Once More Into The Breach: Our Fearless Predictions For 2025
1. The Great YouTube Pushback
It was a moment.
Saturday Night Live was doing a send-up of YouTuber Nancy Grace in their December 21, 2024 cold open, and at close to three minutes in, Sarah Sherman, playing Grace, noted that, “Speaking of frights, because this is YouTube, we could be interrupted at any second by an insanely loud ad. I don’t know when, but—”
At which point the scene abruptly cut to Marcello Hernandez, playing one of the ubiquitous fitness influencers whose ads litter YouTube, shouting Hey!! What if I told you that you could shed belly fat by only eating hamburgers? Bro, I’d be lying!!!
The audience roared loudly in recognition. It was a moment they knew all too well.
At around the skit’s five minute mark, cast member Emil Wakim was playing a Luigi Mangione lookalike being interviewed by Grace when he was interrupted mid-sentence by Hernandez’s fitness influencer, this time shaking a pill bottle and shouting Hey fellas! Do you want a longer dong in under six days? Well, so do I!!
The audience roared again.
It was a scene that must not have gone down well in Mountain View, as it reinforced the notion that YouTube’s ads were widely viewed as low rent, intrusive and generally unpleasant.
Which is why our first prediction is that there is going to be pushback on YouTube this year as bigger budget advertisers realize that SNL’s take on the platform’s ads is pretty much spot on and that despite how easy Google makes it to advertise on YouTube, consumers can not get to that “Skip Ad” button fast enough.
To be clear, it’s going to be more talk than anything. If we’ve learned nothing else, it’s that change in our industry happens glacially.
But there will definitely be a sense that the bloom is off the rose and that YouTube is not the TV alternative cure-all it’s often made out to be, as more and more people take to watching it on TV. That the ad experience still feels “less than” TV and that the “Skip Ad” button (which SNL made sure to highlight) means that consumers can actually skip your ad. And while I have not seen any research on it to date, I would bet that having to actively hit “Skip Ad” multiple times in a single session results in what marketers call a “negative brand association.”
Point being, if you are selling actual CTV advertising, this could be a very good year to start pressing your advantages over YouTube. Which would, of course, mean cleaning up your own seemingly random ad breaks.
Looking at you, FAST services.
2. Advertisers Demand Greater Transparency
Imagine you are a brand manager. One with a sizable TV budget. And for most of your career you’ve known exactly where your TV ads were running. Right down to the position in the ad pod and whose ads ran before and after yours.
Then suddenly you are buying CTV and you’re not getting any straight answers about placement. Just “You hit your target audience on our platform. That’s what matters, right?”
And for a while you talked yourself into thinking you were okay with that. That it was a new medium, and so it didn’t really matter where your ads actually ran, so long as you reached the people in your target, right?
Only then all your friends, the ones who didn’t work in marketing, started telling you how they saw your ad five times in the same show. Then you saw it too. Only your ads were running back to back as well. And when you asked about having more control around placement, you mostly got a whole lot of runaround.
And now you are being asked by upper management to justify your CTV budget and you’re a little scared and a lot pissed off. Because on paper you should be running more CTV, but in the scheme of things it’s hard to justify spending all that money if you can’t even tell your CEO where your ads ran.
Which is why you’re going to lay down the law and tell them you need more transparency. And to your surprise they seem to agree and begin telling you about something called “contextual targeting.”
3. The Boom In Contextual Targeting
As noted in our recent Special Report on Contextual Targeting, targeting ads based on the context of the surrounding context can solve a world of hurt. On CTV that means everything from transparency issues to privacy concerns, overfrequency and lack of reach.
Which is why we think it will continue to grow in popularity in 2025.
There are so many reasons to use it and not very many reasons not to, especially since it can be used in conjunction with demo-based targeting.
Contextual, for the record, can mean anything from the emotional tone of a scene to the actors in it to the action on the screen. Targeting based on context lets brands run on shows that might otherwise seem risky, like news and live events. Better still, it can make your ad seem less jarring, more like it’s part of a piece with the show, which helps to make it more palatable.
It’s also hot right now. And not just because of our report. Which is why we think it’s going to be the big CTV ad trend of 2025.
4. Anger At The Ad Side Continues To Rise
They’ve had 10 years to figure this shit out and they are no closer now than they were back then. It’s screwing up my business, and FFS, it’s just not that hard!
