Author: Seb Joseph

2025 opens with more unfinished business than clean conclusions. Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG is moving toward its first full operating year in 2026. OpenAi is edging toward an advertising business without having settled what the business actually is Google’s illegal monopoly over the ad dollars that fund the open web is moving into a remedies phase that could redraw the market. And that’s only a few of the loose ends carried over from last year. This year’s in and out list reflects an industry reorganizing itself around the unresolved power negotiations.

In
Agentic web
Out 
Internet of Things

In 
Worrying about LLMs scraping away ad revenue 
Out 
Worrying about LLMs scraping away referral traffic

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CES has become the ad industry’s first real gut check of the year. For Amazon’s ad team, that means less pitching and more listening.

That posture can read as contrarian given the concentration of big agency leadership and CMOs. Internally, however, Amazon treats the show less as a sales opportunity and more as a read on how closely agency and advertiser priorities track with its own plans for the year ahead.

If the gap is too wide, there’s still time to adjust. That was the case last year, when marketers said they wanted Amazon’s performance data and closed-loop signals but could only use them partially because upfront budgets were locked into publisher-specific deals and flexible dollars were scattered across too many systems to manage intelligently. Amazon’s response was telling. It built tools that let advertisers keep their upfront deals intact while quietly repositioning Amazon as the brains behind how those budgets are paced, optimized and measured. 

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