In my last newsletter, I mentioned I’d just returned from INMA’s CEO Roundtable where I’d led a 90-minute session on the outlook for news media advertising, including where the advertising market is headed, how AI will likely change it, and how news media advertising professionals should plan, adapt and prioritise in response.

I promised I’d unpack that outlook over future newsletters, and I’m going to start doing that today.

But first, two dates for you to hold on your calendar:

1. Wednesday, October 8, from 10 a.m.-11 a.m. New York time will be the next Advertising Initiative Webinar, entitled Programmatic Revenue Strategies: How Publishers Succeed. We’ll hear from Grant Whitmore, vice president of ad technology and programmatic revenue at Advance Local, and Ryan Avigne-Kennedy, vice president of sales and revenue operations at Boston Globe Media, as they share their strategies for maximising programmatic effectiveness. Click here for more information or to register (free for INMA members).

2. Wednesday, November 19, will be the Advertising Initiative Town Hall. This 2.5-hour Webinar will cover key conclusions and learnings within the Advertising Initiative from 2025, case study presentations from INMA member companies, and a look-ahead to 2026.

I hope you’ll join us for both, and, as always, I’d love to hear more about your successes, ideas, challenges, and what you’re seeing from your perspective. E-mail me anytime at gabriel.dorosz@inma.org.

Gabriel

Advertising projections

In preparation for my talk at Napa Valley, I reviewed global advertising spend projection data from a variety of sources and synthesised as much as possible into an “apples-to-apples” view. 

My primary sources were eMarketer’s Worldwide Ad Spending Forecast 2025, PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2025-2029, IAB’s Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report 2025, and WARC’s The Future of Media 2025, supplemented with a few others in areas like events and branded content.

A few notes of caution when reviewing spend projections:

• Advertising outlook projections are just surveys of what the “buy side” (agencies and brands) say they’re going to prioritise more or less of in the future — and typically you’ll see a sample size of a few hundred to a few thousand respondents, depending on the source — so the outlooks can always change.

• While I focused on global studies for the most part, the United States and China are the biggest advertising spenders by far, and that tends to skew the projections accordingly. So if you’re seeing or sensing something different in your market, that doesn’t necessarily mean you or your data is wrong. It’s important to keep that in mind.

With that said, here’s the topline:

• Global advertising spend is projected to grow to US$1.3 trillion 2028.

• Digital advertising (originally projected to be about 75% of 2025’s total) will now land closer to 80% of total global ad spend by 2025 and approach 85% by 2028.

• Traditional media continues its decline but does look to eventually stabilise over the next few years to around US$125 to US$130B of global spend.

• Traditional display is declining while digital video surges.

When we look at growth, creators/influencers are projected to be the fastest-growing channel with a 30%-35% CAGR. But by share of spend, they will still fall outside the top 10 through 2028.

That despite the report back in June that “content on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and, Instagram will attract more advertising income this year than content from traditional media companies,” according to research from WPP Media. 

Note the distinction between what constitutes “user-generated” and “professional” content is extremely blurry and more than a bit sensationalised for the headline (a paid TikTok campaign is arguably also a traditional paid sponsorship at this point), but creators/influencers are certainly an increasingly important channel, even with those caveats.

By 2028, the second biggest category of spend will be “performance media,” consisting mostly of paid search/SEM and retail media, both of which are projected to continue growing at significant rates. Those two channels combined will equate to less than 29% of all spend in 2028.

Keep in mind with the rise of AI browsers and zero-click search, we don’t know exactly what SEM will look like over the next few years, but safe to say brands will still want to be as close to the consumer query as possible, even as formats and contexts evolve.

The future is video, video, and more video 

But the biggest category of spend by far over the next few years — and I’ve given it away here with the title — is digital video, which will represent about 44% of total spend by 2028, including four of the top seven channels (CTV, social video, video-as-display, and other online video.)

Note that while linear TV will continue to decline, it will still represent 11.2% of spend in 2028, which is not insignificant. Linear TV also remains the channel individual consumers spend the most time with, on average, according to the IAB (a good reminder the media and advertising economy is often irrational).

But above all, the future is very much about digital video. Digital formats now represent a majority (58%) of TV/video advertising — and 68% of buyers consider CTV essential for media plans. Publishers will have to evolve to take advantage (and I’ll return to this in a moment).

No surprise here. All forms of “traditional” or “physical” media are in the bottom five, with physical out-of-home, traditional radio, linear TV, and all forms of print projected to either erode or remain basically flat. 

But the big one is static digital display, or the traditional IAB banner (the classic set of 728x90s, 300x250s and 160x600s), which is the bottom channel in terms of outlook.

