DoubleVerify has released its 2025 Global Insights report, identifying the top five ways marketers are turning to AI to drive efficiency, improve ROI, and regain strategic focus amid growing campaign complexity.
The report is based on a March 2025 survey of 1,970 marketing and advertising decision-makers across APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and North America, conducted by Sapio Research. It shows that while 42 per cent of marketers already use third-party AI tools for bidding or campaign optimisation outside of their DSP, a further 49 per cent plan to do so in the near future.
Among the key findings is a significant shift in time management: campaign managers spend an average of 10 hours per week on manual optimisation, equating to more than $17,000 per year per team member in lost productivity for North American agencies. AI is being embraced to help reduce this workload and refocus teams on strategic and creative initiatives.
Five AI priorities for marketers
The report outlines five clear priorities where AI is already driving meaningful results:
• Automate the grind: Campaign managers are reclaiming time by automating repetitive tasks like bid adjustments and pacing corrections. This shift allows more space for strategic and creative work.
• Optimise in flight: AI is increasingly used to fine-tune campaigns mid-flight, with adoption growing 12 per cent year-on-year. Tools that dynamically reallocate budgets and adjust frequency caps based on real-time data are key to maximising impact.
• Activate smarter, launch faster: Campaign activation saw the biggest jump in planned AI usage (up 32 per cent), especially in fast-paced sectors like food and drink (+68%) and tech (+41%). Marketers are turning to AI to streamline setup and speed time to market.
• Precision over proxies: As upper-funnel spending grows, so does the demand for AI tools that go beyond proxies to intelligently direct investment. DV data shows a 106 per cent global increase in AI-driven upper-funnel activations in 2H 2024.
• Cut through walled garden weeds: With social platform investment projected to hit $27.2 billion globally in 2025, AI is critical to ensuring budget efficiency and media quality in walled gardens. Marketers report challenges in transparency, content alignment and measuring ROAS — gaps AI is increasingly helping to bridge.
Scibids AI in focus
The report highlights how DV Scibids AI™ helps marketers perform up to 1,500 optimisations per day on a single campaign, averaging 400 daily. By integrating third-party metrics like brand suitability and attention, it delivers improvements such as:
• +50% CPM efficiency
• +137% CTR
• +61% CPA efficiency
“The purpose of DV Scibids AI is not to replace marketers but to elevate the work of real people.” the report notes. AI enables campaign teams to focus on long-term planning and audience connection, while automation handles the scale and speed of data-led decision making.
With usage expected to continue rising across functions, from media strategy to dynamic creative optimisation, the report concludes that early adopters of AI will be best positioned to compete in an increasingly automated ecosystem.