This interview was conducted by the editorial team.
2024 was a year of gradual normalization for the AdTech industry after several years of instability. Amid stricter privacy regulations, the market began adapting to new conditions: Apple released an updated version of SKAdNetwork for iOS, while Google took a more flexible stance on tracking. This helped ease pressure across the ecosystem and allowed for more predictable planning. Although there was no sharp rebound, signs of stabilization emerged, with greater standardization, recovering budgets, and the accelerated adoption of AI technologies becoming a key tool for navigating the new reality.
Peter Kireev is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Reliz, a European AdTech company developing AI-driven tools for creative automation and media buying infrastructure. A recognised expert in advertising technology and product strategy, he has spent over a decade building scalable platforms at the intersection of machine learning and digital advertising. He shares how the industry has moved beyond its recent stress, why the rise of CTV is more than just a trend, and what challenges lie ahead in 2025.
Looking back at 2024, which key events and trends in the AdTech industry would you highlight, and how will they shape its future development?
Peter Kireev: The year 2024 marked a turning point for the AdTech industry. It began to finally recover from a prolonged period of uncertainty brought on by years of tightening privacy regulations and technological disruption.
At the start of the year, Google reaffirmed its plans to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, which caused serious concern among those in the market who rely on accurate attribution and personalized targeting. However, this hard deadline didn’t last: instead of a full-scale deprecation, Google pivoted towards a gradual transition. In January, it launched limited testing of Tracking Protection, disabling third-party cookies for 1% of users. The complete phase-out was postponed to 2025, taking into account regulatory feedback and allowing the industry more time to adapt to alternative solutions under the Privacy Sandbox framework.
By 2024, SKAdNetwork 4.0, previously introduced by Apple, had gained wide adoption across the industry and remained the most significant update to its attribution framework within the iOS ecosystem. The version introduced support for multiple postbacks, timestamping, and a more flexible attribution model — features that significantly improved transparency and allowed advertisers to better evaluate campaign performance, even with limited access to user-level data. While the update didn’t restore legacy tracking capabilities, it marked an important step toward a more stable and privacy-focused advertising model.
In September 2024, Oracle Ads officially exited the market – a clear signal that even major players were struggling to keep pace with the changing landscape. Rather than a year of breakout growth, 2024 felt more like a period of recalibration. The industry moved forward, but cautiously, making progress without the momentum many had hoped for.
Still, signs of recovery began to surface. Initial elements of standardization returned, the market environment became more predictable, and planning processes grew more manageable. This contributed to a cautiously optimistic outlook. According to Dentsu, global ad spend grew by approximately 6.8% — a modest but telling indicator that the industry is gradually moving out of survival mode and into more stable, sustainable territory.
How did artificial intelligence shape the industry over the past year?
Peter Kireev: 2024 was not just the year AdTech regained structural clarity — it was the year artificial intelligence firmly took centre stage. What was once an emerging tool became a core component of the industry’s infrastructure. AI is no longer viewed as experimental or peripheral — it is now foundational.
The most visible leap happened in creative production, thanks to the rapid adoption of generative AI, particularly in creative production. Brands and agencies began rapidly generating and testing large volumes of creative assets, enabling faster iteration and more effective campaigns.
A major catalyst was OpenAI DALL·E 3 — an image generation model that gained widespread adoption in 2024 thanks to its integration with GPT-4 Turbo. It enabled the creation of visual creatives from text prompts, allowed real-time adjustments through conversational interaction, and helped quickly tailor visuals to specific campaign needs. This tool allowed brands to move away from lengthy and expensive production cycles, delivering ready-to-use visual solutions within minutes.
It was not just OpenAI, either. Generative models such as Midjourney, RunwayML, and integrations with GPT-4 and other large language models (LLMs) enabled teams to produce both visual and textual content at scale, launch parallel A/B tests, and quickly identify top-performing variations. This generative capability fundamentally transformed the creative process — not only by reducing costs but also by embedding continuous experimentation into day-to-day workflows.
Meanwhile, machine learning quietly reshaped the optimisation side of the business. The industry began moving away from heavy reliance on personal data and toward contextual and predictive approaches. This shift allowed advertisers to achieve stronger results — often at lower costs.
AI delivered the greatest value in two areas: large-scale creative generation and budget optimisation, allowing marketers to acquire higher-quality users more efficiently. For many in the space, 2024 marked the moment AI stopped being a promising tool and started becoming a strategic necessity. Competitive advantage increasingly depended on how effectively companies could integrate AI across every layer of the advertising stack.
What other trends do you believe influenced the AdTech industry in 2024?
Peter Kireev: One of the major investment trends in 2024 was the large-scale shift of advertising budgets toward Connected TV (CTV). This channel has become a central space for experimentation and the reallocation of traditional digital budgets. Amid increasing data privacy regulations, CTV offers scalability, flexibility, and compliance — and continues to grow rapidly.
Another major area of momentum was in-app advertising. Major players such as Facebook and Google have begun actively reallocating resources, driven by the emergence of powerful MLP (multi-level prediction) solutions. A notable example is AppLovin, which reported strong performance in the U.S. market after launching Axon 2.0 — its proprietary AI engine — significantly strengthening its data and targeting capabilities.
These shifts reflected something bigger: a move away from rigid walled gardens and toward more open, diverse ecosystems, supporting greater market diversity, healthier competition, and more balanced technological development. As a result, the reallocation of budgets opened the door for new players and encouraged infrastructure renewal. For advertisers, it meant more choice in tools, strategies, and traffic — and a healthier, more competitive landscape overall.
How do you foresee the AdTech industry evolving, and which key trends do you expect will define its course in 2025?
Peter Kireev: 2025 will bring further growth in CTV, stronger omnichannel strategies, and the evolution of household-level attribution. One of the most exciting developments is the growing ability to attribute installs and conversions to CTV touchpoints. This is driven by improvements in MMP platforms such as AppsFlyer and Adjust, which have started introducing tools to account for CTV-driven installs.
Another area to watch is predictive analytics. While still niche, it offers potential to optimize ROI by more accurately forecasting user behavior. The rapid integration of AI across all levels of the advertising ecosystem is continuing — and will only accelerate in 2025. Advertisers will increasingly adopt machine learning-based solutions for personalized user experiences, adaptive media planning, and real-time autonomous campaign optimization. In 2025, the companies that build fully integrated AI pipelines, from generating assets to acquiring traffic, will pull ahead.
What challenges do you see the industry still facing in 2025, and do you expect to see more effective, system-level solutions emerging to address them?
Peter Kireev: One of the toughest ongoing challenges is fraud detection, especially in the in-app space. With the tightening of tracking restrictions, detecting fraudulent traffic has become more challenging, particularly in the in-app advertising segment. So far, there is no universal solution that can reliably separate real users from sophisticated bots. Fraudsters are getting smarter, and without new detection methods, this will remain a blind spot for many advertisers. We are likely to see more effort here in 2025, but we are not out of the woods yet.
