Meta has been the subject of constant speculation regarding its financial instability, questions about its guarantees for future user safety from the dangers of data privacy, and wonder over its ever-growing obsession with the metaverse. However, it is without question that Meta is currently the biggest place for marketers to reach their audience, and for the foreseeable future, it is set to remain that way. But like all things, not all is left unaffected by time, even the Meta of the future. Marketers must be aware of what this future has in store, because how they market and the tactics they use today, will not be the same tactics that guarantee effectiveness tomorrow, and definitely not five years from now. Change is the only constant, and anyone involved in marketing knows that better than anyone else.

This paper attempts to map Meta 5 years ahead, specifically, the changes, trends, and issues that Meta will be forced to confront, as well as the changes marketers must undergo to adapt to Meta’s new environment. Further, this paper attempts to recommend different tactics that marketers must implement to make the most of what has become the quintessential marketing space, Meta. Section 2 summarizes Meta’s evolution in terms of both their struggles and struggles beyond their control. Section 3 outlines the user behavior trends that have arisen from the past decade of Meta’s existence and how they will continue to evolve into the next decade. Finally, Section 4 details the recommendations provided by the body of research and suggests tactics to ensure marketing success in the Meta of 2025.

Overview of Meta’s Evolution

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, has undergone significant changes over the years, adapting to shifts in user behavior, technology, and the competitive landscape. In 2025, Meta is a company focused on building the metaverse, an integrated environment for virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality experiences. Marketers should invest in 3D campaign experiences, immersive connective moments, and metaverse technology partnerships because the metaverse represents an increasingly important way to connect with audiences, and unique creative ad formats can resonate in new ways. Beyond metaverse advertising technology solutions, brands should build their audiences organically since the best way to profit from Meta’s transformation is via brand equity, established through engagement outside of paid ads. Users are looking for more immersive, interactive experiences that tighten emotional engagement. As a result, Meta has invested in new immersive formats that encourage social interaction, such as 3D ads and influencer AR activations. Marketers have branded the 3D immersive ad experience as the “next frontier of digital,” and brands like Lexus and Tommy Hilfiger have paved the way for concurrent gamification and escapism in advertising by bringing 3D ads into everyday feed experiences. Meta has also made public commitments to provide extensive support for branded AR experiences. For marketers serious about brand loyalty in Web 3.0, the best way is by investing in emerging metaverse tech, including partnerships that allow for digital wearables or one-of-a-kind items that will cover or accompany a character’s avatar in virtual environments. This will create a brand touchpoint that is both very dedicated and visually prominent.

Historical Context

Meta platforms reconceptualized modern communication and immersive introduction to the world of digitalization. Its journey started from a quest to reconstruct a university social network and find a way for students to stay connected while 3000 km apart. The humble launch of “The facebook” in 2004 ignited an ambition of digitally connecting friends and family across the world. Today, Meta has the power to trigger real-world political movements, lead marketing messages to the entire consumer audience or create deep connections between brands and clients, even millions of kilometers apart. Borders no longer bind us. We communicate and share with people not only in the same country but also around the world. In doing so, Meta carved out unique evolution paths for its four brands: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. While each platform caters to a slightly different set of user needs, data insights are shared across the ecosystem, just like digital marketing campaigns which are often run in synergy on multiple platforms at once. The advantages come with limitations, however. The recent mass protests against censorship and user data collection safeguards propelled fierce debates about the limits of Meta’s influence on everyday life and speech. Driven by these discussions, critics have demanded increased data protection and an end to false information spread, which pushes Meta to continuously evolve its data development and privacy processes.

Recent Developments

In the past few years, technological advancements have played a key role in the continued transformation of platforms and user behavior. These advancements can provide insights into where Meta might end up in a broader sense and serve as a foundation for the recommendations and interpretations that follow. Within Meta’s products, the growth of platforms is evident in the increasing impact of artificial intelligence. As of late 2023, generative AI tools and AI-powered recommendation engines are playing significant roles in both content creation and content distribution. The success of these tools is illustrated by the large number of third-party applications built on Meta’s AI developer platform, which saw rapid adoption. These innovations have fulfilled demands for personalized content and communication within the company, and the story from the immediate future is one of continued partnerships and rapid growth again. On the augmented and virtual reality front, Meta continues to be the leader, with its newest headset hitting the market, while other companies are still invested in the R&D stage.

Beyond that, Meta has begun to ramp investment plans for augmented reality products, announcing strategic partnerships with a number of other developers. These measures are aimed at coupling social with AR and realizing the vision of a company that engages users at unexpected moments through the interplay of the physical and digital environments, with an emphasis on discovery. The next development is data privacy changes coming from the EU. These include changes to the timeline regarding the implementation of new privacy regulations and forthcoming ad-targeting rules and infrastructure, which have impacted Meta as a company and force it to address and comply with new privacy rules. From a user perspective, more privacy means less accuracy, therefore less efficiency for advertising.