It’s a screed I am sure many of you have heard (or delivered) in the past year. A sense of frustration that the people on the ad side are not even remotely trying to make all of the many problems involved with CTV advertising go away. That they are busy trying to best each other. To be the ones who “win” in some misguided notion that “the streaming wars” will have a single winner and it will be them. Or that they’re just trying to hang on until retirement,
Regardless, the level of frustration is growing, as is the sense that no one is ever going to figure this out until they’re forced to… which is why many people on the programming and distribution side are looking to big brands to break the logjam.
Will it happen in 2025? Doubtful. But there will be increasingly audible grousing about the situation, especially as even more viewing heads towards streaming, especially ad-supported viewing, along with a vague sense that contextual targeting is offering some temporary relief.
5. Legacy Media Companies Will Continue To Fight Each Other
They just can’t help it. They all want to be the next Netflix. Better and more successful than Netflix.
And so rather than accept the reality that their real enemies are Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple, the legacy media companies are going to continue to duke it out, finding new and inventive ways to undermine each other, whether that is through not cooperating on advertising standards or not collaborating on sports rights (Venu) or just pretending that the big internet companies somehow don’t exist.
As I’ve noted before, it all comes down to Ben Franklin’s comment to his fellow patriots upon signing the Declaration of Independence. “We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Unfortunately, the big media companies are all still betting on “separately” and the trend will only get worse in 2025 as their financial situation grows more precarious.
6. Venu Does Not See The Light Of Day
Venu is a most excellent example of what happens when the big media companies do not hang together. Which is why it merits the only outright prediction I am going to make.
The app, which aggregates live sports from Disney (ESPN), Fox and WBD, was already a question mark when it was announced, given that it did not include NBC and CBS and their vast array of NFL games. So that was strike one.
Then Fubu, the little-MVPD-that-could sued Venu for violating antitrust laws, winning a preliminary injunction against them last year, an injunction a judge refused to dismiss just last month, further delaying launch of the service, which was originally slated for August 2024. The service now cannot launch until at least October 2025 when the trial is slated to begin.
And that’s not even their biggest problem.
WBD, which was going to contribute dozens of NBA games to the service, lost those rights to Amazon this year. And while there are still some NBA games on ESPN, it’s not a huge selection.
Meaning that at $42/month, there are unlikely to be many takers for the stripped down service which doesn’t really work as the only sports app a fan needs.
So there’s that and then there’s the growing legal costs and delayed launch. Which is why I’ll be very surprised if they don’t sunset the project in the next month or two.
7. Cord Cutting Picks Up…Slightly
While the “massive wave” of cord cutting turned out to be more of a slow-but-steady trickle, it’s likely to trickle a little harder this year.
First off, the elections are over and so folks who subscribed in order to keep up with the news no longer have much of a reason to do so. (News on the FASTs plus CNN on Max helps too.)
Second, sports keep moving to streaming. Which infuriates fans, but also gives them less reason to keep their cable subscriptions.
Third, so much of what is on cable and broadcast is now available on streaming, albeit a day or two later. But our asynchronous viewing abilities, along with the demise of the monoculture, also mean that there’s far less pressure to watch those shows in real time.
Again, this is all incremental. If six or seven percent of households cut the cord in 2024, then we can expect eight or nine percent to do so in 2025. Maybe 10 percent. (And for the record, by “cutting the cord” I mean giving up all manner of pay TV services, not just switching from a cable-based MVPD to a virtual one.) But with each bump, the ability to justify maintaining the current ecosystem gets a little bit weaker until, sometime in the early 2030s, no justification remains.
8. Cable News Takes A Hit/Local News Sees A Resurgence
I have become semi-infamous for making this point in a Washington Post article back in 2023, but cable news is dying.
It’s dying because the reason for it no longer exists
Back in the 1980s, the only way for a news junkie to get their fix was to buy the daily newspaper or to watch one of the half hour network evening news shows. There was news radio, but that was local, mostly weather and traffic, certainly not national and international news stories.
But now we have the internet. And social media. And podcasts. And blogs. So there’s no real shortage of ways to get the news. Which means cable news really has no purpose. Its audience, as has been pointed out many times, is largely composed of senior citizens who keep it on as background noise. It’s become hyperpartisan and tribal too, to the point where there are a lot of people who feel that turning on MSNBC or Fox is a political statement more than an information gathering process.
And we can expect to see ratings decline even further, especially now that the election is over.
Local news, on the other hand, is getting harder and harder to come by, as local newspapers get shut down and/or get bought up by big conglomerates who mostly see them as vehicles for advertising and don’t actually cover local news stories anymore.
Which is why we’re seeing a revival in local broadcast news coming, mostly on FAST services.
