Traditional TV television advertising spending surpasses digital video in 2025, accounting for only 42% of the total TV/video advertising spend.
**Digital Video's Dominance: A Game Changer for Modern Marketing**
In the rapidly evolving world of advertising, digital video is making a significant impact, with its share set to command 58% of TV/video ad spend by 2025, according to the latest report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). This shift is driven by technological innovation, changing consumer habits, and the rise of new content formats.
The surge in digital video advertising is directly linked to the widespread adoption of internet-connected devices and mobile platforms, providing easy access to streaming services and social media. Marketers now leverage real-time data, in-depth analytics, and precise audience targeting to optimise campaigns, increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of ad spend.
Senior marketers must embrace agility, data-driven decision-making, and creative experimentation to fully capitalise on this trend. By aligning budgets, capabilities, and creative to a digital-first reality, they can harness video's full potential and drive sustained business impact.
To maximise their return on investment, marketers should diversify and optimise content formats, enhancing targeting and measurement, building flexible, multi-channel campaigns, and adapting to regulatory and consumer trends.
Embracing short-form video, leveraging AI and data, experimenting with emerging formats, implementing advanced analytics, prioritising personalisation, focusing on mobile, adopting multi-channel strategies, collaborating with leading platforms, testing and learning, staying ahead of privacy regulations, and monitoring shifts in consumer behaviour are key strategies for senior marketers to capitalise on digital video's growth.
The IAB report emphasises the necessity of hybrid measurement frameworks combining deterministic identifiers with probabilistic modeling for digital video performance. By 2025, digital video spend is projected to reach $72.4 billion, a 14% increase from 2024.
Media planners are increasingly reallocating dollars away from linear buys toward digital line items that offer guaranteed impressions, audience guarantees, and performance-based pricing. In 2025, digital video spend alone reached $63.8 billion, while CTV spend rebounded to $26.6 billion. The IAB projects the gap between digital and linear video ad spend will widen in 2025.
In 2020, digital video spend was $26.2 billion, accounting for 29% of total video ad spend. From 2021 to 2024, annual digital video spending increased, reaching $63.8 billion in 2024. The IAB forecasts that digital video could approach 65% of total TV/video ad spend by 2027.
The IAB report finds that 47% of CTV inventory will be available via real-time bidding in 2025. Senior marketers should rebalance their media mix toward digital, invest in unified measurement, build agile creative workflows, and deepen programmatic expertise to capitalise on digital video's momentum.
CPG brands use addressable CTV to deliver product tutorials and demo-driven storytelling at scale. Retail marketers use geo-fenced streaming activations to synchronise TV-style creative with in-store promotions. Pharmaceutical advertisers apply strict compliance playbooks to deploy educational video messages across devices. These sophisticated approaches help marketers justify further investment by connecting ad exposures to incremental outcomes.
- In the realm of marketing, understanding technology's role is crucial for effectively utilizing digital video, as it opens up possibilities for innovative content formats such as short-form video and AI-powered personalization to enhance lifestyle and entertainment experiences.
- The growth of digital video in sports marketing is noteworthy, with brands leveraging connected devices to provide interactive experiences, such as geo-fenced streaming activations that coordinate TV-style creative with in-store promotions, thereby creating a seamless brand-consumer relationship.