Technological Advancements

In 2025, significant advancements in technology have shaped the Meta social media ecosystem and elaborate upon three pertinent developments that shape the ecosystem. Specifically, artificial intelligence is greatly enhancing user experience, while augmented reality and virtual reality are integrating into the product experience. Lastly, and as a response to regulatory pressures, Meta is finally prioritizing user privacy within its services.

Artificial Intelligence, from chatbots to image generators, is driving growth in the Meta ecosystem by improving the user experience of its core products. Facebook and Instagram are using generative AI to enhance the capabilities of their traditional text and photo services. From intelligent recommendation systems that surface user-tailored content to the auto-generation of text, image, and video, the user experience has grown more seamless and dynamic. These dynamics lead to important implications for marketers: first, as Meta deploys generative AI, marketers must upskill their writing, visual, and video production capabilities to take full advantage of new types of creative formats that these tools can produce. Using AI tools, marketers will also be able to direct creative outputs more seamlessly and efficiently with less friction from Meta’s systems.

Moreover, and more importantly, marketers must adjust their expectations for what creative can be generated, as standards for creative may shift as generative content proliferates throughout the platform, followed by changes in user behavior. In addition to text and content generation, generative AI is being deployed as a personalized recommendation system embedded throughout Meta’s apps. As these recommendation engines become more accurate and effective drivers for people’s behaviors, marketers must enable options for more creative ad targeting strategies and personalization.

Artificial Intelligence Integration

Artificial intelligence will play a central role in Meta’s success in 2025, being a composite of creative tools, conversational assistants, and marketing helpers. Meta’s current roadmap suggests that it is betting on LLM-first experiences integrated at the center of its most important products and infrastructure. We have already seen how generative tools impact how people consume content and the shortcut they provide for businesses to create content faster, at scale, and cheaper. Look for interactive FAQ experiences on messaging platforms as well. Catalyzing this AI-first future is the company’s increased emphasis on developing powerful AI foundations and infrastructure. Meta’s investment in its own model promises to be just the beginning of its long-term infrastructure push, having shifted Meta’s broader data and AI strategy to rely more on proprietary models built on first-party data, and less on open foundation models.

Future versions of the model promise to get much bigger and generate text even better than previous iterations. This is a big step up since many generative advertising tools are currently on earlier versions. Moreover, the goal for 2025 is also to create LLMs that can generate video, allowing advertisers to create five to fifteen-second video ads at scale and at top quality. Expect to see Meta’s AI team at the forefront of efforts to pave the way for micro-content that boosts brand awareness and affinity among users, or interactive ads that drive action among everyone else. Additionally, research is ongoing to create generative AI models that can create compelling video and image reels for the short-form content formats dominating various platforms.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Meta has made significant investments in augmented and virtual reality technologies as part of its long-term vision for the metaverse. The company’s vision of the metaverse is that people will work, play, and connect virtually through a robust set of social experiences that are persistent, synchronous, and shared. Although it may take years to fully develop the immersive devices and experiences associated with this vision, Meta believes that more accessible communication tools such as AR glasses will be available on a shorter timeline, helping to lay the groundwork for the full metaverse vision even before a fully functional version of it exists.

AR is digital content overlaid on our physical world that can be experienced on devices already in our pockets, such as smartphones. As our phones and tablets have become more versatile and efficient, so too have the tools of individuals creating AR content. There has also been a rapid increase in the types of engaging AR experiences that are easily distributed to and shared with other app users using capabilities like shared stories. Tools have enabled brands and creators to drive engagement through AR, from trying new hairstyles via virtual hair color filters to bringing favorite characters to life in 3D and playing games with them using a phone camera. As a result, we’re seeing more innovative vertical ads in Feed and Stories, as well as new AR experiences in the Messenger camera and ads.

VR overcomes the sensory barriers of space and time, enabling experiences that are impossible in real life, and does so in a way that feels natural and, in some instances, even more impactful than in real life. With the right content, VR can transport us to new places where we can explore, learn, play, and connect in new ways—often with people from across the world.

Data Privacy Enhancements

Meta is turning stronger and more distinct in the fields of data privacy and transparency of user services. In 2022, the company overhauled its Ad Preferences tools, presenting clearer information about why users are seeing particular ads. Users can also share feedback about how relevant they find these ads for the first time. A single place on Instagram, called Profile You Control, shows the ads you’ve hidden, which businesses or accounts you’ve blocked, and your ad interest topics. The Ad Topics tool allows you to manage ad interest topics in one place. Advancements will further enhance user trust in advertising services. Features such as allowing users the ability to encrypt their data, monetizing it, and opting in for audience targeting will increase the inventory of companies and advertisers to choose from.

