Programmatic Advertising in 2025: What’s Next for Organic and Paid Solutions?

The future of programmatic advertising is being shaped in 2025 as the media landscape undergoes a refresh. Accelerating technological advancement, ever greater consumer expectations and increasing regulations to protect personal privacy are all converging. Brands and marketers must evolve by finding the right balance between innovation, consumer safety and sustainability in a cookieless world.

The future of programmatic advertising as the media landscape undergoes a refresh will be a central theme in 2025. Accelerating technological advancement, ever greater consumer calls for transparency and environmental and social responsibility, and increasing regulations to protect personal privacy are all converging. Brands and marketers must find the right balance between innovation, consumer safety and sustainability to succeed.

According to global marketing research and advisory firm WARC, the top five challenges for digital marketers in 2025 are: brand safety, adapting to a cookieless era, accurate viewability and measurement, combating ad fraud, and navigating ad technologies.

What does this mean for programmatic advertising? Brands and marketers will more fully embrace: the prioritization of clean, accurate data and putting privacy first; marketing strategies and advertising that reflect brand values and speak to consumer expectations; and a shift to high-impact, environmentally and socially responsible digital advertising.

Digital advertising in 2025

The future of programmatic advertising will be guided by a few key trends. Understanding what to expect will help you build paid and organic programmatic strategies that will succeed in this evolving media landscape.

A surge in AI tools will drive programmatic campaigns

Supply-side and demand-side platforms will continue to develop AI tools that will increasingly become foundational to efficient, effective, optimized-in-real-time digital media strategies and campaigns based on deep data analytics. In 2025, marketers will have to determine the right level of automation and implement robust governance to best leverage AI to drive results. AI will underpin marketing strategies and media plans.

Marketers will complete the shift to privacy-first targeting

To this point, programmatic advertising has relied on third-party cookies to track users' online interactions and gain insights into their behaviours. This is about to change as Google’s Chrome browser phases out third-party cookies. In this new world, marketers have to rely on first-party and second-party data. Brands and publishers collect first-party data from their websites, apps and customer relationship management platforms. Second-party data is first-party data from another source, such as a business partner.

Other ways to access this type of privacy-first data include:

• Customer data platforms, which collect first-party data from multiple sources and use this information to create a holistic view of each customer.
• Data management platforms, which collect, organize and leverage first-, second- and third-party audience data from online, offline and mobile sources to build highly detailed customer profiles.
• Data clean rooms offer a secure space for brands, advertisers, media agencies and publishers to merge their first-party data and collaborate without sharing personal identifiable information. They use techniques such as anonymization and aggregation and tools such as encryption, differential privacy, hashing, salting and other privacy enhancing technologies combined with strict access and privacy controls.
• Marketers can implement universal IDs – such as unique identifiers – to identify and target users across multiple devices and websites. They can also use cohort-based contextual targeting. For example, Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts groups users into interest-based cohorts, allowing brands to target users based on interests rather than personal identifiers, protecting user privacy.

Connected television scales

Smart or internet-connected TVs (CTVs) are devices and technologies that allow users to consume subscription-based video-on-demand, free content with advertising, apps and games online from the TV screen. It’s estimated that about 80 per cent of U.S. households have a smart TV – a number that is expected to grow thanks to the popularity of streaming services, such as Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Hulu. For marketers, this is a great time to add this channel to an effective digital multichannel marketing strategy.

Fast fact: CTV ads are projected to double, from US$20.5 billion in 2023 to US$41.2 billion in 2028.

In addition to any television capable of streaming digital video or device that enables streaming (e.g., Roku), CTV also includes ads that play before and/or after a movie, episodic series, documentary or other streamed content. This allows brands to reach precisely targeted audiences and access explicit reporting and metrics.

Tips: To leverage CTV, adjust your existing linear TV budget to include both and adapt linear TV ads and creative for CTV. Retarget your linear TV advertising audience using programmatic campaigns to better connect and fully leverage these two channels.

ESG considerations become part of programmatic buying

Consumer and brand focus on environmental, social and governance considerations will increasingly inform media buying in 2025. It’s already happening as more brands and marketers build broader sustainability metrics, such as direct business impact, into their ad spending to reduce the environmental impact. Carbon footprint tracking apps are helping to accelerate this transition, but challenges remain. The biggest challenge is hitting the appropriate balance between profit and climate action. 

Omnichannel marketing will continue to grow

More brands will prioritize omnichannel marketing, defined by Hubspot as “a method where businesses promote their products and services across all channels, devices, and platforms using unified messaging, cohesive visuals, and consistent collateral. Omni-channel marketing ensures you reach customers where they are with a relevant and on-brand offer.” AI and machine learning will more fully leverage data to optimize cross-channel strategies and interactions and enhance the buyer’s journey by providing highly personalized messaging that puts the customer first. In turn this will increase impressions, click-through rates and conversions, and lower the cost per acquisition.

The benefits of implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy include:

• better customer insights;
• increased alignment of marketing campaigns;
• a more predictable buyer journey;
• the ability to connect online and offline marketing efforts;
• improved customer retention and loyalty; and
• increased sales.

Tip: Attention metrics are data points that measure how much attention a user pays to a marketing message or advertisement. Implement them to understand how well a campaign is performing and to optimize ad placements.

Programmatic audio dominates

People are listening to all forms of audio content – news, music, podcasts and books – and they want more. Audio brands such as Spotify, iHeartRadio and Pandora are household names with popularity that continues to grow. For example, 92 per cent of people in the U.S. listen to radio every week.

There have been few ad format and programming options, and limited ability for advertisers to measure the impact of audio ads. This is changing as the automated buying, selling and insertion of ads into audio content, also known as programmatic audio advertising, continues to take hold.

The benefits of programmatic audio include:

• Enhanced targeting (Brands can segment audiences by demographics, location, interests and purchase history.)
• Context-aware, personalized messaging via dynamic creative optimization
• Data-driven insights
• Improved effectiveness

In 2025, brands will coordinate their programmatic audio ads with other channels and formats, such as out-of-home advertising. This will increase the number of times consumers receive a message, which boosts engagement and improves the effectiveness of campaigns.

Retail will become an important part of the digital advertising mix

Retailers are amping up their presence in the advertising space and taking a data-first approach. For example, Amazon Advertising allows sellers to promote their products and services on the Amazon platform and includes product display ads, sponsored ads and its own demand-side platform that uses AI and first-party data to deliver ads. It also offers a self-service display ad solution. Sellers only pay when shoppers click on their ads. Walmart acquired TV-maker Vizio to help advertisers create more meaningful customer interactions and scale the impact of its ad company, Walmart Connect. Retailers are employing closed loop attribution, using customer and marketing data to connect marketing efforts with sales outcomes.

Partnerships between digital ad platforms and trusted publishers will grow

As the media landscape continues to change and marketers leverage AI while adjusting to a cookie-free, privacy-first world, the demand for quality content will grow. Working with publishers can help brands access high-value, first-party data to create effective digital advertising strategies and marketing campaigns.

Understanding what’s on the horizon for programmatic advertising will help marketers prepare for the future and create innovative organic and paid programmatic advertising strategies that build engagement and drive results.