If it’s not already obvious, while audio/podcasts, events, branded content, and affiliate commerce* are projected to grow at moderate to strong rates depending on the channel, that can’t be said about the classic publisher mix. Reliance on print and open Web static banners is not going to work as both are in managed decline. Publishers not diversified in revenue streams will be in a very difficult position — and overleveraged scale models are, of course, the most vulnerable (a key reason why our focus in the Advertising Initiative is on the “post-traffic era”).

*Note that it’s a bit difficult to get reliable global spend and projection data on events, branded content, and affiliate commerce in the same way we get outlook data for other channels, so I’ve only included the average growth rates in the chart above. The spend percentages were a bit inconsistent, but the individual growth outlooks on the categories are consistent enough to give me confidence in communicating those rates.

??The IAB banner is dying, but display isn’t

First, it’s important to note that you may see projections for “display” that seem to differ with the outlook above. That’s because “display” means a lot of different things right now and is increasingly diversifying across a number of different channels like retail media and others, so be cautious and have a look at definitions when reviewing outlook data for display.

Case in point: The overall category of “display” is still projected to be 13%-15% of global media spend in 2025 (US$125 to US$150B), with slow-to-modest growth through 2028. But spend on the traditional static IAB banner ad is declining and declining fast — with spend on those open Web static banners now projected to decline 8%-12% from 2025-2028.

Display is transforming into short-form video

What’s really happening is the majority of the spend on those traditional banners is shifting toward short-form vertical video — and in fact 70% of display spend is projected to shift to digital video formats by 2028, driving US$146 billion in short-form video ad spend.

Video content is increasingly the dominant form of Internet traffic and, as always, advertising revenue is aligning with the dominant behaviours of audiences.

The general consensus is that six- to 10-second vertical video will become the standard display format — in-app and Web.

To win, publishers will have to create hybrid formats that break traditional “instream/outstream” definitions. And it is the consistent conclusion of leading publishers like News Corp Australia, The New York Times, and others that the best chance for publishers to win these budgets is to find ways to enable advertisers to run their short-form social video assets in publisher-owned channels.

From a measurement perspective, success will increasingly be focused on “outcomes” like brand lift, assisted attribution, or incremental sales rather than traditional digital video metrics like VCR. And there are early signs that attention metrics may play a significant role in digital video measurement in the near future. 

It’s also becoming clearer and clearer that advertisers will increasingly use GenAI for the vast majority of video ad creation. They’ll also want to make trafficking their assets as easy as possible, so it’s likely they’ll want to transact programmatically the majority of the time and employ VAST tags. And they’ll favour publishers who anticipate and build for all of that.

Short-form vertical video represents the biggest overall opportunity to publishers, but there are other ways to tap into digital video spends. In-article video, video podcasts, social video, YouTube, and CTV are viable options for publishers who already have the infrastructure, have broadcast legacies, or can tap into data partnerships. 

But it’s important to note that everyone who has looked at this in detail has concluded the same thing, which is that it’s more difficult to win the more traditional instream/outstream budgets or to sell the publisher environment as an equal to broadcast.

Video success requires collaborative strategies

Success in video requires more than just the commitment of the advertising department. 

What the data increasingly shows is a wholesale shift toward digital video as the primary communication and engagement method of the modern Internet, and news publishers are going to have to increase video coverage to serve audiences in ways they’ll increasingly expect. 

Leadership, newsroom, marketing, advertising, and product are all going to have to drive this forward together. And that’s probably going to require some bigger discussions. Recent reporting from Semafor indicates capacity for producing video journalism was a factor in the recent reorganisation of The New York Times culture desk.  

In conclusion

That’s it for the general outlook. In the future, I’ll go deeper on other topics I covered in talking with CEOs in Napa, which included AI’s impact on advertising (generally and for news publishers), programmatic deal strategy, revenue diversification, data, measurement, and publisher alliances. 

As I said live in Napa Valley, one of the imperatives to succeed in the advertising market of the near future is publishers must diversify beyond print and static display. 

And to preview a future chapter, in addition to video, the combination of outlook data and conversations with INMA members all over the world points to branded content, events, affiliate commerce, audio/podcasts — and programmatic deal diversification supported by a first-party data strategy — as the most viable and important paths to explore.

If you see something different in the data, or you want to probe on any of this, reach me anytime at gabriel.dorosz@inma.org. 

About this newsletter

Today’s newsletter is written by Gabriel Dorosz, based in Booklyn, New York, United States, and lead for the INMA Advertising Initiative. You can read his full bio here.

Reach him at gabriel.dorosz@inma.org, connect on LinkedIn, or join the INMA #advertising-initiative Slack channel.

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