From Signal to Strategy: Navigating What's Next in Media Investment

Introduction

Advertisers entered 2025 with established plans, but the mix of that investment has already begun to shift.

Over the course of the year, total U.S. media investment reached approximately $281 billion, essentially flat year-over-year (+0.3%). Growth has stalled, signaling a transition from broad expansion to more selective investment strategies.

Digital media continues to dominate overall spend, accounting for over half of total investment, but the latest data shows growth is uneven across channels. Advertisers are concentrating budgets in formats showing stronger growth and allocation, marking a shift from scale-driven planning to precision-driven execution.

This report explores how those investment patterns are evolving, and what they signal for the rest of the year.

• ​Total U.S. Media Spend: $281B (+0.3% YoY)
• ​Digital Share of Total: 65% ($182B of $281B)
• ​Leading Digital Channel: Social (+9.9%)
• ​Steepest Digital Decline: Mobile App (−3.4%)

Advertisers are no longer focused on being everywhere; they are focusing on where investment drives the greatest return.

Evolution of Omnichannel

Growth Has Stalled, The Mix is Shifting

Total U.S. media investment has effectively flattened, moving from +7% growth in 2024 to +0.3% in 2025. Rather than spreading evenly across all channels, advertisers are becoming more selective, prioritizing investments that deliver measurable outcomes. As consumer attention continues to fragment, brands are focusing on where investment drives the greatest return.

The result is a more disciplined approach to omnichannel media: one defined by optimization, not expansion.

• ​From scale: Last year's playbook was breadth, running every channel, capturing every audience.
• ​To precision: Now the same growth rate masks a quieter reallocation toward higher-engagement formats.
• ​Outcome-led mix: Engagement and measurable performance are the deciding factors for incremental budget.

Media at a Glance: 2024 vs 2025

Where the Dollars Actually Went

A cross-media snapshot of YoY spend shows the story isn't digital vs. traditional, it's about where within each category growth is actually concentrating.

• ​Digital: +2.6% ($182B, largest media)
• ​CTV: +13.3% ($19.2B)
• ​TV: −6.7% ($59.1B)
• ​Print: −21.7% ($6.4B)

Shifting Channels & Digital Mix

Not All Digital Is Winning

Digital media remains the largest share of advertising investment, but growth is increasingly uneven. The latest data shows that social media is the fastest-growing major channel (+9.9% YoY), followed by online video (+6.7%) and mobile web video (+5.5%). These gains reflect a broader shift toward formats that capture attention through immersive, platform-native experiences.

At the same time, other digital channels are showing signs of stagnation or decline. Search investment fell 3% YoY while display experienced a ~3.5% decline, indicating a rebalancing of budgets away from traditional performance channels.

This divergence highlights a critical shift: advertisers are redistributing budgets toward higher-engagement environments.

Video's Momentum

Video Is Doing the Heavy Lifting

Video is driving significant gains across the mix. Mobile web video grew 5.5% YoY, reflecting continued consumer demand for streaming and short-form content across devices. Online video added another +6.7%, and together, video formats are quietly reshaping where attention (and budget) lives.

In contrast, traditional mobile web formats remained essentially flat, signaling a broader transition away from static placements toward more immersive, interactive experiences.

Advertising investment is shifting toward visual, mobile-first, and engagement-driven formats. The next dollar isn't chasing reach. It's chasing attention.

Mobile-First Formats

The Split Within Mobile

Within mobile, the winners and losers mirror the broader digital story. Video and feed-native formats are pulling ahead; static banner and app environments are being rebalanced.

• ​Mobile Web Video: +5.5% ($16.2B YoY), fastest-growing mobile format and third largest overall digital channel.
• ​Mobile Web: Flat ($11.1B), signaling a floor on static placements.
• ​Mobile App: −3.4% ($9.1B), as advertisers reallocated from in-app display toward in-feed and video environments.

Traditional Media

Traditional Media is In Transition

Traditional media continues to play an important role, but its composition is shifting decisively. The standout winner is AVOD, up +13% to $19.2B, as streaming continues to absorb dollars that once lived in linear TV.

• ​Linear TV: Declined −7%, with Cable, Network, and Local all down YoY. Pricing remains premium, but reach is compressing.
• ​Print: Down −22%.
• ​Radio: +7%.
• ​OOH: +4%.

These channels are increasingly evaluated based on their ability to deliver incremental reach and efficiency within a broader omnichannel strategy. The rise of AVOD continues to reshape how advertisers approach television, further blurring the lines between "traditional" and "digital" as the categories collapse into a single video economy.

