Whether it’s global social media giants or Aussie startups punching well above their weight, 2025 promises to be an epic year for advertising and marketing technology companies.
The regulatory landscape is tightening and litigation is sharpening against some of the largest technology companies in the world, creating uncertainty in how some of the organisations will end up.
It’s still unclear how generative AI technology and will impact the advertising and marketing sector. There are many great tools out there that are already enhance advertising, such as Sora, Springboards, Runway, Luma and so on.
This list doesn’t cover that ground. Instead it is focused on larger technology firms that are already having a sizeable impact on the advertising, media and marketing industry
Check out the rest of B&T’s Ones To Watch, including creative and media agencies and media owners.
Meta
A lot has been made about Meta’s recent changes to its fact-checking, moderation and DE&I policies, but there are other significant legal and regulatory headwinds that the world’s largest social media company will have to navigate this year.
On the legal front, Meta faces three seismic legal battles in the US that could alter the business going forward. As reported by Future Media’s Ricky Sutton, Meta faces an antitrust suit brought by the FTC that threatened to break up the business. It has also been sued by 30 US states, accused of fuelling a teen mental health crisis by making Instagram and Facebook addictive. In a third case, a group of shareholders are suing Meta over the never-ending Cambridge Analytica scandal, claiming it hid facts and misled them on privacy policies.
Even if Meta comes through unscathed, it’s decision to relax moderation, bin fact checking, roll out community notes and scrap it’s DE&I programs follows in the footsteps of Elon Musk at X. It is unclear if and when these changes will arrive in Australia, but how users and advertisers react will be interesting, as too will be how ongoing reforms to the social media regulatory environment evolve.
Throw in Meta’s advances in AI, with some commentators suggesting they are well placed to go big on AI, it will be hard to take your eye off Meta in 2025.
Google’s advances in AI technology, including advances in Gemini, could change the way people find information forever. Rather than producing pages of links through search results, Gemini provides summary information collated from different sources. This fundamentally changes the game in how publishers and advertisers show up in Google search, and will require a serious re-think on how publishers and advertisers engage with Google’s algorithm.
Separately, Google has become embroiled in a number of anti-trust lawsuits, including a US case that accuses it of illegally monopolising the search market in violation of sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The suit threatens to break up at least parts of Google, which controls large swathes of the digital advertising market. Any break up would have a seismic ripple effect to the many businesses, including publishers and advertisers, who have become entrenched and reliant on the Google advertising ecosystem. Much like Meta, expect to hear a lot about Google on several fronts this year.
Mutinex
The past year has been massive for the marketing analytics firm Mutinex. When B&T last caught up with the firm’s chief revenue officer Danny Bass and US lead Jon Sintras, the Aussie success story had raised another $17.5 million and was valued at $132.5 million. However, the high-profile hire and subsequent departure of Mat Baxter as its APAC CEO might stick in the memory.
However, last year’s roll out of Hendren is already being described by some clients as a game changer. Hendren is a chat based interface that allows marketers and agency partners to ask questions – much like ChatGPT – and receive real-time insights that can ‘supercharge analysis and optimisation’. The more the product is used, the sharper the insights, while it is being evolved to produce more sophisticated outputs that not only save considerable time, but can enable marketing teams to have more meaningful conversations about media and marketing plans and budgets.
Mutinex is continuing to evolve its product offering and expand its wings across parts of Asia, while its US business gains momentum. Henry Innis and his charges will definitely be one to watch.
Prophet
Another Aussie start up in the marketing analytics space that is worth keeping an eye on is Prophet. The commercial mix modelling platform is being backed by some of Australia’s leading media heavyweights, including the likes of Australia Community Media chairman Antony Catalano, Bastion CEO Cheuk Chiang and Seek co-founder Matt Rockman.
Prophet uses complex mathematical models to measure performance and run predictions that inform decision-making at the geographic region, campaign, category and even the SKU or product level. It can ingest more than 86,000 macro data points – such as exchange rates, weather, age demographics, political events, cash rates, inflation targets, rental vacancy rates, gold price, competitor market share, and others – that contextualises this data to understand how external factors impacting channel investment and campaign decisions.
Last year Prophet truly arrived on the scene, at least publicly, and is working with at least half a dozen clients with a rapid growth trajectory. Like Mutinex, it is also on the charge hiring top talent. Although it is early days, Prophet’s ultimate ambition is to move beyond the MMM space, helping to inform business decisions on everything from marketing to fulfilment, warehousing, price and promotion elasticity, operations, finance, and business models.
