5 years of media evolution provide few answers to brands’ chaotic 2025

5 years of media evolution provide few answers to brands’ chaotic 2025


As brands enter the thick of the annual season for brokering advertising commitments, also known as the upfronts, many are in a disquietingly familiar state of uncertainty. The Trump administration’s trade war has upended 2025 planning, putting marketers in a holding pattern and potentially pushing more toward cheaper, lower-funnel channels. 

The moment presents its distinct set of challenges but in many ways echoes when the COVID-19 pandemic hit five years ago, stopping the world in its tracks and making agility a mandate. However, data demonstrates that marketers did not always move quickly to capitalize on emergent channels during the early 2020s, and the industry’s proclivity for risk aversion may again test whether brands thrive or shrink in a downturn.  

“I think that some of what we’re feeling, in our core, is an awful lot like the uncertainty that we felt during the pandemic,” said David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), in comments kicking of the trade group’s digitally oriented NewFronts showcase Monday. “Now is not the time for fear. Now is not the time for hunkering down and short-termism.” 

That said, the media landscape looks significantly different than in March 2020, in no small part thanks to the pandemic-driven acceleration of digital habits. Retail media, a still-nascent term at the turn of the decade, is one of the fastest-growing areas of advertising, propelled by the dual forces of wider e-commerce adoption and the search for alternatives to third-party cookies. The media network model has not only produced hundreds of retailer-owned ad platforms, but also spread to categories including ride-hailing apps, financial services and travel, resulting in oversaturation. Other channels that were already gaining purchase with brands prior to COVID, including streaming and TikTok, have become dominant in culture, though ad spend has sometimes lagged consumer adoption. That could change as premium media properties like live sports finally flock to the digital arena at scale. 

CTV and social grow ad stature post-pandemic

Annual CTV and social media U.S. ad spending, from 2020 to 2024.  

Amidst this new channel paradigm, the business of marketing hasn’t achieved the same level of refinement as a TikTok For You page. Fragmentation and opacity are greatly exacerbated in a world where everyone’s online while many companies have lost sight of brand-building fundamentals in the chase for media math mastery. 

“Media is more complex than ever,” said Sorin Patilinet, the former senior director of marketing effectiveness and growth sciences at packaged goods giant Mars, over email. “In the past, we had a media manager and a digital manager. Today we have a (manager for) search, retail media, organic media, in addition to the traditional media roles.”

As media sits at another inflection point, with the threat of contraction looming large and antitrust crackdowns priming a shake up, looking to the recent past may be the best way to steel the industry for an uncertain future. Below, Marketing Dive examines the forces that have reshaped media since the pandemic’s outset: What stuck, what flared out and what these channels say about an evolving consumer mindset. 

TikTok and the decline of the ‘social graph’

Social media fads come and go, but few apps have altered how people view content on their phones as much as TikTok. The platform made short-form, “snackable” video the norm for both users and advertisers, shifting everything from budgetary priorities to agency assignments. Crucially, it changed how brands interact with culture, with a premium on lo-fi creator content and fast response times to buzz-worthy moments.

“The content production quality has changed in some ways. There used to be so much preparation into a 30-second commercial. Now that window, again, has become really, really short,” said Alison Mayes, managing director of independent media agency Apollo Partners.

TikTok’s addictive For You page was enshrined as a U.S. cultural fixture as the pandemic forced people to stay locked inside while craving a peek at what everyone else was up to. In 2020, the ByteDance-owned offering became the most-downloaded app globally, ushering a transition from a social media ecosystem oriented around what experts termed a social graph — the network of friends and family the user actually knows — to one centered on out-of-network content surfaced by algorithmic recommendations. That step change aligned with more consumers turning to social formats, including ads and sponsored posts, to learn about new products and services, laying important groundwork for a more recent rise in social commerce.  

Social media’s brand impact soars while TV commercials dim

Percent of U.S. consumers who heard about new products and services through different channels between Q4 2020 and Q4 2024.

It wasn’t long before rivals that were built on the social graph, including Instagram, Snapchat and even LinkedIn, began to crib from TikTok’s model, though few wield the same degree of sway over the crucial Gen Z audience.

“It’s just a stickier product offering. You have more content you can share with more people, that’s more likely to be engaging,” said Ben Allison, executive vice president of media at VaynerMedia.

While TikTok was quick to snap up public mindshare, some advertisers were slow to invest in the channel, a potential response to nascent ad products and wariness over its Chinese ownership, factors that have continued to dog the business.

“TikTok is another environment where we also still struggle when it comes to measurement. They’ve gotten better in recent years, but, when we first launched with TikTok, a lot of it wasn’t measured,” said Mayes. “We can see that stuff now, but it also is in an area that we, as a media planner, crave more accountability as well.”

TikTok represented 3.7% of U.S. social advertising in 2021, or about $2.1 billion. That market share more than doubled the following year, according to estimates from WARC, the start of an upward climb that has extended into today. Facebook, the poster child for the social graph, conversely saw its piece of the pie decline from 65% in 2020 to 49.8% last year, a more than 15 percentage-point drop.   

“I would say 2022 or so is when you start to see, okay, (TikTok) is now a consistent line item. Every advertiser was asking about it,” said Allison.

TikTok’s ad spending trails meteoric rise to cultural prominence

Annual U.S. ad spending on top social media platforms, between 2020 and 2024.

TikTok is expected by WARC to secure about $11.8 billion in U.S. ad spending, or 13.5% of total social advertising, this year. Hitting those benchmarks is contingent on the app not getting banned over national-security concerns. 

The Trump administration has already twice pushed back a deadline for finding a U.S. backer for the company, effectively putting the ownership question on the backburner, but there may come a time in the near future where a scramble will again be set off again to find an alternative. Even in that case, executives don’t see the TikTok model of short-form, creator-driven video going anywhere, speaking to the lasting impact the app has had on the shape of social media.   

“What happens with TikTok in the U.S. is going to be a huge variable but I think the ecosystem is already kind of baked,” said Allison. 



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