Digital Advertising's AI-Powered Future: Innovations in 2024 & What’s Next

The digital advertising landscape underwent a remarkable transformation in 2024, driven by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), the increasing importance of user privacy, and shifting consumer behaviour.

Canadian brands are already leveraging AI to deliver impactful, personalized advertising, driving significant business results. Our recent Search Honours Awards celebrated the top performers who are successfully blending artificial intelligence with their own creativity.

Looking ahead to 2025, AI will continue to revolutionize digital advertising. We anticipate further advancements in personalized ads, delivering highly relevant messages to each user. Immersive experiences will also become increasingly prevalent, with interactive ads designed to capture consumer attention. And, we’ll also see advancements in measurement that will help drive better outcomes for businesses.

Let’s take a look at what’s to come for Canada’s digital advertising industry in 2025.

Leveraging AI to better support our users

For over 25 years, people have turned to Search to satisfy their curiosity, and with 15 percent of the billions of daily searches being entirely new, it’s clear that our curiosity knows no bounds.

We are constantly innovating to help people find answers to their questions. Lens, Circle to Search and AI Overviews are the latest powerful tools to explore the world around you. Lens uses multimodal capability to leverage input from your camera and provide relevant results. For example, if you see a stylish lamp in a friend's house and want to find something similar for your own home, Snap a picture of the lamp with Lens. Lens will search the web for visually similar lamps, helping you find retailers selling comparable items. With Circle to Search on Android, you can simply circle, highlight, scribble, or tap on anything you see on your screen to get more information. AI Overviews demonstrates the power of generative AI, transforming information journeys on Search.

These new behaviours create significant opportunities for brands to connect with customers in moments that matter. In fact, Lens already facilitates nearly 20 billion monthly visual searches, with 20 percent directly related to shopping.

The evolution of measurement

Last year, we introduced our vision for a more transparent, innovative, and actionable approach to Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), designed to help you optimize your budget in today's complex marketing environment. After extensive testing and feedback from hundreds of brands globally, we're excited to announce that Meridian is now available for everyone. This open-source Marketing Mix Model (MMM), built by Google, empowers marketers to make smarter, data-driven decisions across all channels.

Consumers engage with your brand everywhere - streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping, often simultaneously. You need to understand how your marketing actually drives business outcomes. MMMs deliver this, using established methodologies for budget allocation that consider all elements of your business, including external factors such as seasonality, pricing, and economics. Because they rely on aggregated data, MMMs are inherently privacy-centric. Crucially, they measure beyond immediate impact, capturing how brand-building activities like TV commercials, ads on YouTube and Google, or social media campaigns influence future purchases and new customer acquisition.

Our goal? Empower the industry to build best-in-class MMMs and drive better business outcomes in 2025 and beyond.

Dive deeper into performance

Consumer purchase journeys are anything but predictable, demanding an agile ad strategy. Performance Max uses AI to optimize your budget, maximizing conversions across Google’s full range of channels and audiences. It also allows you to see key conversion metrics for each creative asset to understand what truly resonates, leverage audience insights to better understand your customers, and track real-time and projected spend alongside forecasted conversion performance.

For over a year Demand Gen campaigns have helped you create and convert demand on YouTube and Google’s most visual surfaces. Now, you can expand your reach beyond YouTube with Google video partners inventory in Demand Gen, seamlessly managing campaigns at scale directly within Display & Video 360. These advancements, powered by Google AI, will help you deliver your best return on investment (ROI).

In 2025, we are committed to enhancing Performance Max in several key areas, further improving results and providing more transparency into what’s driving performance.

Creativity at scale

A high volume and diversity of creative assets are essential for all AI-powered campaigns. To help, we expanded AI-powered image editing to new campaigns beyond Performance Max. We’ve also launched asset generation in six new languages: German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian, enabling you to reach customers in more markets. For greater control, brand guidelines for Performance Max allow you to define and upload specific brand elements including fonts, colours and logos to ensure that your brand identity is visually consistent across ad formats. Finally, we’ve also upgraded our AI models, including our image generation models, tuning them with performance data across industries to help you create higher-performing assets.

AI will unlock new ways to enhance human creativity — not replace it. That’s why we’re building new ways for you to shape this creative process and reach more customers at scale with relevant creative in 2025.

Video, a priority to drive more engagement

Video is key for engaging viewers, and brands are seeing fantastic results. “Watching TV,” means so much more than it did in the past. Today’s viewers seamlessly jump from hit shows to creator content, including watching YouTube Shorts on the big screen, and it is important to reach your audience where they love to watch.

By tapping into our diverse video inventory on DV360, YouTube Shorts, long form videos or podcasts, brands can meaningfully connect with viewers, resulting in meaningful business results.

YouTube is a decision-making engine. According to a survey by TalkShoppe, YouTube is #1 in helping Canadian respondents decide what to purchase, more helpful than any other platform.

Fandom is another important aspect of YouTube, and last year we launched YouTube Select Creator Takeovers in Canada, giving brands the opportunity to make the most of creator-fan connections. Brands will be able to own 100% share of voice on top creators’ channels like Mia Maples, Kallmekris, or Throttle House.

Looking ahead to 2025, Canadian advertisers stand on the cusp of a new era, one where AI empowers you to create truly personalized and impactful campaigns. My advice? Embrace these advancements with open minds and a spirit of experimentation. Let's work together to shape a future where digital advertising drives unprecedented growth and builds meaningful connections with customers across Canada.