Beyond the gadgets, ad tech and AI are center stage at CES 2025

CES embodies all the excesses of Las Vegas — from the latest high-tech toys to extravagant suites in five-star hotels to exclusive parties with the likes of 50 Cent. This year, ad tech dominated the conference, an indication that it’s now the driving force of the advertising world.

People holding signs for the biggest tech companies in the world, from Google to TikTok to Amazon, were ready to usher executives up the special bank of elevators that led to suites reserved, presumably, for talking shop behind closed doors.

Beyond the buzz, though, three decisive themes emerged for the ad tech crowd: the domination of AI (once again), with 2025 touted as a “put up or shut up” year for the tech; a demand for better measurement from streaming and retail media players; and a desire to simplify the complexity of ad tech to better serve audiences.

AI’s inflection point

AI was inevitably the first word out of many people’s mouths and a relentless topic on multiple panels, with moderators joking about it popping up within minutes of a discussion.

While there is AI fatigue, there’s also a recognition that 2025 is the year for action over sound bites.

“AI is truly at an inflection point,” Karthik Narain, Accenture’s chief technology officer, said on a panel entitled “AI: A Declaration of Autonomy.” “The promise of the limitless possibilities can be limited only by trust not being there.”

Last year, Accenture projected that Generative AI adoption would unlock $10.3 trillion in economic value by 2038.

“What excites me is the content and the creative side want to and begin to catch up,” Erin Nocito, head of global media at Amgen, said on a panel titled Beyond AI’s marketing hype cycle. “So we can match the customization, the nuancing that we can do for our audiences within media with the right content, at the right time, faster and faster with hopefully some efficiency as well.”

AI’s potential economic value is based on how effectively companies can deploy the tech, Matty Beckerman, CEO of IRCODE, tells The Current. The company’s app scans images and leverages AI to train its computer imaging system that maps an image directly to a fingerprint that identifies products in real time, enabling people to shop for products immediately after seeing them. “If you’re pretending you have AI in your system and you really don’t, that’s going to get found out pretty quickly,” he says.

Accountability for rising powers

Streaming had a major presence at CES, with NBCUniversal, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery among the major players featured on panels during the week. But as many of these platforms have scaled their ad-supported offerings, advertisers are looking for more accountability to make sure their ad dollars are driving outcomes.

The market has matured on measurement, Rachel Gantz, Proximic by Comscore’s managing director, tells The Current. Measurement tools are catching up to the reach and frequency that streaming has gained over recent years, she notes.

“Folks are demanding that tools demonstrate that incrementality, [that they are] able to drive optimization and make audiences available to advertisers…, to make sure every dollar is used as effectively and efficiently as possible,” Gantz says.

Some of that measurement is going back to basics and retrofitting traditional solutions like panels alongside big data, according to Mark McEachran, Yieldmo’s SVP of product management.

Retail media, which has also boomed in the last couple of years, is also being asked to deliver on better measurement and attribution.

Marketers can’t always capture the full picture of attribution with the vast array of retail media networks in the market. Brian Mandelbaum, co-founder and CEO of commerce data Attain, shared a recent conversation he had with a CMO of a CPG company highlighting this. The CMO said the attribution from the retail media networks he uses not only inaccurately counted more sales than the company achieved in a year, but stacked up to the GDP of a single state in the U.S.

“Everybody’s got attribution from everybody,” Mandelbaum tells The Current. “They know it and they’re seeing it. So there’s some reckoning here.”

One of the solutions to these challenges, according to Mandelbaum, is making retail media networks more interoperable, so marketers can have a much fuller view.

The elegance of simplicity

Another theme that emerged across several panels was that of simplicity, or a desire to make ad tech less complex. That sentiment was summed up by Bill Briggs, Deloitte’s chief technology officer, who quoted Leonardo da Vinci to begin his panel session on tech trends to watch: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Echoing this, Hilton’s CEO Mark Weinstein warned against ad tech’s tendency to overcomplicate the relationship with the customer. “Marketers have been trying to get to this Holy Grail that is not the Holy Grail — to predict every single thing,” he said on a panel about revolutionizing personalization.

Weinstein went on to say that Starbucks is successful because they ask their customers what they want and deliver it to them, rather than relying on adding complex processes to predict their behavior.

“I just want to caution us as an industry not to get so enamored with this end state that’s not actually serving a customer versus using it to help guide the customer journey and be more thoughtful,” Weinstein said.

Likewise, the ad tech supply chain should be simplified, says John Shankman, chief strategy officer at Aditude, which builds software for publishers. He says the buying process — which involves multiple hops before an advertiser bid reaches a publisher — should be cleaned up, leading to better outcomes.

“Simplicity is elegance,” Shankman says.