TikTok
The fastest growing social media platform is at a critical crossroads. Unless the US Supreme Court or US president elect Donald Trump steps in to intervene, Chinese owner Bytedance is planning to turn off the lights to TikTok’s US operations in a matter of days.
This would have massive repercussions for the advertising industry. According to WARC Media’s latest global ad spend forecast, TikTok’s annual ad revenue is forecast to have grown 19.1 per cent US$23.3 billion ($35.5 billion) in 2024, and had been forecast to rise to $34.8bn in 2026. That is still well below Facebook ($95.4 billion), but significant nonetheless.
How a US shutdown and ongoing concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership impacts other markets remains to be seen. At this stage there is no indication the Australian government will follow suit, but a switch over to a more conservative Coalition government may change Australia’s approach. What would be even more radical is if X owner Elon Musk bought the US arm of
TikTok from Bytedance. Rumours of such a move were quickly batted away in Beijing, but it could make sense for both parties. Advertisers will certainly be keeping a close eye on TikTok if Musk were to buy the US business.
X
Speaking of Elon Musk, what he does with X is another one to watch. Since he acquired the business in 2022, Musk has done a lot to shock and turn away large advertisers. He dismantled its safety and moderation times, while welcoming previously banned users, often with far right ideologies, back to the platform. X has lost its brand safety sheen and nearly half of its global advertising revenues.
Since arriving in June 2023, X CEO Linda Yaccarino has been on a charm offensive to try and woo advertisers back. X claims some of those that deserted the platform have returned, and with Musk’s growing influence in the White House could make some advertisers turn a blind to his unsavoury behaviour on the platform. Yaccarino recently claimed X had launched the “holy grail” of digital advertising by being able to match where brands show up to trending moments on platform, and that there had been more than 250 product launches since Musk’s takeover.
It may be the case that X is showing some true innovation under Musk’s stewardship, but his constant attacks on foreign governments and elections is likely to give large advertisers the jitters when it comes to investing on the platform. The question is can X become as influential as an advertising platform as Musk is becoming as a far right political figure?
The Trade Desk
Only this week (15 January 2025), global adtech business The Trade Desk agreed to acquire Sincera, breaking its mantra of ‘build over buy’.
The move will provide The Trade Desk with more data to convince publishers that ads running through its platform outperform the rest of the programmatic market. As sell-side targeting becomes more important, The Trade Desk is banking on Sincera helping to convince publishers to use its platform rather than look elsewhere.
Sincera’s data powered The Trade Desk’s recent “Sellers and Publishers,” spotlighting where advertising value is migrating across the premium, open internet. It helps advertisers understand the quality of data provided by publishers and content providers, and in doing so, enables advertisers to value ad impressions more accurately.
Sincera has received the backing of important industry players, such as Aperiam, LiveRamp, and NextView Ventures. It will supercharge The Trade Desk’s
Canva
One of Australia’s greatest exports, Canva, continues to go gangbusters; last year its value surged by more than 20 per cent to $48.7 billion, after a secondary share sale underlined investor interest.
However, a decision to hike the subscription costs of its business tier product teams by 300 per cent has received a backlash with several small businesses threatening to walk away. Canva responded by rowing back, somewhat, and allowing current Canva Team subscribers to stay on their current plans ($15 per five users) and only charge new subscribers the flat rate of $10 per user.
The backlash highlights a delicate tightrope that Canva must walk. In order to invest in the sort of AI technology that will allow it to compete with market leader Adobe, it needs to raise capital and earn more per user. But in doing so it risks undermining what has made the graphic design product so appealing – its cost accessibility to a wide audience. How it retains its core audience while adding expenses bells and whistles to its product suite will be crucial to its ongoing success.
Experian
In December, data broker Experian sealed a deal to buy Audigent for a valuation of between $200 million and $250 million. The deal provides Experian with three main benefits: enhanced data, sharper identity solutions and a strong position in the booming curation market. Audigent specialises in a model that shifts targeting from the buy-side to the supply-side of ad tech, which could make it a pivotal player as the ad tech market evolves.
As cookies slowly decline, Audigent’s first-party publisher data, inventory network and sell-side distribution could allow Experian to build its own identity activation technology, which is one for marketers to keep an eye out.
