Less brand safety, more SEO spend in 2025, Forrester predicts

Winter is coming: The air is cooling, the leaves are falling, and the 2025 predictions are rolling in.

As a tumultuous 2024 comes to a close, Forrester predicts that 2025 could be slightly more steady for marketers, but that they “shouldn’t get too comfortable.”

In a pair of reports detailing its expectations for media, advertising, and agencies in the year to come, Forrester detailed insights into the state of topics like brand safety, investment in social media platforms such as TikTok, and AI adoption in the marketing industry. We broke down some of the big takeaways below.

Safety dance: Brand safety concerns in 2024 were no different than any other year, and in 2025, marketers will look to be more “brand smart” than brand safe, the authors of Forrester’s media and advertising predictions report wrote.

They anticipate that 10 “influential global brands will drop DoubleVerify” as their brand safety company, instead embracing new practices like swapping keyword exclusion lists with lists of publishers to include in their campaigns. The prediction is based on a finding from a Forrester CMO survey in which more than half (53%) of US B2C marketing execs said they’re becoming less “prudish” about brand safety.

Clock’s ticking: In addition to questions about brand safety, a potential ban of TikTok in the US has been looming over the heads of marketers for years. But Forrester doesn’t think it’ll happen next year. The authors, writing before Donald Trump won his re-election bid, point to a few reasons why they think this is the case:

• TikTok’s data collection policies aren’t much different from those of other social media companies, they wrote.
• Both Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump used TikTok during their presidential campaigns.
• TikTok has put significant effort into lobbying against the ban, “which will help push the appeals process beyond 2025,” according to the media and advertising predictions.

With that in mind, Forrester also predicts 10% of performance media budgets will go toward social commerce next year, including TikTok Shop.

Omnipresent: AI seemed to be everywhere in 2024, especially so in SEO marketing, a trend that’s expected to continue in 2025. Forrester analysts anticipate SEO budgets to triple as a result of the integration of AI into search engines.

Get out of the house: In the agency world, the rise of AI content production shops is expected to lead to a slow-down of in-house agency growth, according to Forrester’s 2025 predictions for marketing agencies.

Forrester analysts also suspect full-funnel agencies will rise in popularity next year, with one-third of agencies that specialize in digital media becoming more generalist:

• In a Forrester survey of CMOs from Q4 last year, almost half (46%) of respondents said they “plan to integrate performance and brand media assignments with a single media agency” in the next year.
• Another 35% said they intend to combine creative and media assignments in that time.

“Brands demand integration,” the Forrester analysts wrote. “In 2025, CMOs and agency executives will reconcile full-funnel, full-service capabilities with deep expertise in various disciplines and channels.”