Marc Hiscock.
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Marc Hiscock, Director, Agency & Client Partnerships, Quantcast.
Australian media didn’t just recover in 2025 – it re-wired itself.
Digital ad investment reached $17.2 billion in FY25, up 10.6% year-on-year, with video formats now representing 29% of all online spend.
The momentum shows no signs of slowing as advertisers lean further into AI-driven optimisation, reassess measurement frameworks, and rethink the boundaries between internal and external media capability.
Programmatic in-housing is accelerating, and Google’s withdrawal from its Privacy Sandbox plans signals yet another shift in how digital marketing will need to evolve.
From the vantage point of the open internet, four structural trends stand out that will influence how marketers plan for 2026.
Trend 1 - CTV and premium digital video have become the new prime time
According to the IAB Australia Internet Advertising Revenue Report, total digital video advertising in Australia rose 21.9% YoY to $5 billion in 2025, making up 29% of total online ad spend.
With Australians spending more time in streaming and CTV environments than ever before, this shift isn’t just a blip, it’s baked in.
CTV has moved well beyond being a pure brand play; it’s now a channel you can genuinely optimise for reach, performance and even conversions. And as smart TV viewing keeps climbing and BVOD becomes more sophisticated, people are expecting a lot more from it.
The industry wants digital-style accountability, incremental reach, brand lift, and outcome-based optimisation, and we want it across every screen we buy.
Trend 2 – The great in-housing wave: capability, control and cost
Australian advertisers are bringing more media strategy, data, analytics and sometimes programmatic execution in-house, while redefining the role of specialist agencies. Optus, Youi, and Sportsbet are just a few examples of Australian companies taking in-housing seriously, according to a report by the In-House Agency Council.
Australian advertisers are rapidly accelerating their in-housing journey, bringing more media strategy, analytics, data stewardship, and in some cases programmatic execution inside their walls.
Three forces are driving this trend:
- Programmatic and AI have become more complex. As automation gets smarter, brands want to own the intelligence behind it — the data, models and decisioning.
- Budget and headcount pressure is real. In-housing offers faster optimisation, more control and greater efficiency when teams are being asked to do more with less.
- The slow death of third-party cookies. With signal loss across Safari, Firefox, iOS and eventually Chrome, brands are doubling down on first-party data, clean rooms and audience planning they can manage internally.
This doesn’t make agencies less important; it just changes their role. Instead of outsourcing everything, advertisers now want interoperable tech, true transparency and closer collaboration between internal teams and platform partners.
Trend 3 – Programmatic and AI are now the operating system of media
Australia’s programmatic market is deepening and is forecast to grow at a CAGR of ~23.5% from 2025 to 2033. Alongside that growth is the rapid normalisation of AI as the engine that powers planning, bidding and optimisation.
The shift here is pretty big. Marketers aren’t buying “placements” anymore, they’re buying outcomes. Incremental reach, quality traffic, new-to-brand customers, and conversions - that’s what matters.
With that comes higher expectations. Today’s AI-driven systems need to do a lot more than just optimise bids. They’re expected to manage budgets across channels in real time, predict who’s most likely to convert or pay attention, dynamically build and personalise creative, and give clear visibility into which signals are actually driving performance.
All of this also changes how teams work. Automation takes care of the manual line-item tweaks, freeing marketers to spend more time on strategy, testing, and creativity. These are the areas where human thinking really moves the needle.
Trend 4 — The end of Privacy Sandbox creates new uncertainty (and opportunity)
Google’s move to retire most of its Privacy Sandbox tech has big implications. In the short term, nothing dramatic happens. Cookies aren’t disappearing from Chrome tomorrow. But long-term, the industry still lacks a clear identity standard. Here’s what we’re seeing so far:
- A faster push toward first-party data and measurement: without a Google-led solution, brands need to invest in their own measurement stack: MMM, incrementality, brand lift, clean rooms — the lot.
- Renewed focus on the open internet: With fewer browser shake-ups to worry about, advertisers can re-evaluate the open web, CTV, mobile and programmatic without leaning so heavily on walled gardens.
- A spark of innovation across ad tech: The gap left by Sandbox opens the door for new identity providers, clean rooms, measurement tools and even browsers to define the next standard. For Australian marketers, that means more choice and more to test.
What marketers must know heading into 2026
Heading into 2026, one thing’s obvious: the Australian media landscape has fundamentally shifted. For anyone managing budgets, the focus should be on staying open: open internet, open tech, open measurement, and building the internal skills to thrive in a more complex, identity-diverse world. The brands that win in 2026 will be the ones that invest early, stay adaptable and measure what truly moves the needle.
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