Our team recently returned from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. With more than 140,000 attendees and 4,500 exhibitors, the event has reached an astonishing scale. At DanAds, we’re particularly focused on the ad tech developments that are shaping the industry. Here are our top three takeaways for the year ahead, based on our experience at the show.
AI Takes Center Stage
No surprises here – AI was the dominant topic across the show floor. With media and advertising companies heavily investing in large language models (LLMs) and more, CES 2025 was an opportunity to showcase the tangible outcomes of these massive AI initiatives. However, many of the most-hyped applications remain in their infancy. For example, searchable TV, which aims to let viewers identify and purchase products shown on their screens directly through a smart device, is still in its early stages.
A thought-provoking quote from marketer Greg Swan captured the zeitgeist: “How long will saying your product has AI be a marketable attribute? In the coming years, it could be that saying your product has AI will be as blasé as saying it runs on electricity.”
One particularly compelling panel, titled “Escaping the AI Echo Chamber,” explored how the widespread adoption of generative AI risks homogenizing brand advertising. AI-generated imagery, for instance, often carries a certain sameness – the result of overly generic prompts and large models trained on similar datasets. This means advertisers relying on the same AI tools can produce ad creatives that look strikingly alike, undermining efforts to help brands stand out. The panel’s key takeaway? Advertisers must adopt more specific approaches, tailoring AI tools to reflect their unique brand language while balancing utility with originality.
Big Brands Unite
Getty and Shutterstock, two of the largest stock photography companies, used CES to announce an upcoming merger. Stock photography and footage remain essential to most low- and mid-level advertising efforts, but the rise of generative AI has introduced uncertainty to the future of stock imagery companies.
Tools like Canva now integrate AI-driven image creation, yet these systems rely on licensed libraries such as Getty and Shutterstock to function. This suggests that stock imagery isn’t going away, but the business model will soon look very different. The merger is expected to deliver $150 million in cost savings within three years for the combined company.
More news from big brands: Disney Advertising used CES to announce that their number of ad-supported monthly active users (MAUs) has reached 157 million worldwide. This is a sum of users across Disney’s media portfolio, including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, who have viewed ad-supported content, and multiplied by the average number of viewers per household (2.6). And of course, Disney also touched upon AI, launching Disney Select AI Engine which promises advertisers sequential messaging and custom lookalike audiences, among other new AI-powered features.
Cars as Ad Platforms
For years, we’ve observed Uber’s expansion into advertising, starting with food delivery apps and now focusing on cars themselves as ad platforms. Uber’s JourneyTV, for example, uses in-car screens to deliver personalized ads based on the passenger’s destination and profile. CES 2025 demonstrated that self-driving cars are rapidly becoming mainstream, raising the question: how soon will autonomous vehicles also serve as advertising channels?
A few years ago, Dr. Mark Grether, former VP of Uber Advertising, shared his vision: “In the U.S., we spend eight hours a week in the car. Today, we’re sitting behind the wheel – but in the future, with Uber and with self-driving cars, we won’t do that. Now, we have eight hours where we consume content. With our in-car tablets, we are basically stepping into that new, exciting idea of the car becoming the living room – a new kind of entertainment center – and therefore also a new way of how you consume advertising.”
At CES 2025, that idea of the car as an entertainment center seemed closer than ever.
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