Agencies and Publishers Have Been Quicker to Integrate AI Than Brands, Per IAB Report

The use of artificial intelligence continues to gain traction by agencies, brands, and publishers, but to unequal degrees, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, in partnership with BWG Global and Transparent Partners.

More than 500 subject matter experts across the buy and sell sides were surveyed for IAB’s State of Data 2025: The Now, The Near, and The Next Evolution of AI for Media Campaigns—released Monday and sponsored by OneTrust and Dotdash Meredith. The report features industry benchmarks on AI usage, adoption rates, and perceptions, as well as challenges, opportunities, and future needs within the media campaign lifecycle.

“While AI has long been used for yield management, optimization, and automation, the explosion of generative and agentic AI solutions will radically alter the entire digital media ecosystem,” IAB CEO David Cohen said in a statement. “AI will soon power every aspect of media campaigns, not to mention its impact on the creative process. We must fundamentally rethink how agencies, brands, platforms, and publishers work—which is both incredibly exciting and challenging at the same time.”

Here are four key takeaways:

Full integration is coming but not quite there yet

AI is not fully integrated across media planning, activation, and analysis at 70% of agencies, brands, and publishers, but about one-half of those expect to be fully scaled by next year, causing a gap between companies that have and have not widely accepted the technology.

Brands have been slower to embrace AI, with 60% citing cost as the biggest factor influencing the tools they choose to use.

“The industry isn’t taking full advantage of what AI can do now,” IAB vice president, measurement, addressability, and data center Angelina Eng said in a statement.

“It can build media plans, generate audience segments, select media partners, forecast performance, and even use synthetic or ‘fake’ data to enhance marketing mix modeling and sales attribution,” Eng continued. “This will transform how media campaigns are conceived, executed, and managed from start to finish. It will happen fast, and laggards are at risk of being left behind.”

Agencies and publishers lead the way

Nearly twice as many agencies and publishers have fully scaled AI, when compared with brands, focusing on driving efficiency and saving time, resources, and money.

Audience identification and segmentation is the main AI use case for agencies as they strive to continually refine audiences for targeting to meet shifting consumer behaviors.

For publishers, inventory forecasting, cross-device attribution, and analyzing audience behavior are the top AI use cases, helping them deliver ads efficiently to surfaces where their audiences are most active.

Data quality and adoption hold back full-scale adoption

While the popular narrative is that people fear losing their jobs to AI, job security was only cited by 37% of respondents.

The top challenges were the quality of the data being used and produced, protecting that data, and fragmentation among disparate AI tools.

“There is already a lot of catching up to do, and AI capabilities are leaping even further ahead almost daily,” Eng said. “There’s no time to waste.”

The next steps

“At most, only 49% of agencies, brands, and publishers are using or planning to use any of 18 key solutions to mitigate AI adoption challenges,” said the report, “such as strategic roadmaps, clear use cases, formal training, and governance boards, leaving many vulnerable to falling behind the market and their competition.”

The report suggests a phased approach to AI adoption to help ensure that data inputs and outputs are secure and of high quality, as well as training employees on best practices.

Companies should collaborate with others in the industry to develop standards and prioritize key use cases for the technology.