Welcome to 2025 – a year where the only certainty is uncertainty. The flurry of media and agency recent announcements highlights how Darwin’s theory of evolution still holds: it won’t be the strongest, nor will it be the smartest but rather it will be the ones most adaptive to change that will thrive and lead the market.

Here are some of the key interlinking themes likely to define the media and agency landscape in 2025:

The blurring of boundaries will continue to impact media selection and usage significantly

Media agencies are becoming resellers of inventory, clients are bringing more media in-house, and tech companies are bypassing agencies to deal directly with clients.

Marketers are concerned with media agencies transitioning from ‘media neutral’ advisory partners to resellers of inventory, wary of the increasing control and influence exerted over their agency partners by the large tech companies.

Clients who are providing all of the funding for the ecosystem are the ones most at risk from these changes. The question is have enough smart marketers noticed and are they prepared to raise the right questions around this?

Principal media-based trading will be forced out from behind its self-imposed shroud of secrecy

In 2024 several of the global holding groups openly acknowledged significant profit was now being derived from ‘undisclosed trading’ through their trading divisions, with other groups announcing an intent to more aggressively pursue this........

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