5 Takeaways for Ad Tech from CES 2025

Posting a quick dispatch from Las Vegas while this week is still fresh(ish) in my mind.

Across the board there was an incredible spat of content, conversation, compassion, and innovation.

Here are my 5 takeaways for Ad Tech…?

1.??? We have a powerful community.

As the week unfolded we watched with horror as the wildfires blazed paths of destruction in California. Some people brought their families to Vegas after evacuation orders came out and others had to go “home” to tend to houses that no longer exist. The scale of the damage - physical and emotional – is unthinkable but our community is rallying to provide support.? ??

I attended a session at Brand Innovator’s Marketing Leadership Summit featuring Randi Stipes , CMO of The Weather Company, and Laurie Keith , VP Emerging Media and Technology, at Ad Council. They challenged everyone in the room to think about?how we can harness the talent and access our industry has across media, creative, and more to support important causes.

2.??? AI can transform physical spaces too. I’ve written a lot lately about the impact Agentic AI is having on how people interact with digital content and what it means for advertising and categories like paid search. At CES 2025, it was apparent that AI is also poised to fundamentally shift how we interact in physical spaces. For example, this Proto Hologram projected a person right in front of me that looked 99.9% like a real person in the room. No need to plug into the metaverse when the metaverse can plug into the real world.

3.??? He who controls the glasses controls the masses. This is a spin on my quip to Adtech God about memes and attribution. In the context of consumer electronics, there’s an arms race underway to control the glass that covers our screens and, increasingly, our faces. There were smart glasses everywhere and tons of fresh takes on televisions that make the curved screens of just a few years ago feel like legacy tech. Amazon is all-in here and their house of the future showcase included a number of innovations around screens and streams.

4.??? The key for new channels is incrementality. At the Brand Innovator’s event, retail media was a hot topic and the discussion centered around how to ensure that ads on retail media networks are delivering incremental sales and not just cannibalizing other campaigns and getting last-click attribution. David Young, VP Retail Media for DICK’S Media Network (far left with mic in pic) drove this point home and pointed to the importance of brands using first-party data and segmentation to ensure audiences are properly addressed at all steps of the purchase process. I’d say the same goes for the Agentic AI category as we start to see OpenAI and others roll out ad formats. Hopefully they will allow for third-party tracking and optimization so brands can apply best practices for measurement and ultimately understand the incremental impact these new platforms are having.

5.??? CTV is a big dill. In my last piece, I shared what it will take for CTV to overtake linear. The launch of Universal Ads this week is a great example of how ad tech innovation can drive growth – and incrementality. By bringing thousands of small advertisers into CTV, providers of premium streaming video can generate net new monetization. This came up in the session Magnite hosted with Marketecture and Ari Paparo used the example of a CPG pickle brand in his conversation with Paige Bilins as a company who would have never advertised on CTV now being part of the addressable market. Now that’s something we would all relish!

Looking forward to converting the conversation to action across all of these themes throughout 2025 and sending good vibes to everyone who needs them in California!