author-avatar

Susan is a highly experienced marketing executive with over 15 years in a variety of key leadership roles. When she's not building a great business (Vovia), she is off adventuring and travelling the world. You might also run into her on the ski hill or in a hot yoga class.

Other posts by:

2025 Top 5 Media Trends

New year, new trends post! We’ve dug into what to consider and plan for this year from a performance media agency perspective. We feel these are the heavy hitters to be mindful of this year to ensure you are getting the best results from your media investment. Here are five trends to factor into your plans: The continued rise in video, balancing media fragmentation & data depreciation, AI’s impact on digital media, shifts around news consumption, and the growth of retail media.

#1 Trend – Never Enough Video

It is no secret that consumers continue to consume more and more video content. We see this in the growing adoption and time spent of streaming services, time spent on YouTube and social media reels all while time spent on Linear TV remains strong. 

According to the latest CMUST study (using Numeris data) shared at the IAB Report on Data 2024 Conference, Linear TV continues to capture the most reach and time among total adults at 83%, followed by YouTube at 53%, Amazon at 42% and Netflix at 34%. While Broadcast video on demand and the other streaming services (Disney +, Crave, and Twitch) fall under 10% each.

This trend is being driven by the 55+ age group that spends far more time on television, however some may find it surprising that those 30-54 and under 30 still spend a larger portion of their hours on television as well vs the other streaming video services individually. As expected those under 30 watch less TV and stream more than the other age groups. We see that YouTube has the highest reach among the 30-54 segment. 

YouTube is closing the gap from TV for those 54 and under. Google boasts that consumers streamed a billion hours of YouTube content daily through their TV’s. FastCompany points out “how YouTube shifted the maximum length of uploads, creators responded” by expanding the scope of their videos to include feature-length documentary format, sharing deeply researched videos or episodic formats like TV that keeps consumers coming back for more. YouTube’s advantage is the range of content they offer in one place (i.e. content creators, niche influencers, entertainment influencers, podcasts, traditional TV) when others in the video space take more of a segregated approach which is costly for consumers. 

When it comes to streaming, Vivdata’s spring study revealed that “the number of Canadians that only watch streaming TV has grown by 59% over the past three years, from 23% to 37%. Those that only watch linear TV has dropped from 32% in 2021 to 28% today. The number of Canadians watching both linear and streaming TV has also declined, from 45% to 35%”. This interest in only streaming has grown across all age groups:

  • Boomers up by 93% since 2021
  • pre-Boomers up by 91%
  • Gen X up 61%
  • Gen Y up 36% 
  • Gen Z up by 47%

During the 2024 IAB Report on Data conference, Comscore noted that streaming is up 122% from 2020 – 2024. We can all appreciate the biggest hurdle for streaming services going forward is the cost and consumers gaming when they sign up for services so they are not paying too much at once. During 2024, Netflix, Prime, Crave and Disney+ have all launched subscription models with and without ads to help lower costs for consumers.  Our team shared a post on this back in February if you are interested in more details.

#2 Trend – Shrinking Budgets alongside Media Fragmentation & Data Depreciation

Consumers are facing harder economic times which has resulted in less spending. This directly impacts business revenues which lead to more and more Canadian marketers preparing to defend their budgets. This combined with:

  • Policies supporting consumer privacy and limiting performance tracking → Making it more difficult to measure marketing effectiveness
    • Quantcast shared at an IAB conference that 57% of the open web is cookieless and 20% of users delete cookies after a few days.
  • The rise in technologies helping consumers avoid commercialism  → Leaving marketers to gauge performance on a small sample of data (only the customers who allow data tracking)
  • Growing media options drive further fragmentation to reach consumers → Making it more costly for marketers to reach their target audience
  • Rise in AI to solve problems yet platform costs seem to be going up not down → is the AI really working?

These factors together make it an extremely challenging time for marketers to be relevant to their desired consumers cost effectively while proving desired ROI to their CFO’s. 

With the growing challenges of attribution and tracking in today’s privacy-first environment, MMM (media mix modeling) can help provide a clear, data-driven view of overall marketing effectiveness. It enables businesses to assess the impact of each marketing channel and strategy on key outcomes without relying on individual user tracking. By analyzing aggregated data, MMM helps uncover trends, pinpoint what drives performance, and guide budget allocation decisions. This makes it an invaluable tool for understanding marketing impact.

In order to perform an MMM effectively, several types of data are required to ensure accurate insights. This includes marketing spend data across all channels, such as digital, TV, radio, and out-of-home (OOH), as well as campaign-specific metrics like impressions or reach. Additionally, first-party business data, such as sales or leads, is crucial for measuring impact. External factors like seasonality, economic trends, and competitor activity are also key inputs, as they help isolate the true influence of marketing efforts. By combining these data sources, MMM provides a holistic understanding of what drives performance without the need for user tracking.

#3 Trend – AI Era – Pros and Cons Regarding Digital Media

From a media perspective, AI can save us time and drive performance through enhanced targeting and increased efficiency BUT it can also drive a lot of wasted spend.  AI is only as smart as the human directing the inputs that it uses to build its knowledge.  Many agencies don’t understand when AI can benefit as well as what to watch for to ensure it doesn’t hurt your business.

