Author: rssmasher

If anything is clear for 2025, it’s that the cracks in an already fragmented social media landscape are only getting deeper. This year, marketers might be willing to slowly walk away.

“The social media landscape of 2025 will be a difficult place for brands to navigate, harder to monitor, and therefore less appealing to sink resources into,” Stephen Faulkner, director of research and analytics at global creative collective Forsman & Bodenfors New York, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Still yet in 2025, social ad spend is expected to continue to climb, reaching more than $82 billion, significantly up from the $75 billion forecasted for 2024, according to Statista. As expected, Facebook is likely to take the lion’s share of that spend, more than 80%, per Statista, leaving competitors like TikTok and Pinterest, and newcomers like Bluesky and Lemon8, facing off for remaining ad dollars. So even if there are more dollars, that spend will likely be more dispersed than ever.

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This edition of the daily CES Briefing looks at how the agentic era of AI looms over CES and then recaps a session that highlights the underlying issue of everything becoming an ad network.

The artificial intelligence age is passing into the so-called “agentic” era, in which large language models power tools that can take actions on people’s behalf, like booking a full trip itinerary. So of course this temporal shift would show up at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas this week.

As with the agentic era overall, its presence at CES has still been pretty nascent as of Monday, technically the day before CES officially kicks off. 

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Generative AI was a big part of marketing discussions throughout 2024, as brands and agencies became eager to invest in AI tools to do everything from creating internal workflow efficiencies to producing consumer-facing ads. These discussions will continue into 2025, and a lot of the industry hype around the technology revolves around the potential for it to make marketers’ jobs easier, faster and more efficient. But some industry experts say there’s a risk of over-relying on automated ad creation.

Another factor in the AI picture that will carry into the new year is the prospect of AI-generated or altered content being labeled as such. Marketers are hesitant to see “made with AI” labels slapped across their creative campaigns, as such a label doesn’t differentiate between content completely generated by AI or content in which AI tools were simply used to help during the creation process — despite the fact that those are two different things.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at some of the top trends and developments to keep an eye on in 2025.

• The year-in-preview
• Honey’s boo boo
• Netflix’s newest sports deal, Google’s tracking change, Hollywood’s hard times and more

The year-in-preview

If 2024 felt less monumental than recent years when it comes to the TV, streaming and digital video industry, that may be because its ultimate legacy will be to serve as preamble to what may be an especially significant year.

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A string of ad platforms expanded their retail media ad partnerships this week at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. The partnerships all focus on data.

E.W. Scripps has promoted Lyn Plantinga to the role of senior vice president of local media, effective immediately. Plantinga will lead local media operations, overseeing Scripps’ team of regional vice presidents, all while serving as general manager for WTVF, Nashville’s CBS-affiliated local television station owned by Scripps. She has served as regional vice president and…

Like Meta’s recent decision to discontinue fact-checking operations on its family of social media apps, TikTok is appealing to president-elect Donald Trump in order to safeguard its future in the U.S.

Amazon Ads revealed at CES in Las Vegas that brands using its data clean room, Amazon Marketing Cloud, can now query up to five years of purchase signals from the ecommerce giant for measurement use cases. Amazon Marketing Cloud is Amazon’s privacy-safe, cloud-based clean room that advertisers use to plan and measure ads. Previously, Amazon…

At CES on Monday, Comcast announced the launch of Universal Ads, a TV advertising platform that brings media companies together in a partnership to simplify access to premium video inventory. According to Comcast, Universal Ads will allow advertisers of all sizes to buy premium video directly from some of the most prestigious media companies today…

NBC News’ Today remained in first place in total viewers and the advertiser-coveted demo of Adults 25-54 during the week of Dec. 30. But the morning show race was tighter during the final days of 2024 as only 8,000 total viewers separated Today from its main rival, ABC News’ Good Morning America. The typically slow…