Ted Sfikas, Field Chief Technology Officer of Amplitude, shares his thoughts on the future of adtech, privacy and AI for today’s business leaders.
What do you see as the most significant trends shaping the B2B marketing and adtech industries in 2025?
I think the biggest trends that will take place in the next 12 months into 2025 will be a strengthening momentum for privacy conscious data collection, and AI-driven Ad targeting. Both are related in that they surface as logical outcomes from the current Google anti-trust trial, however they were in play for some years before that. The trial simply shone a spotlight on them.
What will 2025 bring for AI Driven Ad Targeting?
DSPs will find that their investments in AI-based lookalike modeling and channel optimization will bear even more fruit. Brands that lack the volume of first party data will turn to DSP-provided audience data that has been nurtured through a strong data lineage that the DSP has collected. This will drive more ROAS as the more brands that sign up for these audiences, the more accurate these audiences become. Look for a lot of success stories in this area, as SMB organizations, especially in the B2B sector, will always be in the market for curated audience data for their ideal customer targets. Whereas in the past, a significant investment would have had to be made in B2B Acquisition technology platforms and the associated personnel, with AI in motion on the DSPs, the same effect can be realized with far less capital. As DSPs begin to promote their built-in audiences curated by AI intelligence, I am confident that B2B companies will increase their investments in this area of marketing, and reassign their budget towards services offered by platforms like The Trade Desk and LiveRamp.
DSPs will also leverage AI to become more precise in what bids they send the SSPs. Based on geo-location and behavioral data, the DSPs will be more intelligent as to what inventory they are bidding for with help from AI optimization.
Will we see more privacy conscious data collection?
Given that Google intends to make third party cookie placement a consent-driven tactic, the trend of API-based data collection that is conditional upon opt-in will thrive. Cookies in general are severely limited, with or without Google’s take on things. I anticipate further momentum away from cookie based approaches and a stronger push towards using Cloud-based platforms to stream the same information to the marketing vendors for attribution purposes. API-based data collection solves cookie absence, and it also doubles its benefit by feeding new data into vendor platforms that in turn improve their AI effectiveness. The more data you send to Meta, LinkedIn, Google and all the rest, the better their algorithms will perform for you — using Cookies, that data was limited to clickstreams.
But using APIs, brands can now enrich their partner platforms with behavioral and offline data in their audiences. That in turn will increase the precision in which Meta/LI/Google’s AI targets the right people and ROAS move up and to the right. I expect most brands to have adopted the event streaming API offerings made available by all Social Media platforms and DSPs alike, to comply with privacy regulations and also ensure that their data collection is privacy conscious and governed well, for these reasons. This will result in higher investment costs by brands, but also a better return on investment.
What’s next for AI’s impact on adtech? Specifically, how do you think Google’s latest Search Bidding Exploration tool will transform the ad industry?
The Search Bidding Exploration (SBE) tool is interesting in that Google’s AI capabilities are optimizing their own search inventory now, providing brands with search terms that may be overlooked. Brands that can “turn this thing on” will have deep pockets, whereas smaller budgets won’t be able to take advantage to the same extent. My prediction is that programmatic AdTech will incrementally improve from an industry-wide perspective because of that. In other words, I don’t think that every brand is ready for SBE and because it is still fairly new, nobody can really say for certain that SBE will prove its worth. I’m taking a wait and see approach on this one, but cautiously optimistic.
What is the top challenge digital marketers will face in 2025? What challenges will they finally tackle?
“Related to the above about SBE, privacy-based data collection, and AI targeting: All of it requires a stronger discipline in both Measurement and Experimentation. I expect 2025 to be the year of validation, so to speak. Brands will be excited about these new AI offerings, and they will be willing to spend (based on what I’m seeing in the stock market after this election, there’s going to be lots of money flying around in the market); but brands have not forgotten the lack of transparency that Google has historically been guilty of. They want to prove that their efforts with new technologies is worth it. It’s why I think my own company Amplitude is going to benefit from AI and data privacy regulations – we measure the impact of these choices made with Ad budgets. I can see my own company’s roadmap – our biggest priority is to make measurement/experimentation a lot easier to design and deploy. We’re doing this because we know the demand for these approaches is already big and getting bigger every day. In 2025, we’re going to see brands take these disciplines to a scientific level with greater ease, and there will be more investments made as a whole in this area.”