Being a performance agency, we recognize the importance of high-converting channels and when businesses face budget cuts these channels tend to take front stage. The challenge is those channels only capture those currently looking for you today vs. building demand among who else might be interested in what you have to sell. For true growth, businesses need a balance of awareness and converting channels and we see the need for this to continue to grow as AI in some of the conversion-focused digital platforms creates added competition and digital cost/waste. Balancing the heavy AI channels with relevant awareness channels to reach your desired audience and push them to seek out your brand is necessary to survive in this new AI Era! 

If you are using AI on your digital platforms and not seeing performance please contact us as we are happy to help. 
For more information please refer to our Group Account Director of Digital Media, Renu’s post regarding AI and Ad Platforms.

#4 Trend –  Shifts in the Consumption of News

News, like sports, is one of the few pieces of content that consumers seek real-time. News consumption among some audiences started to shift from Linear TV, Print and Radio to more and more Digital, especially alongside the rise of social media. The Canadian Government realized news outfits were investing a lot of time and money to curate relevant content, however they were losing revenue as a result of this shift.  In response to this they implemented the Online News Act on December 19, 2023. The intent was to ensure the digital platforms earning billions in online advertising compensate news businesses when their content is made available on their platforms. According to Reuter Institute, Google negotiated a deal to contribute around $73M US for the content. Meta on the other hand decided to ban the Canadian news content vs pay.  As a result, consumer habits around news consumption shift again. 

Statistics Canada reported in March 2023 that Canadians get their news the following ways:

Use by segment:

  • 15-34 use the internet the most 95% vs 45% TV
  • 35-54 use the interest 87% vs 65% TV
  • 55+ still use TV the most at 88% vs 63% internet

We suspect since the policy changes, internet (or digital) has maintained its share but the amount Meta took is just shifting to other digital sources. Reuter Institute reports:

  • News consumption on YouTube and TikTok is up
  • National print brands (National Post and Globe and Mail) have been building subscriptions
  • The biggest competitor though is US news outfits such as CNN, Apple News and New York Times. All have all seen subscriptions rise among Canadian consumers.

Reuters survey shows:

  • 15% of Canadians pay for online news, with 10% subscribing to local media and 43% to foreign media. 
  • 54% pay less than the full price for their subscription

CMUST shared at the IAB Report on Data 2024 conference that Meta exceeds news in weekly hours for time spent. However, the weekly reach is comparable across the two. This continues to validate the importance of news-based buys. They also shared that news consumption remained stable post Meta’s removal. They saw a positive shift in audience visitation among 150 digital news providers in Canada. Our learning from these policy changes are that consumers still desire their news and will adapt on how to obtain it, as will the media industry in providing it. The protection for Canadian news organizations seemed to benefit the large companies (especially those that received added Government subsidies), while smaller local news groups have closed doors or are still struggling as they lose the audiences they previously had from Meta. If you want to read more on changing news consumption and the impact on local journalism, check out our VP of Media Stacey’s post here.

#5 Trend – Growth in Retail Media

As previously noted AI advancements have driven some waste or lack of visibility as to what performs on the large networks, leaving companies to look at more direct and niche options to balance and have more control over their buys.  This has created growing demand for Retail Media where marketers can advertise directly with retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Canadian Tire and many more. These placements provide opportunity around point of sale, growing inventory and access to first-party data. These media networks can include ads across a variety of formats: instore, web, app, streaming, email, social networks or digital boards.

Emarketer shares some great benefits of retail media networks:

  • Access to retailers’ first-party data, which includes information from loyalty programs
  • The ability to leverage relationships that already exist between brands and retailers
  • The ability to capitalize on rising ecommerce sales and traffic
  • Opening new revenue streams above traditional retail sales for the retailers

Statista forecasts that retail media advertising spending in Canada is expected to grow by 21% in 2025:

In September Warc shared an update with mixed reviews where an IAB source as well as a chief economist, Daniel Knapp, said that retail media is ending the separation of brand and performance advertising. Knapp indicated marketers are shifting budget to retail media with the bulk coming from Linear TV, which are still being viewed as separate channels; however he argued perhaps we stop doing that comparison and see the two more tightly integrated.

The other viewpoint from the advertisers’ perspective was that Retail Media still lacks:

  • Cross-platform booking efficiency, making it tedious for spend optimization. 
  • Products are more low-funnel focused and proof of brand-building in media impact is limited

All this said, it is clear Retail Media is a viable performance channel that provides access to highly relevant first party data targeting. It just has some inefficiencies in how you manage and optimize budgets due to its 1:1 vs cross-platform nature. Regardless, the vertical a lot of growth opportunities here in Canada.

Looking Forward

2025 promises to bring opportunities for growth and optimism despite challenging economic times and obstacles for marketers. Finding new and innovative ways to navigate these challenges and obstacles will be key to success for many, and perhaps finding a way to adopt these trends will help in the road to get there. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how these trends play out this year and translate into performance and research to share later pn. If you’ve got questions, reach out!