The news: Consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers plan to hop on the AI train and scale up their retail, social, and connected TV (CTV) ad spending, but challenges around audience and data fragmentation remain.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of CPG marketers expect to increase their retail media spending in the second half of 2025, per MediaOcean’s 2025 H2 Market Report, compared with 59% for social platforms and 55% for CTV.

However, CTV advertising has some roadblocks: 60% are concerned about data silos across platforms and limited cross-channel visibility, and half say a lack of unified measurement is a barrier.

AI’s rise: To navigate growing fragmentation and scale campaigns efficiently, CPG marketers are increasingly turning to generative AI (genAI).

• 70% consider it the most important consumer trend to watch in the second half of 2025.
• 50% are using genAI for data analysis, market research, and copywriting.
• Just 28% are applying it to creative versioning, leaving a substantial window for more marketers to use AI for ad targeting and media mix modeling (MMM).

While half of marketers are leaning into genAI for writing content, they should exercise caution to ensure content doesn’t get homogenous and repetitive of other brands’ writing.

Doubled audience: For marketers focused on CTV ads, 27% say personalization is a key interest, but cross-platform audience targeting without redundancy presents an issue for 45%.

Marketers should explore AI-driven creative testing and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) to address overlapping audiences, adapt ads to specific users, and improve CTV campaign efficiency.

What can be done? Prioritizing flexible, multi-ID strategies can help solve the challenges of reaching consumers across fragmented platforms and screens, per MediaOcean.

GenAI could be especially helpful to enhance MMM to navigate signal gaps and guide investment across different channels—like sales or retail website traffic—more precisely.

This is particularly important given limited access to owned data—due to retailer-controlled POS—and continued uncertainty around tools like Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

Our take: Using creative AI tools like one recently added to YouTube Shorts to resize and retarget content for different social platforms can maximize campaign reach.

CPGs are huge advertisers, and when they pivot, they can influence the entire market. Broader marketers should follow their lead not only in spending but by immediately testing AI tools in high-impact internal areas like CTV creative or retail copy optimization.