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Why advertisers need to keep up with consumer changes in streaming, social search, and gaming. Retail media will make up one-fifth of worldwide digital ad spend this year. Guide to retail media: Rapid growth, expanding formats, and emerging opportunities.

On today's podcast episode, we discuss why gaming is a digital advertising hotbed, how consumers are embracing shoppable media, and what happens now that the ride-sharing industry has bounced back. Tune in to the discussion with our forecasting writer Ethan Cramer-Flood.

Why it matters: Media companies are especially exposed to shifts in consumer behavior and ad spend鈥攁nd both are now under pressure. Ad budgets face new headwinds. As costs rise, consumer brands in retail, tech, and CPG may scale back marketing鈥攂ad news for platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Roku, which increasingly depend on advertising. Content spending will tighten.

The most popular category of subscriptions among all consumers is digital media, followed by delivery services, gaming, and food and groceries, according to SurveyMonkey. Subscription OTT connected TV platform ad spending will grow 40.5% this year to reach $7.54 billion, per our March forecast.

Every major industry will increase total ad spend in the next two years, with media and entertainment leading the pack. Programmatic and B2B ready for a digital shift, while mobile remains dominant with in-game advertising. Here are four takeaways from 蘑菇AV鈥檚 Industry Ad Spending Benchmarks: Q4 2024 and what they mean for the upcoming years.

Yet digital audio will claim only 1.9% of US ad spending this year, compared with social鈥檚 19.3% take. Similarly, 214.0 million radio listeners will tune in for an average of 1:41 per day this year鈥攜et radio will only take 3.0% of all ad dollars. We have broken out digital gaming for the first time.

In addition to linear TV and video streaming services, podcasts, video games, out-of-home (OOH), and retail media networks (RMNs) all sell inventory upfront now. Upfront buying still offers advantages.

US digital media consumption and consumer spending growth are at a standstill. 鈥淚t's just getting really competitive to reach today's consumers,鈥� our analyst Jeremy Goldman said on an episode of the 鈥淏ehind the Numbers: Daily鈥� podcast. Here鈥檚 what advertisers need to know about the latest trends in digital, including fierce competition for ad dollars to ecommerce having room to grow.

And active radio listeners will still spend nearly as much time with their radios as gamers do with their games. Podcast time will trail the larger categories somewhat, but to put it in a different context, podcast listeners will spend roughly the same amount of time per day with podcasts as TikTok users spend with TikTok.

Once-dominant gaming continues to lose share of IAPs. In 2020, gaming generated nearly two-thirds of IAP sales, primarily behind virtual goods sales. By 2027, gaming and nongaming will approach parity in IAPs. Even before then, in 2025, virtual goods sales in gaming will stop being the majority of IAPs. Growth in IAPs is mostly thanks to subscriptions.

This month alone, Amazon is running its (misnamed) Summer Beauty Event, Pet Day sale, and Gaming Week promotions. It also plans to double the length of Prime Day, which will give consumers more opportunities to find deals as well as generate more ad revenues. It鈥檚 squeezing as much revenue as it can from its ad business.

What percentage of gamers say their purchasing decisions are at least somewhat influenced by advertising seen in video games or by video game-related brand promotions? A) 9% B) 19% C) 29% D) 39%. Over a third (39%) of gamers say their purchase decisions are somewhat influenced by video game ads or brand promotions, according to data from CivicScience. March 21, 2025. True or false?

Companies that collect robust user data, like airlines, ridesharing services, food retailers, gaming companies, and more, have opened up new ad space or are exploring ways to harness user data to increase revenues.

Make the case to reallocate ad dollars to other social media platforms to meet shifts in consumer behavior. More like this:. TikTok leads time spent on social for most US adults. Why advertisers need to keep up with consumer changes in streaming, social search, and gaming. Most teens and parents are comfortable with how much time teens spend on smartphones, social media.

Traditional search鈥攚hich excludes retail media search鈥攚ill claim the biggest share of US ad dollars this year, amounting to $90.73 billion, according to our March 2024 forecast.

The retailer held at least 10 sales events this year鈥攆rom sitewide events like its Big Spring Sale and Prime Day to vertical-specific sales like Amazon Gaming Week and the Amazon Book Sale. Those events have helped establish Amazon as a destination for year-round deals and recruit new Prime members.

For the first time, US adults will spend more time per day with digital video than with TV this year, according to our forecast, as the cord-cutting revolution takes hold. Total time spent with digital video and TV will remain just over 6 hours per day, the same amount it鈥檚 been since 2020.

Microsoft met expectations, but the bigger questions鈥擜I competition, ad growth, and cloud momentum鈥攚ill determine whether it stays ahead or starts playing defense.

Its share price is still far below its IPO high, and it will take significant legwork to establish itself as a major channel for ad spending.

Microsoft has quietly laid a foundation for the future of digital advertising with assets in search (Bing), social (LinkedIn), gaming (Xbox), retail media (PromoteIQ), and ad tech (Xandr). Ecommerce giants power the retail media boom. Amazon drove鈥攁nd now dominates鈥攄igital advertising鈥檚 third wave with a powerful combination of search, display, and streaming TV ads.

Social media and gaming will drive this trend. 2. QR-launched AR will rejuvenate out-of-home (OOH) advertising. Pandemic-fueled QR code use will continue, with more than 94 million users this year, Wurmser said. That also made OOH more accessible, offering a richer ad experience for consumers and trackability for advertisers.

鈥淏uying upfront became popular with linear TV, but that old-school sales tactic has become common in digital video, podcasts, video games, and is even emerging in retail media,鈥� said Benes. 鈥淎s long as advertising campaigns are built around product launches and particular timeframes, buying inventory ahead of time will prevail.鈥�. 4. No one鈥檚 talking politics.

Do you think game developers are going to have to have that kind of scale before they're able to attract those ad dollars, those brand dollars in particular? Yory Wurmser (15:04):. Well, gaming has huge scale. Scale has never really been the problem. It's been more the formats, the fact that gamers while they're playing don't like interruptions.

Time spent with digital games, flat. Digital audio, flat, but time spent watching CTV is really one of the only digital activities that is growing, users adding an extra 10 minutes of CTV time to each day in 2025. The other part of this as well, Paul Werner wrote Our Future of Digital 2025 report, linked in the show notes he was writing about this.