How brands shifted marketing and media strategies through year of tariffs

The tariff policies imposed by U.S. President Trump at the beginning of his second term in office turned 2025 on its head for marketers.

Joshua Scherz was among them. Scherz is the founder of Bela, a family-owned seafood brand based in Maine that imports canned sardines from Portugal. Hoping to take advantage of rising demand for premium canned seafood among U.S. consumers, Bela rebranded and launched a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business at the end of January — right into the teeth of President Trump’s trade war.

What should have been a celebratory year for the 28-year-old business proved to be one of its hardest. “We took a margin hit,” said Scherz. And Bela wasn’t the only one. 

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Ad Tech Briefing: Big Tech won 2025 (even when it lost)

AI momentum papered over Google’s reset year

From an ad tech perspective, 2025 will be remembered as the year Google quietly recalibrated — retreating from some of its longest-running bets while accelerating decisively in others.

The most visible reversal came with the effective end of the Privacy Sandbox experiment and Google’s decision to walk back plans to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome.

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