As brands enter the thick of the annual season for brokering promoting commitments, also referred to as the upfronts, many are in a disquietingly familiar state of uncertainty. The Trump administration’s trade war has upended 2025 planning, putting marketers in a holding pattern and potentially pushing more toward cheaper, lower-funnel channels.
The moment presents its distinct set of challenges but in some ways echoes when the COVID-19 pandemic hit five years ago, stopping the world in its tracks and making agility a mandate. However, data demonstrates that marketers didn’t all the time move quickly to capitalize on emergent channels through the early 2020s, and the industry’s proclivity for risk aversion may again test whether brands thrive or shrink in a downturn.
“I feel that some of that what we’re feeling, in our core, is an awful lot just like the uncertainty that we felt through the pandemic,” said David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), in comments kicking of the trade group’s digitally oriented NewFronts showcase Monday. “Now is just not the time for fear. Now is just not the time for hunkering down and short-termism.”
That said, the media landscape looks significantly different than in March 2020, in no small part thanks to the pandemic-driven acceleration of digital habits. Retail media, a still-nascent term on the turn of the last decade, is one of the fastest-growing areas of promoting, propelled by the twin forces of wider e-commerce adoption and the seek for alternatives to third-party cookies. The media network model has not only produced tons of of retailer-owned ad platforms, but additionally spread to categories including ride-hailing apps, financial services and travel, leading to oversaturation. Other channels that were already gaining purchase with brands prior to COVID, including streaming and TikTok, have turn into dominant in culture, though ad spend has sometimes lagged consumer adoption. That could change as premium media properties like live sports finally flock to the digital arena at scale.
CTV and social grow ad stature post-pandemic
Annual CTV and social media U.S. ad spending, from 2020 to 2024.
Amidst this recent channel paradigm, the business of marketing hasn’t achieved the identical level of refinement as a TikTok For You page. Fragmentation and opacity are greatly exacerbated in a world where everyone’s online while many firms have lost sight of brand-building fundamentals within the chase for media math mastery.
“Media is more complex than ever,” said Sorin Patilinet, the previous senior director of marketing effectiveness and growth sciences at packaged goods giant Mars, over email. “In the past, we had a media manager and a digital manager. Today we now have a [manager for] search, retail media, organic media, as well as to the normal media roles.”
As media sits at one other inflection point, with the threat of contraction looming large and antitrust crackdowns priming a shake up, looking to the recent past could be the best way to steel the industry for an uncertain future. Below, Marketing Dive examines the forces which have reshaped media for the reason that pandemic’s outset: What stuck, what flared out and what these channels say about an evolving consumer mindset.
TikTok and the decline of the ‘social graph’
Social media fads come and go, but few apps have altered how people view content on their phones as much as TikTok. The platform made short-form, “snackable” video the norm for each users and advertisers, shifting every thing from budgetary priorities to agency assignments. Crucially, it modified how brands interact with culture, with a premium on lo-fi creator content and fast response times to buzz-worthy moments.
“The content production quality has modified in some ways. There used to be a lot preparation right into a 30-second industrial. Now that window, again, has turn into really, really short,” said Alison Mayes, managing director of independent media agency Apollo Partners.
TikTok’s addictive For You page was enshrined as a U.S. cultural fixture because the pandemic forced people to stay locked inside while craving a peek at what everyone else was up to. In 2020, the ByteDance-owned offering became the most-downloaded app globally, ushering a transition from a social media ecosystem oriented around what experts termed a social graph — the network of family and friends the user actually knows — to one centered on out-of-network content surfaced by algorithmic recommendations. That step change aligned with more consumers turning to social formats, including ads and sponsored posts, to study recent services, laying essential groundwork for a newer rise in social commerce.
Social media’s brand impact soars while TV commercials dim
Percent of U.S. consumers who heard about recent services through different channels between Q4 2020 and Q4 2024.
It wasn’t long before rivals that were built on the social graph, including Instagram, Snapchat and even LinkedIn, began to crib from TikTok’s model, though few wield the identical degree of sway over the crucial Gen Z audience.
“It’s only a stickier product offering. You have more content you possibly can share with more people, that’s more likely to be engaging,” said Ben Allison, executive vice chairman of media at VaynerMedia.