The next level of data privacy and transparency will come along with the metaverse. Wallets secured by biometric authentication will validate users accessing virtual spaces, whether virtual reality or otherwise. Trust scores generated based on user contribution will ensure native advertisements, like virtual posters for real-world brands, reach their targets. Duplicating advertisements reaching people within the metaverse, based on IP addresses and visitors on a pixel page, will become impossible. And that behavior will secure the connection between people and brands in the physical world, and may also lead to new forms of advertisement, and possibly new advertising channels. Additionally, these interventions will decrease the noise in organic and promoted feeds. Both the brand influence on the users and user engagement with brands will be strengthened.

User Behavior Trends

Forecasting user behavior trends on Meta’s platforms in 2025 is a daunting task, but by contextualizing the predicted evolution in demographic changes, information consumption shifts, and time expenditure trends, we can begin describing possible ramifications for marketers. But it is essential to explain as precisely as possible how we envision user trends shaping Meta’s advertising ecosystem in 2025, as such trends directly affect how companies meet advertising objectives. Users have a multitude of companies competing for their attention on Meta’s platforms, and users are continually weighing the value they get from that attention against the loss of privacy intrinsic to existing ad-supported models on Meta and other platforms. Companies and agencies can thus optimize advertising performance on Meta only by understanding how user behavior on the platform ecosystem will shape the value exchange between users, Meta, and advertisers.

Several trends stand out when looking at the user-side marketing implications of these changes. First, a changing demographic structure fuels a gradual shift in content consumption patterns and interaction preferences on Meta, driven by age group variation among user segments. Second, more time spent on content-stool endeavors implies that users will find specific types of brand communications less valuable. In particular, they may view short-form video content, more closely resembling competing platforms’ primary functionalities, as more valuable and related advertising as less annoying. Third, demand for user privacy will shape advertising strategies, prompting the development of even more innovative advertising units that leverage on-platform engagement, advocate model advertising partnerships, and non-privacy-invasive original content.

Changing Demographics

At the onset of 2025, Meta will still be the behemoth it has been for the past decade-and-a-half, and younger generations just coming into their teens may have even skipped using it entirely, continuing instead on newer platforms such as TikTok or Snapchat in a natural migration, before returning to Meta in their mid-to-late 20s when they’re ready to settle down. However, the key difference from 2015 will be that they will return not as potential consumers but as business owners. If Facebook had maintained its original premise of being a social platform that connects friends and family, it would still have remained the same small campus app that it had started out as, very much like its younger cousin, Snapchat. Its current financial muscle stems from the billions of dollars it has scraped from the ad budgets of companies who have gravitated towards the platform to reach the young consumers that have subsequently aged up, and it has been this very volatile ad revenue that has allowed it to build-out ancillary lines of business such as Instagram, WhatsApp messaging and more recently, the Metaverse.

But starting in 2025, we will start to see a change in Meta’s ad customers from global brand advertisers looking to reach millions for a few TV spots, to local businesses run by the GenZ that are looking to spend the extra $5-10 every month to run a Facebook page-promoting ad that reaches their own micro-local community for a few bucks. This shift will be driven as much by a generational shift as it will by technological advances. GenZ, born into a world dominated by social media, prefers to consume media created by their own peers rather than the sterile advertising campaigns crafted by creatives half their age, or in some cases, older still, in large agencies. Indeed, these are the very same peers that they’ve been interacting with across various platforms as they were growing up.

Content Consumption Patterns

Young people are most likely to use newer, more entertaining, and playful apps such as TikTok, which focus on short-form video and entertainment-centric content. Currently, Instagram is the platform these users are most interested in, although with a less positive sentiment oriented around social ads and branded content that tries to imitate organic influencer marketing. Other apps that appear to be attracting Gen Z are YouTube, with its video content and the platform users invest the most time in, and Snapchat, a platform promoting content that is ephemeral in nature. Reinforcing this pattern, the main motivations for seeking short-form video content are entertainment and keeping on top of current trends. These patterns are only going to be consolidated with the implementation of more sophisticated recommendation engines, as TikTok showed its biggest competitors the importance of optimizing feed discoverability for virality, so allowing brands to benefit from that momentum.

In the case of adults aged 30 and over, LinkedIn is the platform they are inquiring about with the least engagement, while still being the most positive regarding branded content positioned through B2B ads, especially in the case of 40 and 50-year-old users. The leading content format is actor-sided video ads, used to communicate the strong values of a brand. Research focusing on sustainable-posts-related comments has become popular. In addition, the possibility of predicting users’ preference for certain content, perceived usefulness, attitude toward ads, and actual behavior was utilized multiple times. Video and image concept ads received the most momentum among these users. Meta is also listening to its audience and has announced that long-form videos will be available on Instagram.

Advertising Strategies in 2025

In 2025, marketers on Meta will draw from its unique communication capabilities to connect with audiences across the critical junctures of attention, interest, engagement, commerce, and after sales service, fostering actual one-to-one relationships — and selling — at scale. Brands will proactively engage customers where, when, and how they are ready to be marketed to. Meta will be a platform designed for “real time” marketing, combined with customer service, through Messenger bots and WhatsApp business accounts connecting brands and consumers. Direct interactions will also take place through innovative creative formats: chat style video ads, AI and AR incorporated format integrations for shopping and web exploration, ads in the Metaverse. Brand and performance ads will no longer be separate strategic categories, and creatives for both brand awareness and consumer action will seamlessly blend, taking equal advantage of interactive new age formats, hyperdetailed targeting and comprehensive effectiveness measurement.

