We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: 2025 will be a consequential year for TV advertising. With the Upfronts approaching, what can we expect to see now and into the next nine months? Digiday’s Tim Peterson sat down with Spark Foundry’s Lisa Giacosa and Fox’s Jeff Collins to discuss market dynamics that will define premium video this year. 

“How do we connect the dots of the data and identity across the walled gardens?”

- Lisa Giacosa

Most broadly, 2025 is poised to be a year defined by more connectivity of data–the building block for everything from attribution to incrementality, and more. While doors are opening for the flow of data into publisher ecosystems–such as for targeting–the sharing out of data has been a hurdle in the past. “Publishers have had to open up more than they ever have before,” explained Collins. “[At Fox] we’ve opened our data up to a lot more partners…because the benefit of doing so outweighs any risk.”

There has been a tremendous amount of focus–and innovation–on reaching audiences as they migrate across viewing experiences, but focusing only on reaching audiences is not enough, according to our panelists. 2025 will also be the year in which new technologies allow advertisers to take context and relevance into account also. If we simply assume identity equals audience and audience equals anywhere, we’re not doing our job properly.” Giacosa stated “Context and relevance is absolutely critical.” AI has opened doors to technology that can decipher not only the transcript and topic of content, but also the sentiment, much in the way advertisers have come to expect from display advertising.

“As a publisher, we need to be pretty agnostic. We need to be able to work across multiple agencies, across multiple different metrics, across multiple different tech partners. It’s a lot of work… but all of that work is worth it, because it’s going to highlight the value of the inventory, and ultimately show incrementality.”

- Jeff Collins