While TikTok was quick to snap up public mindshare, some advertisers were slow to spend money on the channel, a possible response to nascent ad products and wariness over its Chinese ownership, aspects which have continued to dog the business.
“TikTok is one other environment where we also still struggle when it comes to measurement. They’ve gotten higher in recent years, but, after we first launched with TikTok, lots of it wasn’t measured,” said Mayes. “We can see that stuff now, however it is also in an area that we, as a media planner, crave more accountability as well.”
TikTok represented 3.7% of U.S. social promoting in 2021, or about $2.1 billion. That market share greater than doubled the next yr, according to estimates from WARC, the beginning of an upward climb that has prolonged into today. Facebook, the poster child for the social graph, conversely saw its piece of the pie decline from 65% in 2020 to 49.8% last yr, a greater than 15 percentage-point drop.
“I might say 2022 or so is if you start to see, okay, [TikTok] is now a consistent line item. Every advertiser was asking about it,” said Allison.
TikTok’s ad spending trails meteoric rise to cultural prominence
Annual U.S. ad spending on top social media platforms, between 2020 and 2024.
TikTok is predicted by WARC to secure about $11.8 billion in U.S. ad spending, or 13.5% of total social promoting, this yr. Hitting those benchmarks is contingent on the app not getting banned over national-security concerns.
The Trump administration has already twice pushed back a deadline for locating a U.S. backer for the corporate, effectively putting the ownership query on the backburner, but there may come a time within the near future where a scramble will again be set off again to find an alternate. Even in that case, executives don’t see the TikTok model of short-form, creator-driven video going anywhere, speaking to the lasting impact the app has had on the form of social media.
“What happens with TikTok within the U.S. goes to be an enormous variable but I feel the ecosystem is already kind of baked,” said Allison.
CTV’s ascent against linear takes time
As much as stir-crazed people were glued to their phones through the peak of the pandemic, they were also watching a better volume of TV, though less continuously through linear means. The public health crisis sped up an existing cord-cutting movement and welcomed a proliferation of platforms within the areas of connected TV (CTV), over-the-top video and other forms of streaming.
The uptick in CTV spending has not quite been meteoric, but is gaining substantial traction as premium programming, corresponding to live sports, evolves. Digital video, a segment that features CTV, is forecast to capture 60% of total video and TV ad spending this yr, doubling its share from 2020, according to the IAB.
“From a platform perspective, it’s an arms race to acquire rights to quality content and sports,” said James Rubin, chief media officer at 22Squared. “From a consumer perspective, it has turn into very difficult and really costly to access all of the content that they’re concerned about being connected to.”
Streamers are standing up more sophisticated ad-tech offerings and sales pitches, with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video among the many two largest to ramp up overtures to Madison Avenue. Brands that used to spend as much as 75% of their budgets through conventional upfront agreements are actually favoring the flexible digital approach, according to Mayes, together with chasing the promise of superior targeting and analytics. CTV has also welcomed a wider pool of advertisers once priced out of the national linear TV set, including small- and mid-sized brands, with programmatic self-service solutions, the IAB found.
“CTV doesn’t need to be planned on an annual basis. Those are dollars that you simply’re not committing to a yr upfront,” said Mayes. “It is so rather more real-time planning versus having this calendar outlook or perhaps a quarterly outlook sometimes looks like a protracted time now. It’s modified the dynamic of how marketing dollars are tied up, essentially.”
Despite streaming feeling just like the recent norm, total spend remains to be not close to matching that of its traditional counterpart. U.S. ad investment in CTV — here including multiple video on demand formats, including FAST channels and subscription services — last yr hit $15.6 billion versus nearly $56 billion for linear TV, which retains an older-skewing viewer base and destination viewing occasions just like the Super Bowl. However, the audience split may not last for long: EMarketer expects that CTV will finally topple linear spending by 2028.
“Yes, linear TV audiences tend to be older from a macro perspective and CTV audiences tend to be younger,” said Rubin. “The balance is without query shifting from what had previously been linear consumption to now digital, choice-based consumption.”
CTV remains to be dwarfed by linear — but ad-spending gap is closing
Annual U.S. ad spending on traditional TV compared to CTV, from 2020 to 2024.
