Stories that matter: Why media industry prediction pieces always fail

Saying nothing about the future turns out to have real consequences.

Something very different to kick off the first Ad-Verse Reactions to the year! Instead of reviewing the past week’s most important stories in advertising and media (reviewing the coverage as well as the stories themselves), I’m looking at one very familiar but flawed sort of story that needs its own special place in Room 101.

Enjoy and thanks to all the new subscribers out there (which is virtually everyone given how new this is!)

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Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

At first I felt annoyed and then I felt relief. Just what you’d expect from the first Monday of the year back at work.

I thought I’d Google some of last year’s predictions from trade publications about what would happen in media and advertising in 2025. The rationale: “That’s a nice idea for Substack, I’ll evaluate the predictions and see why they did/didn’t turn out to be true.”

What a shame that trade publications never do this (if they do, please leave evidence in the comments!) Now that I’m out of this game myself, I can use the benefit of independence and hindsight to add something different to this annual prognostication game.

But then, like so many articles I’ve written during my brief time on Substack, a bigger concern emerged and I had to rewrite this.

Why are all prediction pieces so weak?

The answer to this is important, so I’m going to use one of the stronger examples I found: this piece by Adweek on 30 December 2024. I’m not going to ridicule it (much), but I do want to use it to show why this genre persists, what it’s really for, and why it consistently underdelivers.

The Adweek article did exactly what these pieces are meant to do. It gathered “more than 20 senior media executives” (I assume by email and via a PR handler). It surfaced familiar themes. It avoided recklessness. It sounded sensible.

And that’s the problem. And it’s annoying.

But then came the relief.

A year out of trade media, I’m no longer under any obligation to serve readers the content they expect without applying brutal filters to what a high standard of thinking actually is. Attention is now so expensive—in a world where we all carry an infinite archive of the best content ever made in our pockets—that anything short of your best thinking is a waste of everyone’s time.

Especially when this is about work. And it’s January. And it’s freezing.

Predictions that can never be wrong

Adweek opens with a line that is more revealing than it probably intends:

“The great thing about predictions is that they are never wrong.”

It’s meant lightly. But it gives the game away.

Predictions pieces survive because they are structurally unfalsifiable. They are built on language like will continue, will become more important, will evolve. They trade in direction, not magnitude. Themes, not decisions. Motion, not trade-offs.

Adweek even acknowledges the circularity:

“So much of the business simply swings back and forth between two poles—bundling and unbundling—that retrospection can take on the appearance of foresight.”

Hmm. This felt like I was being subversively let in to some sort of conspiracy—this is all a bit of a game, isn’t it? WINK!’—without ever being told why we’re bothering with this annual charade.

In any event, this, we’re told, is why the same topics recur every year — AI, fragmentation, trust, events, consolidation—lightly refreshed, presented as insight rather than inertia.

Well, I think a bit more than that is going on. And it has consequences.

Playing to the audience

Once you stop reading these pieces as analysis and start reading them as performance, they make perfect sense.

This isn’t artificial behaviour for its own sake. It’s playing to the audience: signalling competence, preparedness, and alignment to whoever is watching most closely.

At senior level, perceived competence is the currency that keeps you in the job. And perceived competence is maximised not by making legible, risky decisions, but by avoiding visible mistakes.

Which means being vague.

Take AI. In the Adweek piece, Wall Street Journal CRO Josh Stinchcomb says:

“If 2024 was the year of testing new GenAI technologies in the ad buying/selling process, 2025 will be the year of deploying the tech in a tangible way and launching new products and features that add real value.”

This is unobjectionable. It’s also non-committal. What products? What value? At what cost? To whom?

Vagueness here isn’t confusion. It’s protection.

Inevitability as absolution

Another recurring move in predictions pieces is the framing of continuity (or even decline) as inevitability.

Trends are treated like weather systems: things are “happening”, “accelerating”, “reshaping”. Responsibility quietly dissolves because there’s an external ‘system’ driving a wedge between what happens and who decides.

Neil Vogel of Dotdash Meredith puts it bluntly:

“If you’re a platform, you’re under no obligation to send us traffic.”

Well, sure. Unless of course, you built your platform business because of all the high-quality content that people linked to every day for more than two decades.

In any event, notice what this framing does. It turns a strategic dependency—one publishers actively chose—into a natural law. The system did this to us.

This conveniently ignores two things you would expect a business leader to know implicitly:

• their business is exposed to unpredictable shocks

• and shaped by entirely predictable risks

Unpredictability is predictable. Refusing to acknowledge that is a deliberate move.

Because let’s get real: by December 2024, it was already clear that a second Trump presidency would carry material economic and regulatory risk for media and advertising: from tariffs to transactional corruption to deal-making volatility. It was also becoming obvious that generative AI was entering a deflationary phase: less magic, more cost-cutting rhetoric.