A single ad on the “regular” Meta app can — as a probability — also on existing behavior of owned and third-party websites give ads the capability of making brand ads as measurable as performance ads. Business managers will make use of the Meta for Business platform, trained on user behavior models and data from brands combined with third-party partners, to plan and manage — this includes choosing third party management and DSP partner tools — advertising on Meta, and across other consumer touchpoint platforms connected by the Meta API, from a single centralized point. On Meta, advertising will not have the centralized optimization capability it of course has for the Meta user subsegmentation networks. Hence brands will decide how Meta advertising fits into the larger mix, and inform their DSPs and manual approaches in the larger campaign.

Targeting and Personalization

Over the past decade, privacy-related changes have restricted advertisers’ ability to capture user data and retarget website custom audiences effectively. Large-scale advances in artificial intelligence came with the introduction of ad products such as Automated Ads. Targeting capabilities have evolved through Continuous User Profiling and an ever-expanding behavioral graph and predictive AI models – technology that helps advertisers target the right people across formats, surfaces, and experiences.

As we move into 2025, the platform for advertisers is built on the foundation of AI, data privacy, and advancements in machine learning. Becoming demand-driven and harnessing the power of AI to steer attention will help advertisers connect and personalize at each stage of the consumer journey. Innovation in advertising solutions to close the loop between online and offline and signal their digital maturity will help scale advertisers and partners. If you’re relying solely on first-party data and exclusive media listings, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Using the full power of the ad ecosystem – from Reach and Frequency campaigns to Automated Ads to App Insights – will unlock opportunities for advertisers. As long as your ad campaigns are designed around a specific objective, the platform will do the rest.

Marketers looking to reach and engage people in an authentic and relevant way should be using ad solutions – from ad products without special targeting that help connect more broadly to those that leverage people’s demographics and interests to give a more personalized experience, the key is creating memorable moments that resonate with audiences. The massive scale and network of well-curated content present the best opportunity for brands to connect with audiences who open up to discovering and exploring new things.

Creative Formats and Innovations

Meta has long been an industry leader in utilizing new ad formats to establish best practices. New formats are important to marketers as a source of expansion in their media mix and typically perform better than ads in existing formats. With new formats, users may find ads to be less intrusive. For marketers, adopting new formats offers various benefits, including achieving performance breakthroughs, increasing audience engagement, and gaining competitive advantages while others remain strategy-rich.

Recently, Meta has prioritized the performance of video ads, especially full-screen and mobile experience ads. With the rise of short-form video consumption, Meta is placing user feeds at the center of mobile inspiration for sweeping discovery and a deep connection with brands. Additionally, augmented reality ads are prominent in the app menu. Marketers can use AR ads to inspire people to try on experiences, engage with an interactive filter, and shop from brands with an AR lens. Interactive ads are also vital for keeping attention on mobile, enabling people to become immersed in play.

Furthermore, some ad options are high-performing among niche audiences, especially on Facebook. These include events and outfit checklists ads that take its catalog and automated creative system capabilities to the next level. As for users who require more immersive experiences, marketers can opt for Instant Experience ads. As always, ads that help people solve needs in a lightweight way perform better across the board. Meta continues to generate numerous advertising innovations and tools, as marketers’ beta tests yield excellent results across the board.

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Determining whether advertising investments help reach business goals is more important than ever. As measurement moves toward multi-touch attribution and incrementality testing, marketers need access to data and APIs that allow custom economics measurement, a more nuanced understanding of measurement, and a more flexible, less-frustrating feedback loop. This year, access to social ROI data at the product level is beginning to be provided to select advertisers in the US and Canada, with plans to increase that availability to advertisers in Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Spain, the UK, and other countries in 2024. Broader access is expected to roll out by 2025. Expect to see granular reporting by 2025.

In addition, for select retail advertisers, over the next few quarters, there are plans to provide an easier to access, independent third-party product performance measurement solution that’s powered by data systems. Anticipated early access experiences will evolve in 2024, with platform-wide availability rolling out in 2025. The test-and-learn experience is also expanding quickly. In early 2024, an updated version of the Ads Manager is planned to be rolled out that allows advertisers to run product-level incrementality tests more easily and effectively. The updated Ads Manager will allow advertisers to review potential lift tests on their ads. In addition, there are plans to add a simplified user interface that allows a click test experiment to be initiated from a single test-and-learn goal.

