One thing you can’t say about 2025 is that it’s boring. In a decade of profoundly consequential years, it takes a lot for a year that is two months old to make, say, 2021 seem like an oasis of calm. The ripples - known and unknown - from the second Trump administration are spreading far beyond the Gulf of America Mexico, with climate commitments, DEI initiatives and territorial sovereignty all onto the bonfire.

The threat of tariffs and cascading economic retribution across the world economy threatens already anaemic growth in the UK, and all the while Big Tech leaders bend the knee to make sure their own imperial ambitions don’t get thrown out along with the soiled nappy that comes along with the latest temper tantrum.

Against all this, the marketing industry can feel a bit trivial. But in a world where companies are getting sued for not spending on a platform (because racist robots very rarely come up in customer profiling), hate speech is normalised in the name of political expediency and ecommerce platforms let a hyper-famous self-professed Nazi sell swastika adorned T-shirts, this is absolutely our business. 

But it goes broader. The recent Adalytics exposé was the latest in a line of reports highlighting the shady conduct priced into the marketplace for attention on the open web. The fact that it took the most abhorrent material to get actors in the system to stop quibbling over methodologies and move to action a bit quicker than normal is a worrying indictment.

The reality is that the economic incentives in the market do not stack up. The market is so often for more, not better. It assumes an infinite source of inventory can meet an infinite volume of demand while still driving unrelenting business growth, benefits for all in the supply chain and no environmental or social detriment.

What this means in practice is a long tail of sites overstuffed with crap ad slots, AI-generated chum and outright dodgy content that send data centres into hyperdrive with all the associated GHG emissions and water use that might be saved for more productive use than serving out an MPU that no human will ever see.

The Big Tech platforms that can service that demand all have brand suitability questions to answer. It didn’t take the reelection of Trump to make these places where misinformation and harmful material proliferate, and it won’t be any different in 2028 even if a mutton-chopped Zuckerberg has to stare mournfully down a camera as he announces his latest pivot to appease President Elect Lisa Simpson.

There is a set of perfectly reasonable, rational arguments for divesting from these platforms completely independent of political preference. The utopian outcome is a realignment of budgets that breaks monopolies, but for most advertisers it butts up against a business reality rooted in that challenge of servicing growth. 

No one gets fired these days for putting 80%+ of their media budget into the big platforms. From the founder-led D2C ecommerce business who see the immediate return at low cost, to the larger corporates needing to maintain a risk-averse balance that doesn’t cut off some of the cheaper reach on plan, there’s always going to be a market for the convenience that the big platforms service. 

So thoughts turn to what we can actually do as an industry, short of ripping up thousands of different yet interconnected business models. From our perspective at Wake The Bear, there are a few core principles.

Perhaps most important, if you’re not doing it already, is the need to be watertight on the business outcomes you need to deliver. Vanity measures mean nothing if they are not bound to sustainable business success. The incentives you set define the outcomes you get. If it’s growth at all costs, be prepared for some stuff you don’t like and that probably isn’t good for business.

From this, stop reaching for the “more” lever assuming that more impacts alone equals more returns. No one is saying reach is bad, but too much breadth gives licence to those things happening at any cost. The issues that Adalytics shone a light on happened at the arse end of a site list no human looked at for more than three seconds, so if even domain level transparency is hidden from view you have to layer the caution on thick.

The next is to slow your fuelling of the market for the easy over the good. For agencies, it’s right to respond to client needs but we should be prepared to challenge on value grounds. This means treating things like PMAX and Advantage+ with a healthy skepticism. It’s not to say don’t use them, but remember that Big Tech isn’t going to love you back. Their profits and their margin are bigger than yours.

Our efforts and energies are much better served tackling bloat and improving quality - improving ad integrity and optimising towards high attention, low emission environments which typically means those with lower ad loads… which, funnily enough, plays well with your potential customers.

None of this is straightforward but it lays important foundations for what comes next in this ever-shifting ecosystem that’s likely to be characterised by less human intervention and a different profile of accountability. That is, of course, assuming we all make it through 2025 in one piece.