The trends to watch in 2025 are driven by advancements in AI, evolving audience behaviors, and an increasing focus on efficiency and consolidation to maximize business impact.  

Success in this new era requires creative efficiency, effectiveness, and greater control to reduce risk and optimize experiences across every platform and screen. By balancing humanity with technological advancements, we can make 2025 a breakthrough year —building a more sustainable, inclusive, and impactful advertising ecosystem.

Here are the top five trends shaping the next era of impact in advertising:  

1. Creative Quality Over Reach  

Success isn’t just about reach—it’s about delivering the right message, brand and representation to truly connect with audiences.  

With AI-driven creative intelligence, brands can better understand how their ads influence consumer behavior and optimize creative elements to drive better results.  

As Blair Robertson, XR’s Chief Product Officer, noted during The Future of TV Advertising Global conference: “We often say reach beats frequency, but actually quality beats reach. If you think about the activity in the market for the last five years, it’s been about targeting, targeting, targeting. From a technology perspective, we’ve almost ignored the creative, which is arguably more important.”

This shift moves away from using reach as the primary proxy for success because “even perfect media placements fall flat if the message doesn’t connect emotionally with audiences,” Jo Kinsella, XR’s Global President and COO, noted in a recent Media Village article.  

Creative intelligence also lends itself to helping solve the big issue of wasted content. XR has shared that roughly half of all creative assets produced are never used.  

James Shears, XR’s VP, Business Development & Client Partnerships, elaborates on “waste management” in an interview with Beet.TV, sharing "This waste is occurring because advertisers often lack clear visibility into their creative assets, making it difficult to search for and repurpose existing content." 

2. Optimized Supply Paths  

In today’s fragmented media world, streamlining the journey from buyers to screens is essential for improving delivery, performance and sustainability efforts. By gaining greater control over their content, data and investments, brands can optimize their supply paths to drive results more effectively.  

As Robertson explains, “When you have all your creative assets in the same place, you get this beautiful panopticon view of everything that lets you make better decisions about creative buying in the future.”

3. The Live Streaming Era is Here  

Streaming platforms have become the new frontier for fan engagement, serving up unprecedented targeting and interactivity capabilities for advertisers. Yet, premium content experiences require high-quality and trusted delivery.

As sports and other live events continue their migration to digital channels, seamless ad delivery across platforms is critical to reaching fans with a pristine digital experience.  

We need to make sure every platform can achieve creative perfection on all screens, every time.

4. Inclusivity Drives Resonance + Results  

Audiences expect ads to reflect the diverse world we live in, and brands that embrace inclusivity are seeing stronger connections with their audiences and improved outcomes.  

XR’s new Representation Index (RX), launched in partnership with The Female Quotient, provides a standardized metric for brands to track and optimize inclusivity in their campaigns, creating content that resonates and drives impact.  

As Shelley Zalis, CEO of The Female Quotient, told Beet.TV during CES, “What this scoring does now is allow marketers, brands, content creators to be conscious of the work that they’re creating, and then they can fix it. If you can’t see what you’re doing wrong, you can’t fix it. This just gives you such a simple tool to see where you are and where you can go.

5. Sustainability Takes a Prominent Seat  

A single ad campaign can emit up to 70 tons of CO₂—the equivalent carbon footprint of seven people for a full year. This reality is driving brands to explore more sustainable practices that benefit both the environment and business outcomes.  

Collaborating with integrated partners can help brands implement smarter creative and media strategies to reduce waste, improve efficiency and minimize their environmental impact.

By streamlining processes, automating workflows, aligning creatives to a single ID and tracking carbon footprints across both streaming and linear campaigns, brands can make a significant difference in their environmental impact.

‍

By embracing these trends--grounded in data, technology and humanity--we can build a winning marketplace that empowers brands to streamline creative workflows, eliminate waste, and enhance resonance, making marketing more impactful than ever.