2025 is the year adland rewrote the rules—and embraced AI
While 2025 will go down as the year adland became AI people, Dentsu’s David Halter says it also ushered in an era of braver, faster and more human marketing.
2025 was the year that everything in the advertising, media and marketing industry changed at once. The year the pace outpaced us. The year the industry stopped pretending it understood the rules and simply rewrote them as it went.
Let’s begin with some of the headline moments. At least the ones that come to mind without Googling.
Watching the cricket recently, I spotted the Didi logo on the boundary rope.
A perfect reminder of where this story really starts.
The new Didi ad was an earworm that spread faster than Stuart Broad’s disappointed face on commentary. After hearing that flute line, the industry collectively leaned forward and wondered if it was actually allowed to enjoy something together.
Tourism Australia launched its new global campaign and within minutes every armchair creative in the country activated.
Long comments. Short comments. Everyone had a point of view. No other industry can generate that level of unsolicited passion before breakfast.
But credit to the TA crew and their agency partners. Another great national show.
The big banks went big on sponsorships again.
Nothing reassures a CFO like seeing the company logo glowing under floodlights. Or on the merch of the kids.
Telstra kept pushing out the creative and craft boat. You have to love them for that. Proof that bravery is not extinct. It just needs a bucket of trust on both sides.
Then came the leadership plot twists. Great people changed gigs. If you blinked this year, someone senior had moved. But none of these were the real story.
The real story was that everything felt like it changed at once. Because 2025 will go down as the year we became AI people.
Not out of fear, but simply because the tools became too useful to ignore.
Like most of us, it started innocently. I asked my work-approved model to summarise some research. Three seconds later, I felt the first flutter of an American Express Platinum line I know well. “You could get used to this.”
Then came GPT-5 and Veo 3. Suddenly, I was making videos in minutes. Real videos. With lighting, movement and production value that once required a director, a drone and a council permit.
I spent the first hour telling myself it was a novelty. Two hours later, I had created something I was weirdly proud of. Then came the late-night experiments with models for briefs, strategy framing, scenario planning and proofreading. The most surreal moment came later in the year. I walked into a client meeting and found myself explaining AI product positionings, personalisation solutions and Agentic-powered workflows with confidence. The thing I had been playing with for fun had quietly and quickly become an expectation. Somewhere along the line experimenting with AI turned into leading it. That is how our industry works. Do something twice and congratulations, you are now the expert.
Importantly though, the new tools did not replace anything. They removed friction. They returned time. They made the work sharper, not shallower.
And as we head into 2026, it is clear how much the role of agency leaders has changed. Agency leaders have always needed a strong strategic point of view. Now we are also counsellors, educators and occasional AI whisperers for our client partners.
What 2025 has taught us is the importance of our partnership with clients because when we worked together to learn and adapt, we all, as an industry, evolved.
The industry is not in chaos, it is in rehearsal. It is always in rehearsal, working on a new verse or chorus. The companies that did well were the flexible ones.
The brands that won, as always, were the curious, creative and courageous ones. The leaders who stayed strong were the honest ones, the ones willing to say we do not have every answer but we will figure it out together.
2025 has taught us that AI is not replacing the optimism that keeps this industry alive.
It is demanding more of it.
This year was my 20th year working in advertising and I believe that the next 20 will be faster, stranger, more inventive and far more human than any of us expect.
David Halter is chief practice officer, creative at Dentsu ANZ.
