Dentsu’s 15th annual Media Trends report, The Year of Impact – 2025 Media Trends, draws on expertise across the dentsu network to outline ten key media trends, explore each in detail and offer clear suggestions and takeaways for marketers and brands to incorporate into their plans.
Along with our peers at iProspect and dentsu X, we recently conducted a LinkedIn Live panel discussion to explore these trends that are shaping how brands tap into shifting consumer behavior and their implications for future campaigns and budget allocations.
The panel was moderated by Karishma Singapuri, Global Brand Manager – dentsu X, and included Dan Calladine, Head of Media Futures, Aurelia Noel, Head of Digital Transformation, Jean-Guillaume Paumier, Head of FutureLab and Digital Lead - iProspect, and Baijayanti Chadha, Media Strategy Director – Carat.
Karishma Singapuri kicked off the panel discussion. “This new report explores the rapid evolution of the media landscape as it becomes increasingly driven by sophisticated algorithms. Today media is playing a growing role in all our live, fast becoming 100% addressable, 100% shoppable, and 100% accountable. At dentsu we call this the algorithmic era of media, and we believe it will open many opportunities for brands to deliver impact in the lives of their consumers, for businesses’ bottom lines, and for society.”
Dan Calladine described how artificial intelligence has permeated our digital lives. From actively using ChatGPT to using embedded apps for such everyday functions as making recommendations on Spotify or translating texts, “More and more people are using AI every day and it's rapidly changing the world.” He predicts the emergence of “major killer apps” that will soon become so ingrained in our lives that we couldn’t imagine living without them.
Connecting AI’s abilities to human sensibilities, Baijayanti Chadha added, “The only way brands can stay differentiated and relevant is by showing up in meaningful human ways. [Brands] need to … let AI do all the heavy lifting in the back end. That is, process huge volumes of data, synthesize it, slice it, and then contextualize it for human understanding, while marketers need to be focusing on that human storytelling to build … authentic connections with the consumers.”
Brands are increasingly turning to niche audiences and fandoms. Aurelia explained, “They provide something that we have lost on many of the platforms. They provide authenticity, engaged audiences and loyal followers. I think that's got benefits for brands. But from a consumer perspective they provide something that is lacking more and more in our digital world, and that thing is trust.
“It's very difficult to find content that you can trust that is readily available and I think those fandoms and niches provide … content I can trust in with someone I identify with who has the same values, who has the same interests as I do. And I think brands can really recognize and embrace the value of these communities because they're giving them a way to not only stay relevant, but also grow into the media landscape.”
Jean-Guillaume Paumier highlighted dentsu’s vision to lead in this algorithmic age of media.
“We at dentsu are investing a lot of energy and time [in] building solutions around technology that helps you pre-test the creative. This is about using AI to start to mimic the signals that can score the creative, [such as] eye tracking [or] neuro … science. … Before you invest and spend any kind of money on a creative, you already have the confidence that [your] creative is more likely to deliver impact on that platform.
“We're seeing the more interesting conversations are literally the ones where you go with deep platform experts and then you put them in the room with a creative team … and then you get to that really interesting new conversation.
Our duty as a as an agency is [to] make sure we are steering the right understanding of what signals are working … and playing that back to both brands and creative. That experimentation mindset is really, really critical and that's something … we should be driving.”
To hear more from these industry experts, watch the LinkedIn video replay on demand here.
Download The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends report here.
