A third of ad budgets go where nothing existed five years ago

Around thirty-four percent of advertising budget now goes to channels that did not meaningfully exist five years ago: retail media networks, connected television inventory, creator placements, and in-app surfaces that keep multiplying.

Planning frameworks have not kept up, and the gap shows up as spend that cannot be compared across channels.

Comparability is the missing piece

Each new channel arrives with its own measurement, defined by the party selling the inventory. Every one of them reports well against its own definition.

Advertisers who impose a single outcome metric across channels tend to reallocate significantly after the first honest comparison.

Retail media changed the incentives

Retail media attaches advertising to purchase data, which makes it easy to prove an effect and easy to over-credit one. Closing the loop this tightly rewards spend near the point of sale and starves everything earlier.

The demand a brand never created does not appear in the report as a loss.

Monetising inventory takes data, not sales effort

For publishers, the constraint on yield is increasingly the quality of audience data rather than the size of the sales team.

Investment in identity and audience infrastructure is what determines whether inventory clears at a premium or at the floor price.