The Monthly Trajectory

Inside the Monthly Rhythm

A month-by-month view of digital investment shows momentum building from January through April, easing into mid-summer, and rebuilding into the year-end push. The pattern reflects how spend tracks the calendar of consumer demand and advertiser cycles, quarterly planning windows, seasonal campaigns, and the holiday surge.

• ​Social pulled away from the stack: By December, monthly social spend reached $6.5B, roughly 4.6× the next-closest digital format. The gap widened nearly every month of 2025.

Key Takeaways

Five Signals for the Back Half of 2026

1. 1.Growth has stalled.
   • ​$281B in U.S. media at +0.3% YoY. Allocation is now the growth lever.
   • ​Action: Audit channel-level performance against the flat benchmark; anything declining is genuinely losing share, anything growing 5%+ is meaningfully outpacing the market.
2. 2.Social is now the largest digital channel.
   • ​$65.5B and +9.9% YoY. It has surpassed search for the first time on a YoY basis.
   • ​Action: If social is <36% of your digital mix (the new market average), revisit allocation in your next planning cycle.
3. 3.Video formats are compounding.
   • ​Online video (+6.7%), mobile web video (+5.5%), and AVOD (+13%) are all outpacing the overall market.
   • ​Action: Reallocate from static display (−3.5%) into video, same intent surfaces, dramatically better growth trajectory.
4. 4.Search & display are recalibrating.
   • ​−3.0% and −3.5% respectively. Still foundational, but under pressure from higher-engagement formats.
   • ​Action: Hold the floor on search/display for incremental reach, but consider shifting growth dollars into video, which is up +5–7%.
5. 5.The TV economy is moving to streaming.
   • ​Linear TV declined −7% while AVOD grew +13% to $17B. Print continues to restructure (−22%).
   • ​Action: Treat AVOD as a primary video investment, not a TV alternative. Reallocate from linear TV into streaming where audience is consolidating and pricing is still climbing.

Conclusion

Optimize, Don't Expand

The advertising market in 2025 is defined less by expansion and more by strategic refinement. Total media investment held essentially flat year-over-year at $281B (+0.3%), but inside that flat headline, dollars are concentrating decisively in a small number of high-performing channels.

Social media and video formats are leading this next phase, capturing a disproportionate share of incremental spend as advertisers prioritize engagement and measurable outcomes.

Foundational channels like search and display remain critical, but are being reassessed within a more performance-driven framework.

Success will depend not just on initial planning, but on the ability to continuously optimize and reallocate investment in response to changing market dynamics.

Methodology

We undertook a comprehensive review of advertising expenditures across top media channels including digital, out-of-home, paid social, print, radio, linear TV, and AVOD. This analysis compared data from ads that ran between 2024 and 2025, aiming to identify changes and emerging patterns in media spending and strategy. The year-over-year growth numbers in the report have been adjusted for properties that were not covered in both years.

Channel Definitions

• ​Social: Captures all advertising that runs on social platforms, including video, dynamic, carousel, and static ad formats. The +9.9% Social growth shown reflects spend across this full format mix, not video creative alone.
• ​Online Video and Mobile Web Video: Track video ad spend running outside social environments, on inventory like programmatic video, AVOD, and pre-roll placements on news, sports, and entertainment sites. Video advertising as a creative format extends across both the "Social" and "Video" lines in this report.
• ​AVOD: Monitored using panel-based collection. Spending estimates are determined using a statistical model, taking into account the platform's valuation of advertising and the weighted sample of data observations across platforms including Disney+, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, PlutoTV, and Tubi.
• ​Linear TV: Uses proprietary pattern-recognition technology to collect television airings on over 125 broadcast and cable networks. Media spend is estimated using average unit costs by Media, Network, Daypart, Program Genre, and Program.
• ​Mobile: Coverage includes app, web, and video served across 3,800+ domains, sub-domains, subdirectories, and 700+ apps. Ad impressions are estimated using a proprietary algorithm based on engagement and experience metrics by site.
• ​OOH: Out-of-home advertising is a combination of cinema and outdoor formats. Cinema reflects placements served to approximately 3,900 theaters with over 34,000 screens. Outdoor covers nearly all 210 DMAs within all 50 states.
• ​Paid Search: Coverage estimates search activations placed with Google across Desktop & Mobile, Text & PLAs for the top 20,000 domains each month ranked on spending.
• ​Radio: Media spend is estimated through a combination of observations and third-party data sources and includes a mix of over-the-air signals (25 markets) and webstreams (16 markets).

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