NEW YORK — In what analysts are calling “a worrying sign of creative exhaustion,” a new report from the International Marketing Board has revealed that the rate of new adtech acronym creation has plummeted to a seven-year low in 2025.
For decades, adtech has been the world’s most prolific generator of meaningless letter clusters—churning out new abbreviations at a rate unmatched by any other sector, including defense, medicine, and government bureaucracy. Acronyms like DSP, SSP, DMP, and OTT once fueled an industry built almost entirely on the illusion of innovation.
“Adtech doesn’t sell ads—it sells acronyms,” said marketing futurist Dana Selwyn, sighing wistfully. “These incomprehensible clusters of letters give the illusion of sophistication, the sense that something deeply technical is happening behind the curtain. Without new ones, the curtain just looks like what it is—a PowerPoint slide from 2016.”
Historically, the pace of acronym creation has been seen as a leading indicator of the industry’s health. When new regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA hit the scene, the sector responded with a burst of creativity, introducing dozens of related abbreviations that no one fully understood but everyone pretended to. The period is still referred to fondly by insiders as The Golden Age of Privacy Acronyms.
The early years of the AI boom brought a similar renaissance, with an explosion of fresh nonsense such as GPU, NPU, TFU, CFU, RAG, LLM, AGI, MLOps, AIGC, and AIaaS (“Artificial Intelligence as a Service,” though no one could ever explain the service part). The alphabet soup overflowed, giving investors the comforting illusion that something—anything—was happening.
But the latest data shows that acronym production has fallen 54% in 2025, a drop experts describe as “existential.”
“Without new acronyms, how do we convince clients that we’re innovating?” asked Brett Forland, Chief Synergy Officer at AdRithm. “You can’t just keep recycling AI. We’ve already done AIX, AIQ, and AIPaaS. We’re out of vowels.”
Industry leaders are now calling for emergency brainstorming sessions to generate fresh terms before the sector loses its mystique entirely. “If we don’t come up with at least three new three-letter acronyms by Q4, investors might realize we’re just renaming spreadsheets,” warned Selwyn.
The report concludes with a stark warning: “The health of the adtech ecosystem depends on one thing—our ability to keep making stuff up.”
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