Here’s What Top Marketing Execs Learned at CES 2025

The Consumer Electronics Show wraps up tomorrow, but many marketers and advertisers have already fled Las Vegas after a packed week of panels, meetings, floor tours, tech demonstrations, parties, and meals—sometimes packing in multiple dinners into the same evening to maximize face-to-face time with clients or potential partners.

Throughout the week, ADWEEK caught up with advertising and marketing execs to hear what trends and developments were from this year’s CES stood out, and whether spending the second week of January on the Las Vegas Strip is still worth the dough.

Nearly every leader we spoke to mentioned artificial intelligence, of course, and how “agentic” AI—the growing popularity and capabilities of AI agents and chatbots—is changing the way brands and marketers interact with people. They also highlighted that the sheer scale of CES, and the ability to meet with so many clients in person at the beginning of the year in one place, makes the 135,000-person conference unmissable.

The following comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Florian Adamski, global CEO, Omnicom Media Group

We have more clients at CES than ever, which shows you something: Clients are seeking to understand how agencies will cope with technological changes and how generative AI will help agencies to be leaner, faster, and more impactful. This early interest we see at CES is a precursor for what we’ll see for the rest of the year. Clients will ask agencies for answers to help solve for a more complex, fragmented world, so no rest for the wicked.

The overall theme for CES this year is when AI and marketing will realize some of the promises made. It feels like the past three years we’ve talked about potential use cases starting with generative search. 2025 is going to be when push comes to shove, and agencies and media platforms will actually have to prove to clients how it drives their business.

It’s also going to be a year of reskilling in terms of the labor force and how people start collaborating with AI.

Kristi Argyilan, global head of advertising, Uber

I spent 90% of my time at CES in client meetings. It’s an opportunity to get feedback on what we’re doing well and where our next areas of focus should be en masse, so that you can start to put together the patterns to understand the state of commerce media more broadly, and then specifically the areas for Uber to continue to lean in. Especially being brand new in the role, that was an incredibly productive use of my time.

The theme that I heard consistently is that we have done a good job of using AI to work more efficiently, but have we used it to work more effectively? AI capabilities are helping us move work through the system faster. We can do creative versioning a whole lot faster, but are we regularly using it to then optimize? How are we really using AI to move that through faster so we can optimize more than one or two times during a campaign and then driving a bigger result? That’s the promise that we’re all looking to start to see more of as we go through 2025.

Josh Campo, CEO, Razorfish

We knew AI was going to be a big topic, but we saw AI with a lot more substance. There was a lot of conversation around agentic AI, which is about how we’re going to use AI in the future.

With AR and XR, I don’t know that we’re fully there yet, but I feel like we are really close to a consumer viable product. The experience could get a bit stronger, but we are well ahead of where we were last year.

The screens inside cars are getting much bigger, which means you have new entertainment and media space. You also see AI continuing in self driving, which also means that drivers will have more attention in that space.

Last year, we started to see the connected home evolve a lot. This year, you have standards like Matter, which allows providers to connect seamlessly regardless of your hub provider. That unlocks a big market for clients. It used to be that you had to have a homogenous smart home system. Now it’s more, we bought this one, we bought that one, and they can talk to each other.

Matt Graham, CMO of global food and nutrition, Mars

AI into the home around appliances in our business for food and nutrition is enormous. If you think about the integration of tech in TVs, tech in fridges, microwaves, and how you can actually start using AI to inform our people to eat better and create recipes and everything else with what is in their fridge is enormous, and how you can drive that back through conversion, I think that’s exciting.

Equally, I think the evolution of wearables, the data we can get, and how we connect that to human health and the role food can play within that is pretty exciting as well.

Dani Mariano, president, Razorfish

CES this year was a super well-attended event. It will be interesting to see the numbers. The C-Space was jam packed and very difficult to move. That speaks to how much this event matters to marketers, and to partners, and to things that are happening off the show floor.

It’s becoming a place for people to kick off the year, from a client, agency, and media perspective, adjacent to the show. Everything marketing is digital now, and so it becomes a massive place to kick off the marketing year at a technology show.

A lot of the things that we have been tracking over the last eight years are here. Like IoT—we have been fighting our way to try and do it on our own, but now it’s real. Operating systems in cars, we won’t see it for a few more years, but it’s very tangible. Same with XR and health tech.

With AI, there were pockets of it being more legitimate, useful, and ethical. There are brands that are doing deep integration with AI, versus just kind of masking that they’re using AI in the background.

Mark Penn, CEO and chairman, Stagwell

CES has become more relevant to marketers. Back in the day, it was more limited to the technology companies themselves and their prospective consumers and partners. Marketers then kind of saw this as something they should go to to keep up with with what is going on. Now there are more marketers here than ever. I don’t know if it’s the Cannes of America yet, but it’s close.

Agentic AI, one of the major themes of CES this year, is a big building block of the brand of the future. If you think of a brand as having a word mark, a logo, or an audible element—all brands will now have an agent, too. A personality created through artificial intelligence that represents the brand will be routine, and that personality has to be created and imagined. It’s not born. You don’t want it to be the voice from The Forbin Project or something, you want it to represent the personality and values of your company. You don’t want to take things off the shelf and make your company look like every other company, particularly if you’re a large enterprise with a with a brand personality. It is now going to be represented through technology.

Sir Martin Sorrell, chairman, S4 Capital

It’s the usual things. It’s the screens. I was reading, John Deere has autonomous tractors. A guy last night from AutoX told me [they are] going to have an autonomous car. They’ve got an experiment going in San Jose financed by SoftBank. They raised a billion dollars, and they’ll have an autonomous car by 2026. They’re already running cars in San Jose. So that’s going to be big. And the advances in medicine are also huge—for curing disease, cancer, etc.