2025 Predictions from Tim Ringel, Global CEO Meet The People

Tim Ringel, Global CEO of next-generation international advertising group, Meet The People has these 2025 predictions.

Industry

Generally, I predict the US Advertising Market to show solid growth (10%+) in 2025 based on the announced pro-business, pro-US-job/manufacturing and de-regularity agenda that the President Elect has been promoting during the elections. His agenda combined with interest rates cut by the Fed (cheaper liquidity) will incentivise companies to invest into US based brand and campaign work as well as media investments. Furthermore, a lot of companies have been very much focused on controlling cost over the last 2 years allowing them to invest into an upwards economic cycle. The Advertising industry has a tendency to benefit from these upwards cycles early.

Canada, facing elections next year, as well as some European markets like Germany will not be able to jump onto this economic trend as quickly as the US, due to more uncertainty. This will additionally fuel US advertising growth as companies will concentrate their efforts on higher GDP growth markets than Canada, Germany and others. The UK might be a beneficiary of

the US upwards trend due to their already overcome challenges in the last three years around Brexit and elections plus, their close relationship with the US economically and financially.

AI

2025 will be another hype year for AI as the excess liquidity from PE, VC and the debt markets are looking for high growth industries with rapid revenue growth. OpenAI, Antropic, xAI and others will harvest additional momentum on the back of more consumer adoption and increased adoption by companies in SAAS licensing models like Slack, Zoom and others are normal work tools since the pandemic. AI LLMs will be the same in 2025 and become absolutely normal work tools for the majority of people working in white collar jobs.

For the advertising industry we will probably see more adoption of AI but also a realisation that AI can simply not do everything yet. This will trigger some new ideas in the industry e.g. new AI submission categories at Awards but the major shift to AI across all work streams will take until 2026/2027.

Innovation

I do predict that we will see a lot of innovation coming from AI SAAS companies as well as Agency owned/developed AI tools.   We might also finally see the launch of AI consultancy/transformation units across large HoCos and big consultancy firms.

Generally, I do not believe that we will see a big disruptive innovation, besides AI, in 2025 in the advertising industry as most companies and individuals are still very absorbed by AI and its capabilities. In case TikTok does not get banned under the new president (very likely from my POV) we will see a massively amplified move towards Social Commerce on TikTok Shops in the US. This trend is already massive in Asia where TikTok receives less headwinds and will certainly conquer the US in 2025 if regulations allow.

Data

My belief is that we will see first Data-Security / Data-Ownership discussions and even disputes in the advertising industry based on the “reckless” use of user/client/proprietary data with publicly available AI by agencies and clients.  Not sure where this will go but I see a risk and discussion here that will escalate in 2025 but definitely in 2026.   

Tim Ringel is Global CEO of Meet The People 

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