Social media ads and AI are top of mind for marketers this year: report

Whatever happens to TikTok, marketers are planning to keep spending big on social media.

That’s according to a new report from omnichannel ad platform Mediaocean, which has since 2021 been surveying marketers about consumer and tech trends for a series of biannual reports on outlooks for the industry. The seventh and latest installment, which is based on surveys conducted in November, indicates some of “the most important trends set to impact marketers this year,” Brian Wieser, principal Madison and Wall, wrote in the report.

Here are a few to keep in mind during the first half of the year.

Channel in: Social, digital display and video, and CTV ads are expected to stay hot in 2025, according to Mediaocean’s survey of almost 700 marketers across brands, agencies, media companies, measurement firms, and tech platforms.

• More than two-thirds of respondents said they plan to increase their spend on social (68%) and digital display and video (67%).
• More than half (55%) said they’ll up their spend on CTV.

Radio and audio, national and local TV, and print ads, on the other hand, might be out for some marketers this year: More respondents said their budgets for those channels are decreasing rather than increasing, but majorities in each category said they plan to maintain their spend from 2024 to 2025.

Eyes on AI: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mediaocean found that generative AI is “the most critical consumer technology and media trend” for marketers this year, surpassing CTV and streaming as of the November survey.

• Nearly two-thirds of respondents said GenAI is the most important consumer trend they were watching, up eight percentage points from July.
• When it comes to CTV and streaming, 56% of marketers said that was their top trend in both the November and July surveys.
• Respondents ranked TikTok and social video as the third most important in both surveys.

Marketers themselves are mostly using AI for data analysis, market research, and copywriting, per the report. Similarly, automation ranked as marketers’ fastest-growing investment, and was the only ad capability that saw an increase in the share of respondents deeming it “critical” from July to November, according to Mediaocean.

Performance-driven paid media, measurement and attribution, and brand advertising, however, outranked automation as the top three critical investments.

Cookie crumbles: The report also found that marketers are growing less concerned about the depreciation of third-party cookies. In 2023, 39% said that “lack of preparedness for cookieless future and other data deprecation relating to consumer privacy and walled gardens” was one of their main concerns, a share that dropped to 31% last year.

Now, “advertisers are most worried about the decline in the ability to measure campaign effectiveness on tech platforms and the open web,” according to Mediaocean, with 45% selecting that as their biggest media and marketing concern as of November.

Consumers avoiding ads, reach and frequency management, and lack of third-party data access were also cause for concern for some marketers. Mediaocean suggests that “embracing multi-ID solutions” could help address several of those issues.