Nick Keenan, former CEO of Starcom Australia, writes that 2025 will be defined by a marketplace arms race. Dusting off our copies of the White House Tapes and refreshing our memories on the B&T ICBM missile launch protocols, here’s what’s coming your way this year.
You ever notice how every time you step away from something, you come back and suddenly see it all differently? I took a break, followed my 11-year-old kid on his soccer journey to Spain—got some tapas, watched him kick some goals, and then got sucked back into the swirling, chaotic, AI-fuelled inferno that is modern advertising. And now, looking at this industry with fresh, unblinkered eyes, I’m thinking, “What in the hell is going on here?!”
Everyone’s yammering about “innovation” and “managing rapid change.” Rapid? Change? The market already changed, folks! The roads are built, the toll booths are going up, and now it’s all about who’s got the fastest E-Pass to the best audience marketplaces. Agencies and vendors are clawing at each other, scrambling to own the biggest, shiniest, AI-powered marketplaces like it’s the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Black Monday. And advertisers? They’re just trying to figure out which one of these elaborate digital casinos will give them the best odds of not lighting their budgets on fire.
So, where do things stand in 2025? Here’s the hard truth: Big Tech has quietly merged into an all-encompassing ad juggernaut while the rest of the industry is engaged in a full-blown marketplace arms race. Every vendor and agency is either trying to build their own walled garden, storm the gates of an existing one, or cut backroom deals to control as many as possible. The battlefield is chaotic, and we’ve got three main armies:
- The Kings of the Kingdom – Big Tech (Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok). They built the castles, own the drawbridges, and charge a heavy toll for anyone wanting in.
- The Rebel Builders – Media companies, independent vendors, desperate to hammer together their own kingdoms before they get shut out.
- The Power Brokers – Agency holding companies running hedge-fund-style ad conglomerates, trying to amass power not by building, but by acquiring, consolidating, and controlling the flow of ad dollars.
The big questions lurking underneath all this madness:
- Can anyone build a legitimate alternative to Big Tech before they steamroll the competition into oblivion?
- Do marketers even need anything beyond the monster platforms already in place?
Because make no mistake—this is not about technology anymore. The tech is done. This is about control. Control of audiences, control of budgets, control of the entire damn game. And while traditional media companies are still out here bleeding money (looking at you, TV networks with your 40 per cent profit drops and northly blowing COGS line), Big Tech is just fine-tuning their ad machines to make the whole process as brain-dead simple as possible for advertisers. Google’s Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+, TikTok’s Smart+—these aren’t just tools; they’re weapons, designed to eliminate inefficiencies and keep everyone locked inside their walled gardens.
Meanwhile, The Trade Desk (TTD) stands as the last great independent marketplace, with a US $39 billion market cap it is now bigger than Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis combined. The holding companies should have been the ones to lead this type of market place transformation, but instead, got caught with their pants down in committee meetings distracted with too many business model threats. While TTD led rapid fire API integrations into every available SSP mopping up every audience outside big tech, Holdco’s got stuck lifting up outdated pricing models, scrambling to cut costs, merge teams, and slap AI on everything like it’s some kind of magical cure-all. Case and point is the Omnicom/IPG merger? Institutional investors don’t seem to buying it and the sell job is on between now and the vote in March to change that. As it stands wall street is interpreting it more as a move to buy time, not a move to fix the business model of both.
Because that’s the real problem, isn’t it? It’s not consolidation, it’s not AI—it’s the fact that the entire pricing model of agencies is built on a foundation that’s in danger of crumbling beneath them. FTE-based pricing, outdated retainers, opaque media margins are all relics of a past era that has too many services tripping over one another. And instead of pivoting to something truly strategic or drawing on their creativity to solve the problem agencies are doubling down on automation, which risks turning themselves into glorified vending machines rather than the strategic business partners clients actually need.
A pathway that will leave their planners holding their “custom strategy decks” like Blockbuster employees explaining late fees to Netflix subscribers. And as automation tightens its grip, outdated business models will keep trying to duct-tape the old ways onto a machine that no longer needs it. The inevitable truth? Fewer seats at the table, fewer pay cheques, and a whole lot of talented people left watching the industry evolve without them.
Big Tech with once-distinct platforms preventing an all in budget approach has now had a major accountability barrier removed. Remember when each platform had its own thing? Facebook was for your weird uncle’s political rants, Google was where you looked up symptoms and convinced yourself you had a rare disease, Amazon was where you bought things you didn’t need, and TikTok was for dance moves you’ll never master? Well, now they’re all just giant audience marketplaces with AI running the show.
Social (Meta), search (Google), e-commerce (Amazon), short-form video (TikTok) have all blurred into one big AI-driven marketplace where advertisers can shift budgets effortlessly between them. The lines are gone. The platforms are indistinguishable. And that’s dangerous. Because now, brands can consolidate their spend into fewer, easier-to-use platforms that you can benchmark against each other, and suddenly agencies look like middlemen who are adding friction instead of value.
Retail media networks are jumping on board too. Coles embedding its marketplace into Meta is just the start. If you can’t beat Big Tech, you join them. And the explosion of alternative marketplaces, specialty platforms, decentralised search and hyper-targeted social networks is making everything more fragmented, more complex, and more expensive. But here’s the kicker: do we actually need all these new audience marketplaces? Or are we just creating an unsustainable bubble that’s bound to pop?
Most advertisers will say they want “personalisation at scale.” But what they really want is to buy as many eyeballs as possible while only paying for the ones that convert, “maximum eyeballs, minimum cost” and rightly so. While all these niche marketplaces pop up, most brands are just throwing their budgets back at Big Tech, where the scale actually works. Hyper-targeted advertising sounds good in theory until you realise that broader demographics still perform better for most brands, so beware those touting narrow audience segments, thems is mostly selling snake oil. The real question however is: can anyone build something compelling enough to take on Big Tech, or is this all just a desperate land grab that ends with more consolidation and fewer winners?
Because let’s be real—the AI bubble is already looking shaky. David Cahn’s analysis of AI’s $600 billion black hole is a warning shot. This marketplace frenzy? It’s eerily similar. The only thing keeping this house of cards standing is the fear of missing out. And when the dust settles, only the boldest and fastest will be left standing
Whether it is the millions in investment from agency groups (woefully below big tech’s billions) or local media vendors betting on $4.5 billion dollar AFL broadcast/streaming deals to keep eyeballs on screens long enough to make the math work. It’s a market riddled with record deals, record investment which in turn needs record ad spend just to break even. Last week one of the media partners celebrating the start of the AFL deal declared “if your not live your nothing”, an understandable “hoorah” from a rebel builder rallying his troops, but a counter to that from the Kings of the Kingdom might be “if your not profitable your dead”. Then you really are nothing!
Welcome to the Great Marketplace Arms Race. Choose your weapon wisely.
