NEW YORK – Digital video advertising is continuing its growth trajectory, just in time for the overlapping NewFront and Upfront periods, with connected TV rebounding strongly after a slowdown and set to dominate advertising budgets in the coming year, according to new research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

“Digital video, which encompasses connected television, online video, and social video continues to be one of the fastest growing channels in all of media,” said Chris Bruderle, VP, Industry Insights & Content Strategy at IAB, in an interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the IAB NewFronts.

Digital dominance continues

The IAB’s 2025 Digital Video Ad Spend and Strategy Report reveals a significant milestone in the ongoing shift of advertising dollars toward digital platforms.

“One of the big pieces of news is that digital video we project in 2025 will account for nearly 60% of all advertiser investment across TV and digital video,” Bruderle said. “That is incredible because that is nearly double the growth from five years ago.”

This dominance reflects sustained momentum in the sector. “We saw that digital video grew 18% year over year between 2024 and 2023,” he noted.

CTV rebounds

Within the digital video ecosystem, connected TV has overcome previous challenges to reassert its growth trajectory.

“CTV grew 16% in 2024 after a year where it slowed down in 2023 to only grow by 9%,” Bruderle said. “It was hampered that year a lot by the strikes coming from the SAG-AFTRA group.”

The recovery stemmed from several strategic developments in the streaming landscape. “They stood up their programmatic and self-serve ad platforms. They introduced live sports and programming for the first time and really gained a lot of IP, culture and credibility,” he explained. “It was great to see CTV now regain its growth volatility, its growth volume with OLV and social video.”

Outpacing broader media growth

The IAB report reveals digital video’s growth rate significantly outperforms both overall media spending and other digital channels.

“Digital video will grow, we project, two times as fast as media overall,” Bruderle said. “It’s growing one to two times faster than other digital video channels as well.”

This acceleration reflects both consumer behavior and advertising effectiveness. “Sight, sound and motion content is incredibly exciting. It’s where advertisers want to be because it’s where consumers are,” he explained. “The embedding of commerce in social video and now more aggressively in connected TV enables advertisers to not only engage consumers, but then be able to drive business outcomes, most notably shopping.”

Budget shifts

With advertising budgets relatively fixed, digital video’s growth necessarily comes at the expense of other channels—primarily traditional television.

“The digital video dollars are coming from linear television. That progression continues to happen,” Bruderle said. “We’re seeing that in digital, dollars itself are moving there as well. Display is one place where we’re seeing a lot of advertisers want to move from display that’s been around for 20 years and even search are moving into this space.”

An interesting development is the internal competition within digital video itself. “We are also seeing, interestingly, in CTV dollars coming from social video,” he noted.

This shift reflects the democratization of CTV advertising through new buying platforms. “Now as the CTV streamers stand up programmatic and self-serve platforms, it enables the long tail, the small advertisers to buy to activate there, which they have not been able to do for years,” Bruderle explained. “Now they’re able to actually go in and activate with those partners’ hands to keyboard in the way that they’ve been doing with search and social for two decades.”

Looking ahead, Bruderle identified several critical developments that will define digital video advertising in the coming year.

The evolution of programmatic and self-serve platforms for CTV will continue to mature. “You’re going to see more than that right now. They talked about it last year in the upfronts. You saw them do it. Now here’s a second upfront, some NewFronts where programmatic activation is more robust,” he said.

Live content, particularly sports, will see increasing investment across streaming platforms. Additionally, the influence of creators is expanding beyond traditional boundaries.

“The merging of creators and creator content into the greater TV and video and digital video space” represents a significant trend, according to Bruderle. “The major production groups hire digital creators for not only ad content and ad campaigns, but also they’re bringing these folks in-house to help create new organic content for them.”

This creator-driven content is increasingly finding its way to larger screens. “Google made it official that the majority of the viewership of YouTube is happening on TVs, on the largest glass in the home and overtaking mobile,” he noted. “What is a huge part of the type of content that is being engaged on YouTube is creator content, is long tail content. But now that is increasingly becoming TV.”

The convergence of creator content and traditional television viewing creates what Bruderle calls “a heck of a pair of tailwinds” that will further accelerate digital video’s gains in the year ahead.

You’re watching Beet.TV coverage of the 2025 IAB NewFronts. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

By David Kaplan on    @