蘑菇AV

This is the first installment of our quarterly 鈥淎d Spending Benchmarks鈥� series, which helps ad buyers and sellers calibrate their spending and revenue mix against the market.

Digital ad spending growth in Canada is being driven in large part by a host of industries. Our rankings show that retail and consumer packaged goods continue to have the most ad spending share.

Meta is still the top dog in social media, but smaller platforms like Snap and Pinterest are focusing on augmented reality and ecommerce, respectively, to stand out in a crowded field. Meta鈥檚 ad revenues surged as AI investment intensified. Meta delivered a standout Q4, with revenues climbing 21% YoY to $48.38 billion.

AI shopping assistants are reshaping product discovery and threatening retail media鈥檚 search-driven model. RMNs and advertisers need to adjust strategies to protect their market position and seize the opportunity to turn disruption into growth.

Tariffs are slowing retail sales growth: A Reuters analysis found the Trump administration鈥檚 trade policies have cost companies more than $34 billion in lost sales and higher costs, and that toll keeps rising.

Escalating US tariffs on Chinese imports and the likely closure of the de minimis loophole could significantly impact social platforms like Meta and TikTok鈥攚hich rely heavily on ad dollars from fast-growing Chinese ecommerce companies such as Shein and Temu.

Ad spending on retail media will increase by more than $75 billion by 2028. To take advantage of this opportunity, retailers must understand advertisers' top priorities and be prepared to address their challenges.

Search will account for 64.0% of retail media next year, as it is heavily tied to product discovery on ecommerce sites. Display will make up 25.0% of retail media ad spending, 11.0% of which will be video. In-store advertising makes up a small but growing share of dollars spent.

US retail media spend will reach $60.81 billion in 2025鈥攁dding roughly $29.2 billion in new ad dollars, more growth than Meta and Alphabet will see combined, according to 蘑菇AV鈥檚 forecasts. At the same time, 71% of advertisers now rank incrementality as the most important KPI for their retail media investments, an Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey found.

This report compares our 2024 US ad spending and time spent with media forecasts. It identifies incongruities between how marketers are spending ad dollars and where consumers are spending their time.

Germany is seeing the fastest growth in CPG ad spending. Its close neighbors, France and the UK, are seeing CPG investments in digital advertising rising rapidly. But Germany is outpacing them by several percentage points. This may be partly due to the industry鈥檚 so far limited investments, leaving more room for growth.

As marketers combat signal loss, they鈥檙e turning to channels less reliant on cross-site or cross-app tracking, according to 蘑菇AV鈥檚 鈥淎d Measurement Trends H2 2024鈥� report. 76% of brand and agency marketers worldwide plan to increase their digital ad spend on social media/influencer marketing in 2025, while 64% will increase retail media spend and 47% will increase spend on connected TV (CTV), according

Chinese ecommerce brands like Temu and Shein are already slashing US spend. Meanwhile, Reddit and Pinterest are gaining ground, fueled by AI tools, international growth, and ecommerce integrations. Streaming platforms are proving resilient as linear TV continues its decline.

After beauty's social return on ad spend (ROAS) dipped to $1.90 in Q4 2024, the category saw a marked jump up to $3.50 in Q1 2025, according to a March report from Cart.com.

Ad dollars mirror that shift: Online formats will climb 12.3% in 2025 to $405 billion, while offline spending declines 5.5% to $181 billion. Newspapers will decline farther (-13%) than total offline spending. For economic coverage, newspapers (and magazines) are only used by 8% of the population.

The insight: Amazon鈥檚 decision to double the length of its Prime Day sale delivered significant rewards for its advertising business鈥攁s we said it would. The takeaway: The first four-day Prime Day was an important learning experience for brands. With the event unlikely to get any shorter, sellers will need to be more precise about their ad strategy鈥攆ocusing spending on times of day when shoppers are more likely to buy, or saving the bulk of their budgets for end-of-sale urgency.

More retailers are turning to Instacart to power their ecommerce storefronts, with Costco Business Centres and Kohl鈥檚 Food Stores signing up for the company鈥檚 white-label services in the first half of 2025 alone. That鈥檚 up from 30 in all of 2024, and slightly more than a dozen in 2023.