Digital Advertising In 2025 And Beyond

As with most technologies, the digital advertising landscape is constantly evolving. There are new tactics, new rules, and new technologies that can uproot your high-level strategy. But which news is worth paying attention to? We’ll share a high-level assessment of current digital advertising trends, and the future of digital advertising in 2025 and beyond. 

The Current Digital Advertising Landscape

Privacy And The Cookie-Less Future

Marketing data privacy is still a big talking point for consumers and governments. Privacy legislation remains mainly at the state level, with states like California, Connecticut, and Colorado updating their legislations annually. At a federal level, there isn’t a clear, streamlined marketing data privacy mandate (yet). With these patchwork of laws across the country, the lawyers certainly have their work cut out for them. 

To make things even more confusing, Google continues to muddy the waters on the future of data privacy, cookie deprecation, and user experience. With all the confusion and backtracking, marketers are increasingly looking at moving away from cookies as a main part of acquisition and retention strategies. Instead, consider using audiences and identity data from a partner like Stirista to give you the control you need in a long-term strategy.

AI in Advertising

The practical uses of AI in digital marketing are constantly growing. AI is being used to create content for social media and emails (more on that below), but teams still need a skilled marketer to double-check the work and make sure the consumer experience is still top-notch. AI for automation also continues to increase for manual tasks – things like report generation, lead scoring and campaign optimization.

When you look at how AI is changing advertising, it is being used as a tool to give marketers back some time, leading to more strategic and creative thinking. However, as with any new technology and with everything related to the consumer experience, it does still need to be monitored by experienced marketers.

Personalization and Contextual Strategies

A growing marketing tactic that AI enables is hyper-personalized content at scale. Think about the Spotify “Daylist” playlists – a personally curated playlist that refreshes four times a day, for all 675 million users. That level of hyper-personalization is only available with AI.

In the marketing world, AI is being used for personalized advertising in the same way. Marketers generate super-targeted discount models that hit the customer with the right coupon for their lifecycle stage and shopping preferences. If your customer tends to shop online for party supplies on Thursday at 3:20pm – send them a 20% discount on decorations at 3:15pm. If the weather shows poor weather heading towards a prospect’s neighborhood – send them a 15% discount on food delivery. AI and the amount of consumer data we have makes hyper-personalized contextual marketing possible today, but marketers are still learning to harness the data to enhance the consumer experience. 

With the patchwork of data privacy laws and the potential poor impact on consumer experience, marketers need a trusted partner to help them utilize AI and create truly personalized experiences that also keep brands in compliance.

What’s Next: Future Outlook

So what’s next for the future of digital advertising?

Privacy legislation will continue to fragment and be led primarily by states, with new policies and new states being added every year. The future of cookies is still unknown, and how Google will handle consumer privacy is still not set in stone. Regardless of privacy concerns, AI and hyper-personalization are still growing, freeing marketers up to be more strategic, creative and targeted at a larger scale.

For marketers to position themselves for success in the coming months, it’s important to have a trusted partner like Stirista with a lot of data, who can meet customers where they are, while respecting their privacy and staying in compliance.