The Unbundling: How Advertising's Power Centers Are Shifting in 2025
The duopoly is dying, but what's replacing it is even stranger
The Empire Strikes Back (But Which Empire?)
Google and Meta still dominate, yet 200 new players are stealing their lunch
Something fascinating is happening in digital advertising right now. The duopoly of Google and Meta, which has dominated digital ad spend for over a decade, is watching their kingdom fragment—not because they're failing, but because the very nature of advertising is unbundling.
After fifteen years of watching these giants vacuum up every advertising dollar, I'm seeing something I never thought I'd witness: genuine competition. Not from another tech giant trying to be the third player, but from hundreds of smaller kingdoms each claiming their slice of the pie.
Retail Media Is Actually Three Different Stories
Each more complicated than the industry wants to admit
Story 1: Every Surface Becomes Billable
Your gym, bank, and pizza app all want to sell you ads now
The explosive growth of retail media networks continues unabated, with over 200 networks now operating globally. But here's what most industry analysis misses: we're not just seeing retailers become media companies. We're seeing the complete monetization of commercial intent.
Think about what's really happening. Marriott has a media network. So does United Airlines. Chase Bank is building one. Your local grocery chain probably has one in development. By 2026, I predict your gym, your streaming service, and your meal delivery app will all have "media networks."
This isn't innovation. It's the logical endpoint of surveillance capitalism—every company realizing that their customer data is worth more than their profit margins.
Story 2: The Measurement Myth Collapses
Everyone's lying about attribution and nobody wants to talk about it
Here's the uncomfortable truth about retail media networks: their measurement is both better and worse than traditional digital advertising. Better because they can show actual sales. Worse because every network measures differently, and nobody wants to admit that their attribution models are held together with Excel formulas and wishful thinking.
Amazon Ads accounts for the majority of the retail media network space, and removing it from the equation dramatically reduces the size of the overall retail media market. In 2023, Amazon Ads saw a 24% year-over-year growth in business, hitting $47 billion. Walmart was a distant second, only capturing $3.4 billion.
The dirty secret? Most RMN performance data is as reliable as a three-dollar bill. But advertisers are so desperate for first-party data that they're willing to accept black-box reporting that would have gotten them fired five years ago.
Story 3: The Hybrid Model Emerges
Retailers finally admit they're not tech companies
Rather than overburdening IT teams with full platform builds, retailers will adopt frameworks that support custom program design while leveraging existing infrastructure. What this really means: retailers are finally admitting they're not tech companies.
The winners in 2026 won't be the retailers who build the best tech. They'll be the ones who partner with companies that already have it. Watch for a wave of acquisitions and partnerships between traditional retailers and ad tech companies that nobody saw coming.
Privacy Theater: More Protection, Less Control
How "privacy-first" became the biggest bait-and-switch in tech
The Cookie That Wouldn't Die
Five years of deprecation announcements, zero actual deprecation
Google first announced its intention to eliminate third-party cookies by 2022 in January 2020. Here we are in 2025, and cookies are still alive, though increasingly irrelevant. But the real story isn't about cookies. It's about what's replacing them.
Privacy Sandbox technologies enhance user privacy by enabling companies to select and measure ads without identifying or tracking individual users. Sounds great, right? Except every major platform is building its own "privacy-preserving" solution that just happens to lock advertisers into their ecosystem.
The First-Party Data Land Grab
Every company hoarding data like it's 1849
By 2025, we'll likely see a rise in curated publisher marketplaces, enabling reach and precision. But here's what that sanitized language really means: everyone's building walled gardens, and the walls are getting higher.
Companies are hoarding first-party data like it's gold in 1849. They're calling it "privacy-focused," but it's really about control. Control the data, control the advertiser. Control the advertiser, control the money.
Zero-Click Searches: The Canary in the Coal Mine
70% of searches may never leave Google by year's end
The Attention Recession
When the search engine becomes the destination
In March, 27.2% of U.S. searches ended without a click compared to 24.4% in March 2024. Zero-click searches could surpass 70% by 2025. Let that sink in: seven out of ten searches might never leave Google.
