In this post, we look back at the past year and highlight the key digital advertising trends that defined 2025. One thing is clear: digital advertising did not slow down, it just became smarter. Looking across AdClarity’s data for different industries, you see the same patterns repeat. Those patterns tell a broader story about how the digital ad market behaved this year, not just in a single vertical but across the board.
Spend Is Resilient, But Smarter
The first big message from 2025 is that budgets held up, even with economic noise in the background. In the US Accommodation and Hotels category, our projected Q4 2025 digital spend is about 400 million dollars, up 22 percent from Q4 2024. That is a strong signal that brands still see digital as non-negotiable when demand is high.
AdClarity’s Online Retail Marketplaces category tell a similar story at a different scale. For Q4 2025, marketplace advertisers are expected to invest roughly 2.15 to 2.25 billion dollars, about 10 percent above last year’s holiday peak. You see the same profile in both: a clear Q4 spike, softer Q1 and Q2, and a rebuild into Q3. Educated marketers are not just “spending more”, they are concentrating spend where it is most likely to convert.
Social Is the Scale Engine
Across categories, social media is the digital channel that does the heavy lifting on reach. In the Restaurants and Delivery category, for example, social generated 28.4 billion impressions, about 60 percent of total impressions, yet took only 35 percent of spend with an average CPM under 7 dollars. In Groceries, social drove almost 80 percent of impressions and 61 percent of spend, still at an efficient CPM.
Online retail marketplaces show the same pattern at category level: in 2025, social consistently made up more than half of digital ad spend. Taken together, this is a useful lesson about the general market. Social remains the primary engine for cost-effective digital reach. If you want to hit large audiences often, 2025 data says social is still where most brands go first.
CTV and Video Are the Attention Plays
Where social is about scale, Connected TV is about impact. In Restaurant advertising, for example, almost half of all digital spend went to CTV, yet it delivered under 18 percent of impressions and ran CPMs around 32 dollars. Grocery advertisers showed a similar pattern: 29 percent of digital ad spend on CTV for fewer than 8 percent of impressions, with CPMs in the low 30s.
For many industries, CTV’s share has climbed into the mid-teens and rises even higher in holiday periods. This is the broader market trend in one line: brands are willing to pay more for big-screen, lean-back attention, while social and standard video cover frequency. Online video usually sits in the 15 to 20 percent digital ad spend range and is often the fastest-growing slice, notably in travel and retail, because it blends storytelling with more flexible pricing.
Display, by contrast, has become a rather minor supporting character. In 2025 it is typically a low single digits share of digital ad spend in all categories, used mainly for broad coverage and retargeting where CPM is lowest.
What You Can Learn from 2025
The general market lesson is that most winning digital advertisers now run a three-part engine: social for scale, CTV and online video for attention, and a thin layer of display for efficiency. The biggest brands in each AdClarity category are those that execute across all of these, not just one. Smaller challengers, meanwhile, do not try to match spend. They use the same channels but lean harder on precise audience targeting, regional focus, and creative differentiation to punch above their weight.
Looking Ahead
In 2026, we should expect these patterns to deepen rather than reverse. Social will continue to carry the bulk of impressions, online video and especially CTV will absorb more of the brand-building budget, and display will stay a tactical tool. The takeaway for any digital marketer is simple: build a mix that mirrors how people actually consume media, then be ready to shift budgets quickly between social, video and CTV as performance, CPM and competition change. That is the playbook 2025 data is already writing for 2026.
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