In a year marked by platform volatility, AI acceleration, tariff shocks, and shifting consumer behavior, marketers searched for clarity across EMARKETER’s most-read topics. The top 10 themes reflect where advertiser attention truly moved in 2025. These trends captured the forces reshaping performance, discovery, and measurement: AI-driven optimization, creator-centric social ecosystems, commerce-led advertising, and CTV’s rise as the new premium video default. Together, they tell the story of a market recalibrating around efficiency, accountability, and cultural relevance as marketers prepared their 2026 strategies.

As consumers become adept at ignoring ads, avoiding dreaded ad fatigue requires brands to prioritize creativity and interactivity.

Audiences say TV is the most acceptable place for advertising, but amid the shift to digital for younger buyers, a balanced approach is critical.

Amazon is recalibrating its relationship with the agencies and adtech firms that helped build its retail-media dominance. While Amazon insists agencies remain central, many intermediaries say rising data costs and tool duplication echo earlier platform playbooks from Google and Meta—centralize strengths, limit external dependencies, and scale in-house automation. The result is a more controlled, AI-driven ecosystem that may reduce tooling diversity while boosting Amazon’s own ad stack. For marketers, the challenge will be balancing Amazon’s convenience and scale with the flexibility, transparency, and customization offered by independent partners.

On today’s EMARKETER Miniseries—AI-Driven Media Management—we explore how to break down the media manager role into workflows that can be automated or augmented by agentic AI, what agencies misunderstand about AI, and which agency tasks are ripest to hand off to AI right now. EMARKETER Senior Director of Content Jeremy Goldman speaks with Adam Epstein, co-founder and CEO of Gigi. Listen everywhere you find podcasts, and watch on YouTube and Spotify.

NBCUniversal (NBCU) debuted AI-powered ad features ahead of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in 2026, giving advertisers the opportunity to leverage AI for better results in live TV and video-on-demand properties. Campaigns running on NBCU properties now gain access to the massive benefits of utilizing AI for TV, CTV, and VOD advertising.

In 2026, AI will reshape advertiser workflows and behaviors, while rising video consumption will boost CTV and YouTube.

Universal Ads announced Thursday an expansion of its Universal Audience Network in partnership with third-party publishers, including Samsung Ads, Cox Media, Philo, Vevo, and Telly. New partnerships enable marketers to scale campaigns with simplicity as Universal Audience Network maintains an over 90% household reach across premium video. Universal Ads is tackling one of streaming’s biggest pain points—fragmentation—by consolidating access to the streaming and connected TV (CTV) ecosystem.

To counter complaints about its proposed Warner Bros. purchase, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has pointed to what he says is the company’s biggest competitor: YouTube. Netflix’s contention that YouTube is its biggest competitor is defensible, but key differences exist between the platforms that opponents could use to swing back. Ultimately, it may come down to a court ruling—and recent antitrust cases suggest judges may side with Netflix.

Sell-side platform PubMatic and connected TV (CTV) ad company BrightLine announced a partnership that will bring addressable and interactive CTV ad formats to PubMatic’s programmatic platform. As interactivity becomes a critical differentiator in a crowded CTV ad landscape, marketers can use PubMatic and BrightLine’s partnership to more easily deploy interactive CTV ad formats across major publishers.

US ad spend growth will grow a total of 11% in 2025, excluding political spending, per an updated Madison & Wall forecast cited by Mediapost. The figure is well above Madison & Wall’s previous estimate of 3.6% growth and follows 13% YoY growth in Q3. Even as total media ad spending continues to grow, growth doesn’t entirely negate the overall climate of uncertainty that will undoubtedly affect the ad industry in the year ahead. Slowing growth expected from Madison & Wall in 2026 and ongoing economic headwinds indicate that advertisers are still operating in an era of caution.

Netflix will officially acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) streaming and studio assets in an $82.7 billion deal, the company announced Friday morning. Netflix stated it has secured $59 billion in financing from a collection of banks to finalize the deal. This is a coup for Netflix. Acquiring Warner Bros. will provide exclusive control over intellectual property such as DC, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and HBO Originals. Ted Sarandos agreed, framing the acquisition as a rare but necessary shift for Netflix to maintain its leadership.

Streaming TV advertising is moving toward transparency and accountability as DoubleVerify (DV) brings Open Measurement (OM SDK), a standard in desktop and mobile advertising, to streaming environments. Expanding access to OM SDK and providing standards for transparency in streaming will enable advertisers to plan and measure streaming ad campaigns effectively—marking a major industry shift.

NBC News is introducing an ad-free, subscription-based streaming platform that consolidates its full lineup of content, spanning linear broadcasts, podcasts, live channels from NBC-owned stations, and original exclusive reports, into a single application, per Variety. Multiple platforms appeal to user preferences but cause more difficulties for advertisers who are struggling with an increasingly fragmented TV ecosystem.