None of this required clairvoyance. It required the courage to name the present rather than perform optimism about the future.

A case study in strategic vagueness

Nowhere is this clearer than in the endlessly recycled promise of first-party data.

Insider CRO Maggie Milnamow predicts:

“With third-party cookies continuing to phase out, advertisers will invest more in first-party data and work with publishers who sit on a lot of that data… using cutting-edge AI to help brands go beyond contextual targeting and harness the power of human emotion.”

We’ve been hearing versions of this 1PD argument since before the pandemic. The pandemic was meant to accelerate it. Then the excruciating cookie deprecation saga. Then retail media. Then gen-AI and zero-click discovery.

At some point, this continuity dressed up as foresight becomes a gruesome self-parody.

For publishers embedded inside large corporate groups, the incentives are obvious to paint the future as an obvious continuation of the present. Shed costs. Talk up AI. Avoid publishing binding positions on ethical or sustainable AI use… because that would require enforcement.

And enforcement is risky.

What courage would actually look like

If a media executive were genuinely serious about the future, they would be willing to say something like this:

Our referral traffic from Google is falling off a cliff because of AI overviews. We are taking radical action to reach audiences directly and to offer advertisers new value; even if it means upsetting powerful platforms and being labelled “anti-tech”.

That kind of clarity is rare because it carries career risk.

Which raises an uncomfortable question:

Are executives incentivised to strengthen organisations—or to preserve individual power even as the organisation shrinks?

The real cost of vagueness

The cost of all this isn’t abstract.

When revenues stagnate and strategies remain vague, journalists are laid off. Commercial teams are hollowed out. Entire companies are merged or erased.

Since the pandemic, the group hit hardest has been middle management: too expensive to keep, too experienced to be pliable, not senior enough to be protected. Attend any B2B conference and you can see it: grey-haired freelancers and consultants at one end (ahem), fresh-faced juniors at the other.

The industry is bleeding exactly the people it most needs in an age of automation: experienced operators with enough judgement and energy to adapt hard-won principles to new conditions.

But investing in them would be expensive. And risky. And visible.

So it doesn’t happen.

The comforting lie

Predictions pieces offer one great comfort.

The illusion that serious thinking is happening somewhere behind closed doors. That executives are gaming out the year ahead. That journalists are lifting the lid on privileged discussions.

The harder truth is more unsettling.

Nobody is really thinking about next year.

Most organisations are still trying to understand why what they attempted last year didn’t work. The real tension is not about the future, but about the present: about customers, value, and what people are actually willing to pay for.

And that’s fine. You don’t need to predict the future to run a business.

But you do need the courage to acknowledge the present.

Not a prediction… a hope

So no, I won’t end this with a forecast. Just a hope.

As consolidation continues, as automation accelerates, and as fewer humans are left making decisions that shape culture and commerce, perhaps we reach a tipping point. One where clarity becomes more valuable than cover. Where leaders are rewarded not for sounding prepared, but for being prepared to choose.

The gift of the internet was supposed to be abundance: more voices, more choice, more experimentation. That promise is struggling under a model where too few platforms control too many outcomes.

If 2026 is remembered for anything, I hope it’s this: the year media leaders stopped performing foresight — and started exercising responsibility.

Because the hardest part isn’t predicting what happens next. It’s being clear enough about the present that you’re willing to be held to it.

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Thanks for reading Ad-verse Reactions

I’m Omar Oakes. Someone who’s spent the last decade inside the media and advertising ecosystem, picking apart how this industry actually works, not how it pretends to.

I bring together a mix that’s becoming rare: editorial leadership, strategic clarity, and a front-row view of how agencies, broadcasters, platforms and marketers tell their stories… and where those stories break. I was global tech editor and media editor at Campaign before becoming founding editor-in-chief of The Media Leader, building it into one of the industry’s most trusted platforms.

Now I’m building a specialist clinic, oomph., which exists to help media and advertising leaders whose businesses are evolving faster than the story they’re telling. Most agencies, broadcasters and adtech companies are quietly building up narrative debt—a misalignment between what they are and what they say. The cost of that gap is commercial drag: missed opportunities, confused teams, weaker sales narratives, and stories that fail to cut through.

oomph. fixes that through a blend of editorial intelligence and strategic consulting, using a media-powered flywheel to deliver clarity, coherence, and narrative advantage.

This Substack is where I share the same ideas, challenges and provocations I bring to clients. No paywall, no fluff… just the work of someone who wants a sharper, braver, more coherent media industry. If we want better stories, someone has to start telling them.

📩 Reach me:
Business inquiries: omar@oomphoomph.com
Press: omaroakesmedia@gmail.com

🔗 More about me:
Social: Let’s connect on LinkedIn
Website: oomphoomph.com