising, cause real-world harms yet are not held responsible for the content they carry and make vast profits from scam advertising that ruins people’s lives.
It is galling that they have no content cost and can plough huge margins into further investment in AI that increases their dominance over the media owners who do create high-quality content for the public and advertisers.
It is also unbelievable that advertisers of all kinds target elusive audiences one person at a time in the hope that they can grab a couple of seconds of their attention to make a sale to the 5% of active purchasers who, meanwhile, do their best to avoid advertising.
It is farcical that the platforms invent increasingly ridiculous ‘ambush’ ad formats that worsen the problem of advertising’s intrusiveness, leading to further loss of public support and, ironically, an additional loss of effectiveness.
It is bananas that the platforms’ DIY tools massively increase the amount of advertising while reducing its standards, with barely any apparent attempt to target the most appropriate audiences, while the platforms ‘improve’ the advertisers’ ads without their consent.
It is utterly ridiculous that advertisers pay out billions of dollars to advertise to machines.
It is positively crazy that people’s data and privacy are still treated so cavalierly in the pursuit of advertising targeting.
It is nuts that media trading is conducted on volume, not value, and that some network media agencies have to play a shell game with their clients to hide their true profit margins while rewriting media plans to maximise their revenue, and their owners still only make single-figure profit increases.
All of the above result in ineffectiveness and waste on an absurd scale.
Google itself estimates that 60% of all advertising is wasted, while WARC and System1 have calculated that 94% is ineffective.
This is a trillion-dollar industry where the majority of the spending might as well be set on fire.
2025 saw another turn of the screw
Despite appearances to the contrary, the biggest news in advertising this year was the re-election of the Trump administration.
The only obstacle to the global domination of the big US corporations is regulation, but this got watered down when they paid due homage to the new President, and they’re already getting the benefits of their pizzo.
Alphabet had a rap over the knuckles from the US Department of Justice with no requirement to divest, so Google will continue to control much of the ad market.
Jurisdictions around the world have been intimidated by US tariff threats and have diluted measures to protect the public, perpetuating advertising’s role in enabling ‘bad stuff’.
The US administration continues to oppose regulatory action for no reason other than its own power to do so.
And in the arm wrestle over Warner Discovery, the US Government now seems to be favouring Paramount as a way to neuter CNN while championing ‘free speech’.
The dominance of the US mega-corps is extending deeper into the TV/video market, with YouTube flying and the streamers flexing their muscles as Netflix pursues Warner.
Netflix is also steadily building its own walled garden advertising infrastructure and Amazon is expanding its giant tentacles in all directions, including streaming via Prime and retail media. At the same time, its DSP goes from strength to strength.
This year, the US nomenklatura even carved up TikTok to their own benefit without any real scrutiny, and the Omnicom/IPG deal was approved with conditions that echo the Musk/GARM case, which attempts to limit political or ideological bias.
Unless, of course, it’s the kind of bias approved by the White House.
This year was probably the first where the majority of the advertising that people saw and heard wasn’t made and distributed by agencies, so billions of people experienced the worst kind of advertising, untouched by skill and experience.
There used to be a symbiotic esprit de corps among advertisers, agencies and media owners in the shared mission of making advertising work harder. This only now applies to the minority of the market.
The US platforms, streamers, and ad tech industry only cares about its own interests, and these are financial.
Wall Street, not Madison Avenue, controls the advertising market, and its business models determine everything else. Even Omnicom/IPG is small by comparison and subject to the pressures of the financial puppeteers.
The big platforms are driving automation to achieve hegemony in the advertising market, and this year, Marc Zuckerberg let the cat out of the bag twice, once over trade matters and then over Meta’s true intentions in advertising.
As the rump of the traditional advertising industry struggles to transition from workshops to factories, it is failing to turn lathes to lasers at the necessary speed, hampered by decades of under-investment in technology.
It is salutary that WPP has chosen to partner with Google to create its Open platform, short-cutting internal development but creating dependency.
This year’s Omnicom/IPG deal is ample evidence of the established order consolidating as the world changes around them, and Dentsu’s disinvestment plans and WPP’s serial travails this year need little further commentary. Perhaps the UK Government’s win for WPP will help the necessary turnaround.
The mooted Comcast/ITV and Telegraph/DMGT deals are proof of the need for consolidation in the legacy media, providing a firmer financial footing even if a US company necessarily ends up controlling the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster.
ITV’s 70th birthday compendium of great commercials was also something to remember this year when thinking about how great advertising captures hearts and minds, not just ‘eyeballs’ and snippets of attention, reluctantly granted.
The regulators seem to have received the memo about the market’s horizontal diversity in audiences and ad revenue, and we can expect a more liberal approach to takeovers, followed by further contraction.
So, what exactly should we remember about 2025 in 2026?
Firstly, that advertising matters way beyond its role as funder-in-chief of the world’s largest corporations. It affects people’s lives, not just business, but it’s become a cash dispenser for those platforms that hide their responsibility behind the fig leaf of freedom.
Wall Street may run the show, but Main Street is both the audience and the product, and this dichotomy is at the heart of the public’s loss of faith in advertising.
Advertising is funding platforms that spread division and cause real-world harms. Advertisers should consider their advertising investments as part of their approach to ethics.
Secondly, that advertising works best when created and distributed by skilled people, most of whom work in agencies. DIY advertising is often pointless.
Thirdly, the right messaging across the right range of channels is needed, and an excessive reliance on short-term, one-to-one media where traffic is increasingly agentic and synthetic is a hard way to build a business or brand.
Fourthly, that advertising funds the pluralistic media eco-system of high-quality content for the public and advertisers, and without it, they have to merge in order to survive.
Another point to remember from this year is that the advertising industry as we knew it is now a thing of the past.
There is a rearguard action. Omnicom/IPG may be a much-needed attempt to invent a new approach to marketing, not just advertising, or simply a perpetuation of the old order.
Let’s hope for the former, but the human cost of transformation could be heavy.
This year, it became ever more apparent that change in marketing and advertising can only come from advertisers themselves. They have the motivation and the means.
There are some promising signs. McKinsey reports that ‘brand’ is making a comeback, and the recent Ebiquity/WFA study suggests that investment is likely to grow, even if the latter study was less optimistic about how it’s spent.
Agencies can play a key role in driving change within advertisers, advising them on internal structural change management to improve effectiveness and accountability, creativity across all disciplines, not just departments, and a pluralistic channel strategy.
We should remember the lessons from 2025 and aspire to resist the death of expertise in advertising.
We need to reassert and share the core principles of great advertising, adapted for the agentic age, especially for advertisers and especially the long tail of newer advertisers.
To this end, ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ will continue its mission to aggregate the best publicly available research, data, case studies, and thought leadership, including outputs from our October conference. We’re aiming to help advertisers navigate today’s market realities with the world’s top advice.
We plan to build a portal to bring together the world’s best work and ideas, primarily for advertisers but available for all to contribute to and access. Everyone is welcome to help.
There’s a lot at stake, but if the lessons from 2025 are absorbed and advertisers regain belief in the full firepower of multi-polar marketing and advertising, we might just see the return of common sense next year and beyond.
Fingers crossed.
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, offering strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industry, and is non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance. He writes for The Media Leader each month.