Regulatory Landscape

In 2025, growing geopolitical power tensions and continued popular concerns over the negative effects of social media on society will create an increasingly partisan and restrictive regulatory landscape. This will impact both how Meta operates, as well as the types of ads that are able to run on their platforms, and marketers will need to continue to stay within these lines. Political brand engagement is likely to be further popularized and planned brand campaign cycles may need to further consider being more in tune with the geopolitical calendar. However, new emerging platforms may also face less advertising regulation than Meta, potentially enabling branded advertising to be less filtered and more engaging there.

In 2025, there are likely to be additional regulations specifically targeting the issue of international manipulation of ads and some further limitations on the scope of what ads may be able to run on Meta and which audiences may be targeted. There will be implications and lessons for advertising from increasing international IT platform regulation, culminating in what are known as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. The former regulates and restricts international digital platform advertising, specifically from influencer and algorithmic recommended advertising use cases. This is to reduce the scope of social networks supporting misinformation and disinformation tactics which contribute to democratic distortions.

Global Regulatory Changes

The increasing scrutiny from regulators globally has forced Meta Platforms Inc. to change certain practices. Data privacy concerns have led to imposing stringent regulations that restrict user data protection practice. As advanced technologies like artificial intelligence have a propensity to use publicly available information, it has mandated that marketers remain aware of the impact of upcoming privacy guidelines on their work. Meta has built advanced privacy features, compliance solutions, and customizable advertising and data-sharing options to abide by the changing rules while also catering to marketers.

World governments have increasingly started penalizing Meta for user safety and marginalizing its role in influencing user behavior to incite hate or cause physical harm. Countries have sanctioned a ban on using Meta products. More organizations are likely to follow suit as international conflict escalates, especially between nations. Data safety issues might arise as relations between world powers worsen. User sentiment is also shifting toward greater distrust in companies collecting and securing their information. That said, it becomes even more critical for marketers to keep such factors in mind, in particular industries, geographical regions, and demographics when framing their communication strategies. These forces are causing brands to increasingly adopt novel alternatives to Meta, which they would not have considered in the past.

Impact on Marketing Practices

Marketing is likely to look very different in 2025 than it did as recently as 2020, for a number of reasons. New ad units with experiential and Interactive Media Ads on Instagram and AR and VR technologies are being introduced, while a new advertising business presents new competition with retailer ads. There is also a focus on developing an all-encompassing metaverse that will shape consumers’ shopping habits and journey. Coupled with the demands of emerging competitors, ad agencies and brands need to rethink and change their advertising structures and processes to stay ahead of consumers’ wants and needs and to continue to deliver an excellent customer experience.

Retraining and hiring new employees to work with more advanced technology such as AI can be pivotal for ad agencies and brands to communicate a clear vision and tone on services. As metrics become more sophisticated and real-time feedback is available, executives must invest in developing the capabilities to interpret data. Furthermore, creative teams must be able to leverage new data sets to tell stories that can more powerfully activate consumer emotions and needs. There will also be some licensing terms for creative tools, while other companies will be working in collaboration on the creation of ad units. With so many facets to the advertising platform, agencies and brands should ensure that operations and projects are visually mapped and updated in real time.

Emerging Competitors

The rise of TikTok-driven social discovery is one of the biggest shifts in consumer behavior in years, creating a clear challenge for Meta. Emerging platforms link socializing and shopping in new ways. Video remains the most engaging content format across social and streaming services and the move from desktop to mobile is enabling this behavior to flourish.

We see the emergence of next-gen video-first platforms increasingly competing across content formats and for ad budgets. Vertical video formats are growing in importance not just for social feeds but increasingly across display and cloud streaming ecosystems. These platforms are innovating in new ways to leverage their immersive environments, ‘in the moment’ culture and recommendation engines, driving genuine consumer engagement across lives, interests and aspirations.

Analysis of Competing Platforms

TikTok continues its relentless ascendance. The video platform, initially created for lip-syncing and later expanded to allow comedic skits, dance challenges, and memes, became the go-to app for the under-35 crowd. It rose to 1 billion monthly active users in September 2021, to 1.5 billion in July 2022, and to over 2 billion in February 2023. In the U.S., TikTok is the most downloaded iOS app of all time and has recently also dethroned Instagram for total user time spent. Although other social networks are still being used, e.g., Facebook by those ages 35+ and Instagram—as the go-to platform for influencers, perhaps most especially for U.S.-based advertisers, and also now offering shopping capabilities—a high percentage of Gen Z users have indicated that they use TikTok and Instagram as search engines.

Snapchat is also bouncing back, growing its global audience to 436 million daily users and expanding video services, e.g., via Spotlight. Even X is planning to show ad-revenue-sharing payments to influencers creating viral content in the back half of 2023.

Although the purchase of sponsorships in influencer marketing should be present in any digital marketing strategy, especially given Gen Z’s interest in using those content creators for information search, it will be even more relevant in 2025 than in 2023. Moreover, while it makes sense for advertisers to partner with macro-influencers who have tens of thousands or millions of followers for visibility purposes, micro-influencers, who have no more than 1,000 to 10,000 followers, can represent a cost-effective partnership for brands seeking authenticity or niche positioning due to their engagement ability.

