did the Media Trends play out?
In early 2025, we published a trends piece outlining key shifts in advertising and media. Now that we’re at the end of the year, let’s have a look at what the data and industry signals showed and where reality diverged from our forecast.
1) Global Ad Spend continued its growth
Our prediction: 2025 would hit ~$1.07T in global ad spend.
Reality: Global ad spend did indeed grow strongly. Recent forecasts from The Wall Street Journal show a ~8.8% growth to around $1.14T.
What has been driving this growth? The synergy between traditional and digital media has created more effective advertising opportunities. Combined with better measurement capabilities and more precise targeting, advertising is working better than ever before.
2) Streaming Advertising & Ad-Supported Tiers actually scaled
Prediction: Streaming platforms will embrace ads (Netflix/Max ad-supported tiers, CTV growth).
Reality:
- Netflix’s ad-supported tier more than doubled users, exceeding 90M+ monthly globally. A clear sign of the shift toward ad-funded video. The Verge
- Industry forecasts also show connected TV/OTT ad spend growing strongly (~10–20%+) in 2025. Skybeam.io
We’ve also experienced this switch to CTV and streaming at GLADTOBE. Our CTV spends for our clients have increased by a whopping +1200% over the past year and we’re not stopping here. We’re expecting more and more clients investing in CTV.
Takeaway: Streaming scaled ads in a powerful way. Platforms increasingly treat ad-supported tiers as a core growth engine, validating the forecast that “streaming is TV now.”
Note from our side: although streaming is getting stronger and powerful, we’ve come to the realization that a mix of both Linear TV and CTV do the trick for most of our clients. The best of both worlds.
Want to know more about combining CTV and LTV?
3) Social Media relevance: fragmentation, community, and a push back to human
In our 2025 predictions, we anticipated a drop in traditional engagement and a weakening grip of social platforms. What actually happened was more nuanced. Social didn’t lose relevance, it shifted.
GWI’s 2025 reporting showed that people continued to spend significant time on social, but behavior fragmented across multiple platforms and micro-communities. Users weren’t engaging less; they were engaging differently: more in private spaces, more in interest-based groups and forums, and more through creators who feel closer and more relatable than brand voices. (gwi.com)
This shift toward intentional, community-driven participation lined up with Kantar’s findings: brands relying on polished, impersonal output struggled to earn attention, while those showing real people, real expertise, and real context saw stronger resonance.
A major driver behind this?
2025 was the year feeds became visibly flooded with AI-generated content. Fast to produce, easy to recognise, and often indistinguishable across industries. The more AI-native content users encountered, the more they gravitated toward what felt human: creators speaking in their own voice, unpolished behind-the-scenes formats.
In other words: AI increased volume, but human presence increased value.
Social media didn’t decline; it re-anchored around people. A trend that sets the stage for what becomes even more important in 2026.
4) Retail Media continued strong growth
Prediction: Retail media would grow fast and capture more ad share.
Reality: Data shows that retail media continues to be the fastest growing media, with a growth of ~13.9% in 2025. It is still dominated by the big players like Amazon but smaller retailers also start to appear. dentsu.lv
Takeaway: Retail media’s strength as closed-loop performance advertising held up. It remains one of the most resilient channels for measurable business outcomes.
5) AI & Measurement Tools went from theoretical to practical
On AI and Measurement, our trend piece predicted:
- Better targeting and performance through AI tools
- Marketing Mix Models and real-time measurement advancements
Industry reality: AI investment into advertising automation and targeting was a key driver of ad spend growth in 2025, mentioned as a major factor by some analysts from The Wall Street Journal. The measurement models are indeed evolving with new AI and data solutions emerging.
Takeaway: The shift toward AI-enabled optimization and analytics tools was real, but the measurement landscape is still in progress rather than fully realized.
Have a look at how we have integrated AI into our media planning.
6) Podcasts: Growth, Format Shifts, and a move into Hybrid Media
We predicted that podcast consumption would keep rising and that proved true. But the real shift came from format evolution. Podcasts are no longer just audio. They’ve become video podcasts, livestreams, clipped formats, and full content ecosystems across YouTube, TikTok, and social feeds. Axios reported that video-first podcasting surged, reflecting how audiences increasingly prefer to see the hosts they’re listening to.
For brands, this meant podcasts weren’t just a channel, but a distribution network: long-form audio + short-form clips + social extensions + community interaction.
So while the prediction that podcasts would “overtake radio” held true directionally in several markets, the bigger insight from 2025 is that podcasts matured into hybrid media. Part audio, part video, part community. And that’s where their strength now lies.
What this means for Marketers after 2025 (our TL;DR)
The industry didn’t slow down in 2025, on the contrary. A few things became clear:
- Ad spend increased, again.
Global ad spend grew in 2025, supported by reduced tariff impact and AI-driven efficiency gains. With forecasts landing around $1.14T. (WSJ) - Streaming became fully ad-native.
Ad tiers scaled rapidly. Netflix’s ad-supported plan more than doubled users, and streaming leaned further into sports, linear-style programming, and performance-driven formats. (The Verge) - Social didn’t die. It evolved.
Social engagement shifted toward creators, micro-communities, and human-led content, as feeds became crowded with AI-generated material. People still spent significant time on social platforms, but with more intentional, community-driven behaviour. (GWI & Kantar) - Retail media kept delivering measurable ROI.
Retail media continued its climb with strong double-digit growth, powered by closed-loop attribution and purchase-linked data. (Dentsu) - AI and measurement progressed. But the transformation is still ongoing.
Brands adopted AI broadly across planning, optimisation, content adaptation, and buying, while measurement tools continued to mature but didn’t yet reach full real-time unification.
Final Thoughts
Looking back at our predictions and how the year turned out, we can give ourselves a solid A-. We did see things coming and we’re proud that we could adapt and ride the wave.
2025 blended the media landscape. Streaming leaned into TV playbooks, podcasts became full content ecosystems, retail media acted like a performance engine, and AI rewired how work gets done. Our word for 2025: convergence.
And in a year filled with AI-generated everything, the real differentiator ended up being humans: real people, real expertise, real context. The more automated the feeds became, the more audiences gravitated toward what felt authentic.
If 2025 showed us where the industry is heading, 2026 is where the shift becomes unmistakable. We’ll break down exactly what that means in our upcoming 2026 Trends report.
