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Your boss just asked you to justify next quarter’s budget.
Or maybe you’re job hunting and wondering which skills actually matter right now.
Or perhaps you’re just trying to figure out if you’re spending your time on things that will be obsolete in two years.
Here’s what you need to know … marketers spent $395.7 billion on online media in 2025. That’s not just a big number. It’s a map of where the industry is going and where you should be paying attention.
Let me break down what actually matters.
The Money Tells the Truth
Forget what people say at conferences. Forget the “hot takes” on LinkedIn. Follow the money.
When marketers collectively shift billions of dollars, they’re voting with their budgets. And in 2025, they voted for some clear winners and some surprising losers.
💡Search is still king at $137 billion. No shock there. But it only grew 10%. Translation … search is the reliable workhorse, not the exciting thoroughbred.
💡Social hit $96 billion and grew 17%. That’s the second-fastest growth of any channel. By 2026, social spending will crack $110 billion for the first time. For context, that’s nearly as much as linear TV, direct mail, and offline shopper marketing combined.
Let that sink in. Social media advertising will soon match three of the biggest traditional channels combined.
The Real Story Isn’t in the Big Numbers
It’s in the small ones.
💡Creator spending grew 20% in 2025 to reach $9 billion. This year? It’s projected to grow another 24% to $11 billion. That’s faster than any other channel, online or offline.
A few years ago, “influencer marketing” was something interns handled on Instagram. Now it’s an $11 billion industry growing faster than anything else in marketing.
💡Connected TV spending jumped 15% to $33 billion last year. This year it’s expected to grow 22% to $41 billion. That puts it at 77% the size of linear TV spending.
The future isn’t coming. It’s already here.
What’s Dying (And Nobody Wants to Say It)
👇Engagement marketing — that’s email and SMS — grew just 2% in 2025. The slowest growth of any online channel. It’s not dead, but it’s not where the energy is.
👇Digital audio grew only 4%. Surprising for a “high-engagement medium,” as the researchers politely called it.
👇Mobile gaming ads grew 5%. Not terrible, but nowhere near the excitement the gaming industry generates.
👇Display advertising grew just 5%, half the overall online rate. We’re still spending $56 billion on it, so it’s not going away. But it’s also not where the innovation is happening.
The Healthcare and Higher Ed Reality Check
I’ve spent 20+ years in healthcare and higher ed marketing, and here’s what this data means for organizations like ours.
We’re often late adopters. We have compliance concerns, longer approval cycles, and audiences that don’t always behave like consumer audiences.
But here’s the thing … our audiences are on these platforms. They’re watching creators. They’re streaming on CTV. They’re scrolling social.
The data shows where people’s attention is. And if we’re still putting 40% of our budget into channels growing at 2-5% while ignoring channels growing at 20-24%, we’re not being cautious. We’re being irrelevant.
What This Means for Your Career
>> If you’re early in your career:
- Learn creator partnerships and CTV buying now. Not next year. Now. These are the skills that will matter in 3 years when you’re competing for that next role.
>> If you’re mid-career:
- You probably built your expertise on search and display. That’s great — they’re still the biggest channels. But if you can’t speak fluently about creator economics or CTV attribution, you’re going to sound dated in meetings
>> If you’re senior:
- The question isn’t whether to shift budget. The question is how fast. Your CEO is seeing these numbers too, even if they’re not talking about them yet.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth … if you’re the person saying “we’ve always done it this way” or “our audience is different” while your competitors are figuring out TikTok and YouTube partnerships, you’re becoming the bottleneck.
The Decisions You Make This Quarter
You don’t need to blow up your entire media mix.
But you do need to ask yourself … am I experimenting with the channels that are growing 15-25% annually? Or am I optimizing channels that are growing 2-5%?
Both matter. You need the stable base and the experimental edge.
The marketers who will be running departments in 5 years are the ones who can do both. They can defend the search budget and make the case for the creator partnership. They can explain why display still matters and why CTV matters more.
What You Should Do This Week
Look at your budget. Find 5-10% that’s going to a channel growing below 6%. Not all of it — just some of it. Move it to a test in creator partnerships, CTV, or social. Track it. Measure it. Learn from it.
Next quarter, do it again.
In a year, you’ll have real experience with the channels that are actually growing. And when that next job opportunity comes up — or that next budget conversation happens — you’ll have something valuable to say.
The Data Behind the Story
These insights come from Winterberry Group’s annual analysis of US marketing and advertising spend. Full methodology and data available at MarketingCharts.