Market Share Trends

“The Meta advertising ecosystem is vast and diverse, offering various ad placements on different platforms, attracting active advertisers across sectors, breeds, and regions. It has the potential for exceptional expansion. The Meta ad ecosystem is on track for accelerated growth because of the most advanced advertising products and solutions in terms of selection, quality, and performance, block by block.

Taking the share of advertising budgets from other platforms is not easy; it takes a lot of hard work. But Meta has ample strategic assets: industry-leading targeting capabilities; optimized performance that drives high conversion rates; available advertising formats that change the perception of advertising; high share of consumer time spent on Meta apps; a massive global community; cutting-edge AI systems that improve the ad experience for users and advertisers alike; and technologies to automatically build and onboard scalable campaigns for the most important objectives. The growing share of advertising budgets will be driven by the best advertising solutions that exploit our powerful and unique strategic assets.

The gradual recovery in advertising spending that has begun will continue in 2024, thanks to AI and the improved tools and experiences it can power. Better per-person ad frequency management targeting across channels and formats will lead to significantly better campaign outcomes. These improved outcomes, in turn, will generate demand for added volume and results. That will help ads grow faster than overall revenue over time.”

Recommendations for Marketers

Short-term strategies cannot consider the horizon of online communications without applying them to develop loyal communities and with a transactional force capable of optimizing purchases. However, in this case, optimizing community talks should serve to create an authentic bond with the brand and not only to obtain immediate traffic or purchases. Given the continuous iteration of the algorithm, it is advisable to experiment with the new formats, aligning them with the objective of the campaigns. There has been a strong push in promoting the advantage of being present in new formats.

Mid-term strategies must seek to optimize sales and profit, for which using targeting tools and the information obtained in the data-led process, micro-targets must be developed. In the same way, all those segments that could be less solvent and risk share should be avoided. In this phase, communications must seek to recover purchase share progressively without jeopardizing the solidity of the brand. By segmenting consumers with greater purchase intention and communicating through creative cross-channel campaigns, immediate responses can be expected that will help optimize operational investment in media. In addition, it will be essential to invest in personalized approaches and match the brand experience with user preferences to increase conversions.

Long-term strategies incorporate the brand-building aspect of communications, which requires considerable investment effort. Just as new environments are long-term, advertising in this environment requires a long-term commitment. To make brand communication an experience for the user, to create branded games, to assign resources to building loyalty to lead the conversation in communities, to provide the brand with a purpose in line with user values and work to have a clear position with which the user identifies, are just some of the tasks that brands will have to work on.

Adapting to New Technologies

Meta has consistently positioned itself at the forefront of new technological advancements over the years, launching new and innovative technologies available to its audience. Meta has made significant investments in augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence technologies that have had a great impact on digital marketing. Earlier this year, it was stated that AI-powered chatbot technologies are at times great for advertisers, allowing them to communicate with consumers on mass levels. However, it was also mentioned that the lack of visual and video content can prove to be an issue. Meta’s current goal is to incorporate visual graphic generation and video generation directly into their chatbot technologies.

In addition to keeping consumers engaged, Meta is also using AI to keep user feeds relevant. In the past, Meta relied heavily on third party data to ensure users receive content that they want to see. However, the recently imposed privacy regulations impacted Meta by limiting the data available that advertisers could use to target their desired audience. For that reason, Meta’s current focus on first party data is vital. Current users who have had positive experiences with a brand are more likely to engage with the brand in the future. By focusing more on first-party data, users are shown ads based on their previous engagements with brands, allowing a deeper and more meaningful connection while ensuring that users are shown relevant ads.

Engaging with Audiences

In 2025, marketers are likely to face increasingly fragmented audience attention, arising from increased adoption of decentralized digital platforms. Due to recent changes in privacy policies, marketers have found it difficult to accurately track customers and measure their engagement across different platforms and channels. This hesitation is exacerbated by the surge in adoption of AI tools, which increases audience proximity, thereby drawing attention away from social and other digital platforms.

To amplify audience engagement, brands can leverage interest-based audience networks. Accounts and communities that are especially engaging can further help brands to raise awareness and engagement with customers. These engagement metrics must be the metrics we pay most attention to as we negotiate complex ad buy deals with brands. While impressions and total spends may remain the most popular metrics when negotiating deals with brands, they don’t guarantee the best outcomes. Ad buyers and brands will need to work more closely together to ensure all engagement metrics are taken into account, enabling a partnership model. The process starts with collaborative and integrated strategy share outs, where both partners share relevant learnings, insights and sets priorities. Brands should also avoid working with too many influencer marketing partners at any given time to ensure a high-quality end result.