One of the great things about the AI revolution is that local news shows can be personalized to show you the news that matters to you—so stories about your county, the sports teams you follow, localized weather.
That’s not a 2025 thing or even a 2026 thing, but it’s coming and we will see bits and pieces here and there, as the various broadcasters and station groups experiment with what is possible.
We’ll also see a slow revival of local news—no one is going to be breaking any viewership records, but rather, the bleeding will slow down and stop. Ad dollars will come back to local too as nascent businesses aimed at providing small and medium businesses with the sort of self-serve advertising they can get from Facebook continue to crop up.
This is a long term play—not every small business will have the bandwidth or desire to use AI to create their own TV commercials. But enough will, the technology will get better, the sense that Facebook is becoming AOL 2.0 will continue and the self-serve market will gain traction. Not in 2025, but by 2026 or so, we can expect to see the mainstream media suddenly “discover” it, the way they discovered the OS Wars this year.
9. The OS Wars Still Matter
We were all over the OS Wars last year, the battle over which interface prevails on as many TV sets as possible
Here again, there won’t be one winner, but rather, many, with each half percent of market share worth millions, if not billions.
It’s a pretty crowded field too, especially in the US. You have the big tech players (Google and Amazon), big consumer electronics manufacturers (Samsung and LG, globally, Vidaa from Hisense, VIZIO in the US,) independent players (Whale TV, Titan OS and TiVO), and Roku, which is sort of its own beast.
Which is why everyone was more than a bit surprised when The Trade Desk, an ad tech company that runs a demand side platform (DSP) announced that it was launching its own TV operating system a few months back. (This, after denying earlier reports of its existence.)
I don’t really see much of a place for them. The thing about a TV operating system is that it’s not like a computer operating system, where you get to pick which one you want. The TV OS comes pre-installed on your TV, you don’t get to choose a new one, and most US OEMs already have their own proprietary OS.
There’s some room in Europe, where it is estimated that 40 percent of the market is still unclaimed, and elsewhere in the world too (Asia, Africa, Latin America) but those markets are still fairly new, the competition fierce, and there are Chinese and homegrown competitors to contend with.
What I do see starting to happen, just on the periphery in 2025, but picking up over the next few years, is TV OEMs using the superiority of their operating systems as a key differentiator for consumers. The advantages will all come courtesy of AI and will involve features like better discovery, better shopping tools and superior personalization.
We’re at a point where visual innovations are no big deal—what’s the point of having 8K resolution if no one is making 8K content—and so the usefulness of the TV, both as a viewing device and as the centerpiece of a smart home system—may prove to be the difference between a sale and a pass.
10. X’s Audience Gets Split Between Threads and Bluesky
Extremely Online journalist types are extremely proud of how many of their ilk have decamped X for Bluesky where they can be free of “Nazis” (e.g. people with different political opinions) and not worry about getting death threats for criticizing Trump.
They also tend to dismiss Threads, Meta’s erstwhile entrant into the social media fray as, well, overly corporate and bland, a social media version of Nickelback.
But here’s the thing: go to the Apple App Store download charts and you’ll find that Threads has been in the top 10 for many months now. This week it’s at #2, ahead of TikTok and ChatGPT.
Bluesky meanwhile enjoyed a short burst of popularity in the two weeks after the US presidential election, actually hitting #1 on November 13th (Threads was #2) but has since sunk to the point where it is not in the list of the top 200 apps showing up on my phone this week.
To be fair, Bluesky does attract a lot of name journalists and my buddy the New York Times Pitchbot.
But Threads seems to have everyone else: all those influencers whose audiences are mostly on TikTok and Instagram, people whose interests are fashion, sports, comedy, relationships, foreign languages, parenting, pets… you get the picture. Basically everyone but journalists and online activists.
That’s a much bigger audience, by the way, and one that the television industry is going to need to pursue in order to promote its shows.
Much in the way it’s going to need to be on Bluesky to talk to the chattering classes about Shows That Matter (especially around awards season) and about business decisions like mergers and acquisitions.
X was once the only show in town for all that, at least from a microblogging perspective. But it looks as if its audience will slowly drift onto the other two platforms in 2025, though the jury is still out as to (a) whether either new platform has legs and (b) whether audiences will eventually return to X, which is a distinct possibility.
Point being we will see a lot of activity in the space and TV marketers should make sure to keep an eye on all three this year, albeit for different reasons.
That about wraps it up. Have a great 2025 and I promise to review these a year from now to see how they panned out. (Here’s the scorecard on our 2024 predictions in case you missed it.)