A lingering barrier to buy-in for CTV is measurement. Unlike the rankings monopoly present in linear, which was flawed but generally accepted, CTV has few standardized methods for assessing the effectiveness of campaigns. A highly fragmented landscape will make coming up with agreed-upon benchmarks difficult. Some initiatives, just like the cross-measurement solution Aquila, which is backed by the Association of National Advertisers, hold promise in solving the riddle of CTV measurement but remain of their early stages.
“I don’t consider that there’s any consistency in how that work is being done across the industry,” said Rubin. “The indisputable fact that our industry has been historically anchored to the notion of reach and frequency as pillars of understanding marketing delivery or media delivery and ultimately impact — the indisputable fact that we will’t actually measure that in an industry-accepted way today is absolutely mind-boggling.”
Retail media’s gold rush — and unsure future
Beyond affecting media consumption, the pandemic spurred people to pick up different shopping habits. The closure of physical stores was a pain within the near term but resulted in an influx of e-commerce data that, combined with the deprecation of third-party tracking technology, helped fuel the rise of retail media networks as marketers sought more precise methods of reaching consumers online.
“Starting at that cut-off date, lots of the retail-first firms began to construct their very own retail media networks,” said Alberto Leyes, senior vice chairman of go-to-market strategy at Guideline. “Obviously that had been thought of up to now, however it accelerated in 2020 because the brick-and-mortar shops were suffering.”
CPG advertiser spend on retail media spiked 93% yr over yr in 2020, the moment the floodgates opened, according to Guideline data that examines spending from all of the foremost ad-holding groups in addition to a range of boutique agencies. Retail media has since turn into the fastest-growing pocket of digital, analysts say, and is in search of its next phase of expansion within the realms of offsite media — or running ads outside of the retailer’s owned properties — and thru a convergence with CTV. U.S. advertser investment in retail media is predicted by eMarketer to grow 20% this yr to $62.35 billion and top $85 billion by 2027.
But eye-popping levels of growth belie the headaches the channel has created. Many brands view retail media buys as a tax imposed on them through larger trade agreements with retail partners that wield power over shelf placement. As in CTV, the sense that retail media networks are walled gardens or “black boxes” which have little incentive to compare notes with rivals is commonplace.
“Their advantage is that they have the closed-loop evaluation,” said Mayes. “The difficulty is: I would like to see which retailer is performing one of the best. Everyone has a little bit bit of a unique approach of how they’re getting to those analytic numbers.”
As true standardization looks like a pipe dream, many are simply waiting for the opposite shoe to drop on a retail media landscape with too many networks to meaningfully support. Mirroring past eras of digital platform emergence, power could consolidate among the many handful of players with the size and complex technology to meet large marketers’ needs.
“On the retail media side of things, I feel there’s going to be an infinite amount of contraction,” said VaynerMedia’s Allison. “Everybody’s coming to market [with] essentially the identical type of offering.”
Necessity breeds innovation
A saving grace for retail media within the short term could also be Trump’s tariff chaos. Retail media is built around performance channels that marketers tend to lean on in times of belt-tightening. These bets are meant to be low risk and easier to tie to transactions, however the grueling pandemic years demonstrated that many brands lost value due to a nearsighted swing toward performance.
“We’ve seen this occur before during economic downturns just like the 2008 recession and the 2020 pandemic, and is already re-emerging with recent tariffs news and stock market volatility, pushing brands towards over indexing on performance-focused tactics,” said Mayes in a follow-up email.
“However, prioritizing short-term performance on the expense of upper-funnel marketing like brand awareness, brand constructing, connecting with consumers, carries longer-term risk,” she added.
Moments of high pressure can also breed innovation. Marketers have plenty of newer tools to experiment with of their quest for efficiency, including generative artificial intelligence that was not available through the height of the pandemic. And as hectic because the COVID era was, the upshot was 35% growth for digital promoting on the entire, per the IAB.
“We need to keep in mind that change — even massive, unsettling change — isn’t all the time bad. We need to keep in mind that the digital promoting industry was born from change, and it was born to change,” said the IAB’s Cohen on the NewFronts. “The faster things change, the more disruption is in our world, the more that digital grows.”
Informa, which owns a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind Marketing Dive, can also be invested in WARC. Informa has no influence over Marketing Dive’s coverage.
Chantal Tode contributed additional reporting to this story.
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