The ARF’s 2025 Research Reports & Resources compendium brings together the most important thinking shaping advertising research today—from AI and privacy to media planning, attention and brand strategy. Spanning dozens of studies, reports and expert perspectives published by the ARF in 2025, this collection provides marketers and researchers with a practical, forward-looking view of how data, technology and consumer behavior are redefining the discipline.
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Media planning frameworks often assume that channels operate independently or compete within the same funnel stage. This research challenges that assumption by demonstrating that the largest performance gains come from cross-funnel synergies, particularly between upper-funnel television, middle-funnel digital media and lower-funnel promotions. Using a large-scale CPG dataset and a novel estimation–optimization approach, the study shows that explicitly modeling these interactions can materially improve media allocation decisions while also significantly increasing incremental revenue.
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This fifth experiment in the Psychology of Gen AI series reveals that large language models apply a rigid, rule-driven logic when evaluating privacy scenarios—even when humans typically shift their reasoning based on framing, emotion and social context. Unlike consumers, who blend intuition, feeling and social perspective into their judgments, GPT-4o relied on a single internal rule across all testing conditions: data use is acceptable only with explicit consent. This consistency offers value for certain analytic tasks but exposes limits for advertising research that depends on emotional nuance and context-sensitive consumer insight.
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On September 29-30, the ARF and MSI co-produced the inaugural ANALYTICS & FORECASTING conference, exploring the evolving role of modeling in market research and forecasting, with a particular focus on the opportunities and limitations of synthetic data. Attendees engaged in critical discussions about the opportunities and limitations of modeling in market research applications and heard practical strategies and solutions from leading researchers and practitioners.
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