Building Brand Loyalty

In the ever-evolving landscape of social media, marketers face the challenge of capturing and maintaining a user’s attention in real-time. This presents a unique opportunity to leverage the engagement power of advertisements compared to other forms of media. Nonetheless, standing out poses considerable hurdles, especially when younger audiences are turning to alternative platforms to avoid advertisements. In today’s advertisement-saturated environment where brands seem to almost exclusively pursue users’ intent, it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to assert themselves through relevance-based marketing alone. Instead, the answer to developing long-term relationships with consumers may lie in the unfathomable waters of branded entertainment and interactive content. Marketers looking to create impactful ads must operate beyond the restricted boundaries of an audience’s immediate behavior. Not only should they initiate the relationship through relevant targeting, but they should also invest in the long-term connection by serving entertaining ads that not only establish a brand’s visual identity and purpose but are also enjoyable in their own right. Companies continue to provide the tools to allow brands to build rich identities on their platforms that encourage two-way interaction. However, crafty marketers will learn to utilize the technological capabilities offered to aid audience interactivity and multiplayer fun in order to connect with their target demographic.

Case Studies

Meta has accumulated a wealth of experience with its new technologies, including tools for targeting audiences with great accuracy, expandable advertising options, and an emphasis on mobile-first platforms. Many marketers have employed these resources and never looked back. Here are some examples.

Klook, a travel platform that inspires and enables travelers to explore the world, sought to gain sales during the typically low-demand winter months. To attract customers to its website and raise awareness of its airport transfer service, Klook launched an integrated approach on Meta, with Facebook and Messenger acting as its central platforms. By implementing a series of communication touchpoints that drove consumers from awareness to decision-making, Klook encouraged travelers to book on-the-ground experiences with Messenger ads featuring a package of local tours and activities.

The ad’s call-to-action button led to an automated one-to-one conversation to book products via messaging, with upselling and cross-selling during moments of intent. The campaign resulted in increased audience engagement, with open rates of over 90% and engagement rates of almost 70%. With Singaporean travelers booking transfers and local experiences through Klook, ad clickthrough rates doubled, alongside a 70% increase in purchases compared to the previous year.

Souvla, a fast-casual restaurant, used Facebook Ads to piggyback on trends and promote limited-time offers – sandwich bundles, catering specials, and collaborations – while driving interest in its new location. The Souvla marketing team said the bundles only appeared on social media for a few days and had grown serious traction, and they would be timing messages on Facebook – a key advertising channel for Souvla during its launch – to coincide with Souvla’s own content pushes. The campaigns resulted in an 85% month-over-month increase in revenue.

Successful Campaigns

To effectively navigate the evolving advertising landscape in 2025, marketers must embrace innovative strategies that connect with users on a deeper level. The following case studies demonstrate crucial lessons and best practices for future campaigns. The ‘WannaTalkAboutIt’ campaign highlights the importance of supporting authenticity and cultural relevance through grassroots outreach, creative talent development, celebrity collaborations, hype-building outreach, and influencer marketing. The connected AR experience aimed to alleviate mental health stigma among young audiences by introducing relatable content with real people instead of celebrities.

The ‘First Job’ campaign shows that you don’t need a huge budget to break through. The brand asked consumers to share their job applications on their own. Then the mega-brand reshared selections of those on their channels. The result was free owned and earned media. The upcoming brand activation around the First Job themes involved people earning money for the summer, then doing a fun photo challenge.

Lastly, the ‘Made by You’ campaign illustrates how global brands can forge connections with local consumers and foster community while launching speakable product films on various platforms simultaneously. The creative strategy had a deep commitment to creating access for the general user and came to life through workshops offering local talents access to production resources, kits, and tools. Marketers require an advertising ecosystem that can support these updates, from cutting-edge third-party tools for content creation to the trust infrastructure for data optimization.

Lessons Learned

A successful campaign can lead other marketers to experimentation and exploration. The marketing playbook offers a wide variety of tips that can help brands maximize commerce performance on what is still the world’s largest social network. The platform and its advertising ecosystem have only flourished by putting in hard work and providing advertisers with the technologies, structures, and teams to truly become partners in brand building. One main takeaway from past successful brand campaigns is the ability to embrace experimentation as a key creative direction. Marketers should act on the understanding that video works differently in each platform and mull on the full funnel strategy.

The documentation allows marketers to gain deeper insights about ads that help determine a brand’s long-term health and perception: favorability, brand message association, ad memorability, brand intent, and conversion anomalies. But measuring video branding efficacy by traditional means shouldn’t be confined to long-term brand-building campaigns; the temporary negative measurement effect of common video advertising buttons shouldn’t discourage brands from investing in video despite video ads being at higher risk of getting discounted by digital video performance measurement. Traditional performance campaigns can also keep the long-term effect in mind when using video for traffic. Marketers should use the guidelines shared and produce short and long-form ads that work inside and outside the platform to generate high-quality traffic and even greater long-term spend. Brands that understand the many intricacies of advertising and embrace the learnings will surely reap the greatest rewards.