This isn't just about AI summaries. It's about the fundamental question of who owns the internet's front door. When Google becomes the destination rather than the gateway, every other business becomes a subsidiary.
The YouTube Anomaly
People search for answers in videos now, not web pages
YouTube is now the top destination for traditional search in the U.S., EU, and UK. People are searching for answers in videos, not web pages. This shift is so profound that most marketers haven't even begun to grasp its implications.
By 2027, I predict "video-first SEO" will be a bigger industry than traditional SEO ever was. Brands that aren't creating video content aren't just missing out—they're becoming invisible.
The Contextual Comeback Nobody Understands
It's not the best solution, just the last one standing
It's Not About Keywords Anymore
AI reads between the lines, understands the vibes
Traditional contextual targeting relied on basic keyword scanning and broad content categories, often missing tone, sentiment, and nuance. With AI, we're shifting to a semantic understanding of content.
But here's what the industry doesn't want to admit: contextual advertising is making a comeback because everything else is failing. It's not the best solution; it's the last solution that doesn't require selling your soul to a tech platform.
The Brand Safety Theater
Sanitizing the internet one boring article at a time
Advertisers keep demanding "brand safety," but what they really want is brand control. They want their ads next to content about their industry, but not content that's too negative. They want to reach people interested in their category, but not people who are too interested (because those might be competitors).
The result? A sanitized, boring internet where every article reads like it was written by a corporate communications department. Because it probably was.
2026 Predictions: The Uncomfortable Truth Edition
Prediction 1: Platform Consolidation Accelerates
Half of today's retail media networks won't exist in 18 months
By the end of 2026, 50% of retail media networks will be dead or absorbed. The math simply doesn't work for 200+ separate networks. Advertisers can't manage that complexity, and retailers can't justify the infrastructure costs.
Watch for "meta-networks"—platforms that aggregate multiple retail media networks into a single buying platform. The middlemen always return, just with different names.
Prediction 2: The AI Advertising Loop
When robots sell to robots while humans watch Netflix
Within 18 months, AI will be creating, placing, and optimizing ads with minimal human intervention. But here's the twist: AI will also be consuming those ads, deciding what users see, and even making purchase decisions for them.
We're heading toward an absurd future where AIs are advertising to other AIs, and humans are increasingly irrelevant to the entire process.
Prediction 3: The Direct Brand Renaissance
Owning your audience becomes the only sustainable moat
Smart brands will realize that the best way to win the platform game is not to play. They'll go direct to consumers through owned channels, build community platforms, and treat advertising as a tax on companies that can't build relationships.
The formula is simple:
Build an audience you own
Sell directly to that audience
Use advertising only for acquisition, not retention
Treat every platform as temporary
Prediction 4: The Attention Rebellion
Ad blockers evolve into attention protectors
Consumers will begin actively rebelling against the attention economy. Ad blockers will evolve into "attention protectors" that filter out not just ads, but all forms of manipulative content.
The winners won't be brands that capture attention. They'll be brands that deserve it.
The Real Future of Advertising
Here's what twenty years in this industry has taught me: every shift in advertising is just a new way to solve the same old problem—connecting sellers with buyers.
The tools change. The platforms change. The metrics change. But the fundamental challenge remains: how do you find the right person, at the right time, with the right message?
AI search, retail media networks, contextual advertising—they're all just different answers to the same question. And in five years, we'll have completely different answers that seem just as innovative.
The only constant is change. The only strategy is adaptation. And the only metric that matters is whether you're creating value for real people with real problems.
Everything else is just noise.
The Bottom Line
We're living through the unbundling of digital advertising. The monolithic platforms are fragmenting. The unified metrics are disappearing. The simple answers are gone.
This isn't a crisis. It's an opportunity. But only for those willing to admit that the old playbooks are dead, the new playbooks haven't been written, and the only way forward is to start writing your own.
Stop trying to win yesterday's game. Start inventing tomorrow's.