2025 advertising trends: What brands and agencies should consider this year

Trend 1: Signal loss

While Google may have delayed its cookie phase-out, third-party cookies have already been restricted across major browsers like Safari and Firefox. Alongside this, more users are taking control of their privacy settings, opting out of cookie tracking when given the choice. These changes mean brands must think differently about how they identify and reach audiences across digital channels.

The focus is moving towards first-party data strategies and identity solutions that help bridge online and offline interactions. Consumer engagement has grown more complex, with people interacting across devices and platforms in ways that aren’t easily tracked by traditional methods. The key to overcoming signal loss is to create a strong data foundation that connects different touchpoints in a compliant and scalable way.

Experian’s Consumer Sync helps marketers navigate this by connecting on- and offline data using an identity graph that enhances audience reach across channels. Our cookieless audiences, built using privacy-first approaches, are already available across a multitude of media destinations, enabling brands to maintain their targeting precision even as traditional signals evolve.

For marketers, it’s a good time to rethink audience strategies and explore identity solutions that respect consumer choices while maintaining effective campaign performance.

Trend 2: Curation

Publishers and media owners are increasingly focused on how they package their inventory to offer more value to advertisers. Curation, particularly through private marketplaces (PMPs), is becoming a key strategy for enhancing inventory addressability and creating more targeted media opportunities.

Curated PMPs leverage first-party data and alternative identifiers to create audience segments that advertisers can access in real-time. This provides a flexible, DSP-agnostic way for brands to reach their desired audiences while maintaining control over where their ads appear.

Experian has just launched our audiences within Audigent to develop curated PMP strategies that bring together first-party publisher data, contextual signals, and identity resolution. These curated solutions help marketers deliver more precise campaigns, reducing reliance on broad-based targeting approaches. Given our recent acquisition of Audigent, we are excited about the opportunity to build further innovative solutions for advertisers and publishers.

As curation continues to evolve, advertisers will need to evaluate their media partnerships carefully to ensure they’re accessing quality inventory with the right level of transparency and control.

Trend 3: CTV

CTV is rapidly becoming a core part of digital media strategies. It offers the reach of traditional television combined with the targeting and measurement capabilities of digital advertising. In the UK, CTV is expected to grow significantly in 2025, with the market projected to exceed £0.9 billion in ad spend^[1]. With 74% of UK adults now watching CTV^[2], the opportunity to engage audiences through streaming platforms is growing.

Brands are increasingly turning to CTV to reach viewers with personalised, relevant content in a lean-back environment. However, defining and measuring CTV audiences remains a challenge, particularly in fragmented European markets where standards are still emerging. The focus now is on building accurate audience profiles and ensuring campaigns are measured effectively across platforms.

Experian helps brands address these challenges by providing robust audience solutions tailored to the UK and European CTV landscapes. Using identity data such as IP addresses, advertisers can create addressable audiences that can be activated across CTV platforms, ensuring precision in a space where traditional methods may not apply.

As CTV adoption grows, it’s important for marketers to ensure they have the right data partnerships in place to navigate platform diversity and maximise campaign effectiveness.

Trend 4: Privacy-first collaboration

With growing privacy regulations, there’s a shift towards secure ways of sharing data between brands, publishers, and technology partners. Data clean rooms are becoming a critical part of this conversation, providing a secure environment where multiple parties can match their data without exposing raw information.

Clean rooms allow brands to collaborate on audience insights, campaign measurement, and attribution while respecting privacy rules. These environments are particularly valuable for building enriched audience segments and improving media planning, as they offer a privacy-safe way to unlock more insights from first-party data.

Experian’s embedded linkage solutions are designed to make clean room collaborations more effective. By linking identity data in a privacy-first way, we enable data overlays to improve match rates between first-party data sets across organisations. This boosts scale and facilitates audience activation across a wider range of channels.

For brands and agencies, the rise of clean rooms highlights the importance of having a data strategy that goes beyond just collecting first-party data but focusses on finding the right partners to collaborate with, ensuring that data can be used effectively in a compliant way.

Trend 5: Omnichannel marketing

Consumers interact with brands in multiple ways—seeing an ad on their phone, browsing products on their laptop, and buying in-store. Marketers are getting more sophisticated moving from channel-specific campaigns to audience-led strategies that engaging consumers across multiple platforms. This omnichannel approach will become even more crucial in 2025 as channels like CTV and Retail Media Networks (RMNs) become prominent parts of the media mix.

Experian empowers advertisers to adopt an omnichannel audience approach across on and offline, boosting their share of voice in key segments. Our blend of data, identity, and activation capabilities helps tackle channel fragmentation. With numerous integrations into buy and sell-side platforms, advertisers can define an audience once and reach them across channels. This is possible as our robust marketing insights are linked to a graph of digital identifiers like hashed emails (HEMS), Mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), IPs, and Universal IDs. By leveraging links to offline identifiers, we also enable advertisers to onboard their first-party data at scale across platforms.

Omnichannel campaigns offer marketers a chance to build stronger customer relationships through relevant, personalised experiences. By putting the audience at the centre of planning, marketers can deliver a coherent, consistent message that resonates.