The Latest Ad Trends That Marketers In the Know Need to Know

(For the rest of us: IYKYK)

by Stephen Graveman

According to science*, these are the three fastest-observed phenomena in the world:

1. The rapid acceleration of technology
2. The changing world of advertising
3. How quickly you hit mute on an irrelevant CTV ad (more on that in a bit)

As marketers, we’re expected to not just be in the know on everything happening in the world — we’re often expected to be experts. If that doesn’t sound exhausting, think about what technology and advertising looked like just ten years ago (anyone remember Vine?).

To help our fellow marketers stay in the know, we’re taking a quick look at this year’s latest trends and how they will influence advertising in 2025, 2026, and beyond.

*citation needed

The Rise of Connected TV

Few letters have had such a disruptive, polarizing effect on society in recent memory as “AI.” Seemingly overnight, artificial intelligence has changed business models, rethought our day-to-day work, and sparked a lot of dialogue and debate. But for all of the excitement, there has been another acronymic technology dominating mindshare for those in the know: CTV.

Mediaocean, an omnichannel advertising platform, recently released its 2024 H2 Market Report — and found that Connected TV has overtaken AI as the top consumer trend, which has now fallen to second place. With more audiences cutting the cord — and more streaming services raising their fees — audiences are increasingly turning towards more affordable ad-supported offerings. And that’s huge news for advertisers.

WARC reports that the CTV ad market is expected to balloon by nearly 20% in 2024, and is on course to be worth $35.2 billion before the year is through. Advertisers aren’t just investing more in CTV either; they’re doubling down. CTV spend is expected to account for two-thirds of all growth in the video market this year (including linear TV). By 2026, it’s projected to account for nearly a quarter (23.9%) of video ad spend worldwide at $46.3 billion. To recap, that’s $10 billion in just two years — and there are no signs of slowing.

AI is Still A-OK

So is it time to throw in the towel on AI and focus solely on CTV? Well, kinda — but not in the way you might be thinking. While AI may have lost top billing to CTV, it’s still playing a very big role in advertising. Whether you’re using it to help write outlines, pre-viz graphics and storyboards, or automate tasks, understanding how to harness AI will still be vital to marketing success. But what if we stopped siloing these powerful technologies? What if we combined them into some kind of obvious “chocolate-and-peanut butter combo” for advertisers?

As the world’s first keyword-based audience builder for CTV, MNTN Matched perhaps best represents this future merging of powerful technologies. MNTN’s generative AI analyzes your website to determine your company’s products/services, then automatically creates an editable list of recommended audience keywords. From there, generative AI uses those keywords to find the consumers in over 99% of US households that are mostly likely to buy based on their behavior, shopping habits, or recent life events. Your budget is then automatically applied to your highest intent audiences first.

A major trend that we’ve been following at MNTN is how AI is being used to fortify audience strategies, from building to targeting to optimizations. This has helped to level the playing field for advertisers by letting brands of all industries and sizes tap into advanced machine learning to better analyze campaign performance and target high-value audiences. This frees up valuable time for marketers to analyze performance trends and make larger, more impactful strategic decisions across their marketing mix. As a unique service on the market, MNTN Matched is also the tip of the spear for what’s coming — opening doors that will make finding and converting customers more strategic, successful, and cost-effective.

Into the Fragmented-Verse

And all of this is good news because if you know the current state of streaming, then you know it has changed dramatically recently. The last few years has seen more services launch, some merge, others close or rebrand, and all of the major players introduce ad-supported offerings. It’s not enough to “just” run CTV ads anymore; you have to reach an audience across multiple services like Netflix, Hulu, and Peacock. At the same time, there are more OTT devices that stream content than ever before; today’s consumer has more choices than ever before to find and stream content on their TV — and advertisers have more options to reach them. Leichtman Research finds that 82% of all U.S. households have at least one internet-connected TV — and the average household subscribes to four streaming services.

This fragmentation is a bit of a double-edged sword for advertisers. On one hand, a fragmented marketplace leads to audiences being spread out over multiple services — and that can potentially make targeting difficult. On the other hand, if you do have the right tools, there’s more premium content than ever for your brand to match ads against. For the brands that are prepared, the reward greatly outweighs the risk. Savvy advertisers are getting ahead of this challenge by embracing an audience-first approach to reconnect their viewers across a fragmented CTV market.

By taking an audience-first approach, you skip managing direct deals with countless streaming services and instead focus on targeting what matters most — your audience itself. This is often done through CTV’s ability to apply targeting tactics to a household IP address, eliminating the need to hunt down your audience and hope they watch your ad. As a result, your ad is always being seen by the right viewer at the right time — regardless of when and what they’re watching.

The More You Know…

The accelerating trends make it clear: technology and marketing will continue to innovate and expand faster than ever. To keep up, we suggest following your favorite marketing and advertising news outlets — as well as entertainment trades and technology blogs. To help, we have MNTN Research — a central hub of analytical reports for the world of advertising. It’s a strictly facts-and-figures analysis of advertiser trends, consumer insights, and ad creative analysis for strictly education purposes — no sales pitches or promotional gimmicks.

The rapidly changing world of advertising and tech means that marketers are more obligated than ever to stay in the loop — but the ones who do are going to unlock some incredible opportunities.