Karen Halligan. Credit: OzTAM
The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2025 and forward to next year.
Karen Halligan, CEO OzTAM.
I started 2025 on stage at the Future of TV Summit talking about the importance of comparability, independence and transparency in premium video measurement, why impression volume alone is not enough, and why not all video is equal.
I also shared OzTAM’s roadmap, highlighting the pending launch of Streamscape and outlining our big data initiative, not knowing just how relevant these developments would become as the year unfolded. As the industry entered one of its most turbulent periods in recent memory, these themes quickly shifted from forward-looking priorities to immediate necessities and underscore why a rigorous, consistent approach to measurement matters more than ever.
This year has been fast, messy and unforgiving with senior leadership changes, large scale redundancies and restructures, agency and media company mergers, budget tightening, AI and a rapid loss of senior experience reshaping the market.
At the same time, audiences are spreading further and faster across platforms. Fragmentation is not new, but Australia seems to have a habit of adopting new trends earlier and with more enthusiasm than other markets. In PwC Australia’s Media Outlook, programmatic video and CTV are expected to grow 25% year-over-year through 2026, with Australia remaining in the top three globally for paying for TV and movie streaming. Australia’s programmatic ad market is forecast to grow from $US441.74 million in 2024 to $US2.96 billion by 2033 (CAGR ~23.55 %) according to market analysis.
This pace can be exciting, but it also creates planning and accountability challenges.
As mentioned by CRA’s Lizzie Young in a recent interview, the Australian media industry has lost 70 cents in every dollar of revenue that it used to have, because it now goes offshore with the global platforms. That is a huge loss we need to adapt to, one that impacts many areas including Australian media companies, quality news, Australian jobs, local production, and relevant and safe media environments to name but a few.
Every dollar carries more weight, and competition for those dollars has intensified. Advertisers need to know which channels are delivering genuine reach, which exposures are meaningful, and where duplication is wasting money. In a climate like this, trusted measurement is not a nice-to-have, it is the only safeguard against guesswork. This is why Netflix signed onto our Streamscape service earlier this year, gaining independent and robust measurement against competitors, and why VOZ Streaming plays such an important role in the programmatic ecosystem, reducing wastage and duplication while increasing efficiency.
As budgets contract, the tension between short-term survival and long-term brand health becomes very real. One of the biggest misconceptions continues to be that all impressions are equal. The attention paid when viewing advertising on the TV in your living room, versus the mobile in your hand, versus a social media newsfeed or the full-screen experience of BVOD, is vastly different.
The full-screen BVOD/SVOD exposure in your living-room environment is doing a very different job to the muted, fleeting mobile scroll with at times questionable brand safety. Quality inventory continues to deliver higher attention, stronger brand outcomes and a safer context - and measurement is what proves that difference. Quality reach delivers bigger business impact.
The solution is not more data, but clearer data. Different measurement approaches will naturally produce different views of audience behaviour. Brand-specific automatic content recognition (ACR) data, for example, reflects the demographics of that brand’s customers, which can skew results towards more or less affluent households, higher or lower connectivity, or younger and older users with differing levels of digital engagement. Quantitative survey data can diverge again, as it relies on recall rather than actual viewing behaviour.
Streamscape data provides an independent view of video consumption across all TV sets, focusing on platform-level comparisons and a holistic picture of household viewing habits. It’s panel-based hybrid methodology, integrating data from a national TV meter panel with dual metering sources and VOZ Total TV currency, ensures its data is representative of the total national Australian population.
Advertisers need a unified, independent view across screens so they can see who they are reaching, how often and where incremental reach is coming from. They need to know how a view on one platform equates to another – who is measuring that view, and how it relates to competitors across the entire ecosystem.
With Streamscape addressing one of the industry’s most pressing gaps by bringing major streaming services into a unified, cross-screen view, our big data proof of concept initiative continues to explore how integrating big data into our established panel data can deliver more precise audience measurement and data consistency. As an industry, we continue to evolve yet again to keep pace with both technology and viewing habits.
The industry will face more pressure in 2026, not less. Tougher decisions, tighter budgets and higher expectations will continue to be the norm. In this environment, confidence comes from clarity, and clarity is significantly improved when provided from trusted, independent measurement sources.
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