What themes will be critical for marketers in 2025? At the Interactive Advertising Bureau Annual Leadership Meeting, Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s VP and general manager of ads and commerce, spoke about the future of AI-powered ads. We sat in and are sharing our top takeaways and tips for your marketing in the year ahead.
1. Embrace AI as a business essential
Business expectations of marketing are at an all-time high, and tighter budgets mean leaders have to ruthlessly prioritize. It’s not just an opportunity, but an imperative, to expand marketing’s role as a profit driver. This is where AI can help. A study by BCG reveals that AI leaders have achieved powerful results. Globally, companies in the leading stage have reported revenue growth ~60% higher than companies in the essentials stage in the last 12 months.1
2. Think beyond the traditional marketing funnel
We’re in the midst of a transformative shift in consumer behavior. At any given moment, consumers are streaming, scrolling, searching, or shopping — sometimes simultaneously. Consider how often you watch TV with your smartphone in hand; maybe you’re one of the many people watching YouTube Shorts on your TV screen or using Google Lens to search (and shop) what you see, in real time. Aim to reach your consumers across these key moments of influence. AI helps make this possible by predicting consumer behavior, allowing you to drive meaningful connections with consumers across Google and YouTube.
AI-powered campaigns allow marketers to connect with consumers as they stream, scroll, search, and shop.
3. Unlock the full value of AI
Google’s AI tools are built to tackle the biggest challenges marketers face across their creative, measurement, and media. Creative tools like Imagen 3 help marketers speed up the creative ideation and production process to hours, instead of weeks. Meridian, Google’s open-source marketing mix model, equips marketers with deeper insights from their first-party data. And AI-powered campaigns like Demand Gen allow marketers to connect with consumers as they stream, scroll, search, and shop.
4. Prioritize privacy to harness the power of your data
As first-party data continues to be critical to reaching customers and
measuring the impact
of campaigns, marketers need to keep pace with, and prioritize the adoption of,
privacy-preserving technologies. Features like trusted execution environments help us
protect user data, while allowing us to perform essential functions like data matching and
measurement.