Future Outlook

In the recent past, Meta has successfully navigated its way to limit unrest from scrutiny over its data privacy practices. It has strengthened the security posture of its platforms, further authenticated accounts, improved detection of suspicious automated behavior, and brightened controls for the overwhelmed user. It has launched a more affordable virtual reality headset while further investing in the development of platforms. Meta is set to become a utilitarian standard for its users where they can spend their time, socialize with peers, and conduct business – all in the virtual space. Augmented reality now almost seems like magic. Just as the mobile phone transformed how we communicate, work, and live, AR has the power to change the world yet again. However, it’s only possible to generate this effect when the technology is widely available, scalable, and integrated into everyday life. This shift has come with the evolution of flexible AR glasses, where computation is untethered from a phone or desktop but is still on the user’s face, allowing for completely new experiences. Meta’s move to focus on a digital-first-then-physical approach is bound to pay off. With continuous focus on inclusion, it is creating desirable and exciting solutions while keeping a longer time frame with the aim of having a profound impact in terms of technology, capabilities, and brand integrity. In the world of marketing, while consideration for the privacy of users will still be paramount, there is no dearth of tools for marketers to play with.

Predictions for Meta’s Trajectory

Although the near-term future for Meta may look blurry, we can still glimpse what lies ahead in the next few years and even further on. Meta’s backbone products likely will continue to exist at their core form. Facebook will remain a universal platform for connection, exploring, event organization, commerce, local business recommendations, and marketplace services. WhatsApp will serve as a communication, customer service, and potential business-to-consumer sales channel. Instagram will be the channel for self-expressive content that has the least trader type of posts and advertising. Threads is likely to become a unique and beloved space for conversations around areas of interest, where you use wordings in much more elaborate formations than you would on Facebook or Instagram, albeit in a fascinating way.

In the long run, Meta will be recognized for launching the most promising advances in the MarTech space early on and owning the domain market sector. Meta will specialize in specific ad formats powered by AI and ML, serving them from channels that all reside under its umbrella. In addition to making digital ad services available to people at all stages of company development, it will focus on predictive analytics and first-party data tools. Meta could challenge its current status as a business ecosystem driving across a decentralized space via fashion ads, fashion user experience, and fashion compatibility of tools and solutions. Meta’s goal would be a unified solution that exits all advertising parties so seamlessly that it feels like an extension of the advertising and marketing concept and strategy they had developed, where Meta would apply its AI and ML capabilities as content creators refer to Meta for help.

Long-term Marketing Strategies

Increasingly complex advertising features and stricter rule enforcement mean that advertisers need to invest more time and effort into their marketing endeavors. Marketers must familiarize themselves with all aspects of advertising on Meta, from creative formats to targeting options to data collection and measurement features. Immerse yourself in the platform. Regularly spend time on it, seeing it from the viewpoint of an end-user and engaging with the type of content you are trying to sell. In this way, you can discover additional details about the algorithms that drive exposure. You may discover that certain interactions increase the likelihood of your advertisements being shown in user feeds in contributing proportionate amounts to return on ad spend.

Use a structured approach when evaluating and executing Facebook advertising campaigns. Arm yourself with adequate goal-setting and budget distribution guidelines. Connecting your ads to the guidelines is a first step for meta advertisers who rely on online sales conversions. By doing this, you can take advantage of the Meta ads templates, ensuring a good user experience. A content calendar framework might also come in handy. More than ever, it is crucial to develop a logical theme and story that extends over several ads. You have the tools to create compelling stories on Meta, so use them. Build a sequence of ads that guide the users’ path from top-of-funnel to middle, and finally to bottom-of-funnel marketing on a single topic; music from a set list, graphics from a current promotions, or a camera that uses a new technology are examples.

Finally, leverage the latest developments on all levels of your Meta advertising. If you see an ad using an innovative new feature, bookmark it, and then explore that new element. If elements are exciting to you, they might appeal to your target audience. At the same time, closely monitor changes to ad policies to ensure compliance.

Conclusion

In 2025, Meta is a markedly different social media ecosystem compared to its predecessors in the 2010s, with a deep integration of AR and VR technologies, AI-generated content, and improved data privacy practices. This transformation is driven by Meta’s response to data leaks, changing user behaviors favoring niche new entrants, and global regulatory regulations. However, marketers need to adapt to these changes not only because future-proofing is important to survive, but also because Meta is still the largest online advertising ecosystem in the world where users daily connect to engage, share, and learn. Meta products still have a strong influence on daily engagement, and serve as an important online shopping discovery channel, and the future of its advertising business is not one to be neglected.

This essay outlines the expected key changes that impact the Meta advertising ecosystem to prepare brands about what to expect, and thus be better equipped to meet the upcoming challenges and seize the new opportunities. As strategic implications, marketers must consider adapting to AR and VR technologies, learning and utilizing new AI content generation tools, engaging with audiences beyond advertising, and accelerating their digital transformation to be able to fully leverage Meta solutions and explore the wider business potential it provides. Efficiency is key to survive in a transactional economy. Collectively, these recommendations give brands an advantage to adapt to any unexpected changes taking place.