YouTube wants to be TV. Influencers want to be media. What now?

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Today's edition is a bit different. It's a guest post by James Swift, managing editor at MediaCat.

As we close out 2025, James and his team have been analysing how the main advertising channels performed this year and what it means for how marketers should think about spending in 2026. From TV's identity crisis to retail media's continued rise, here's their take on the year that was. 

The year in… TV, audio, OOH, influencer marketing and retail media

In its 2025 Mid-Year Forecast report, WPP suggested that advertising activity needs a new taxonomy. TV, audio and social media no longer make sense as descriptors, it said. Instead, marketers should designate all their comms as either content, commerce, location (OOH, cinema, etc) or intelligence (search, basically).

It was by no means a frivolous proposal, and WPP’s new categories make a lot of sense. But we at MediaCat have stuck to the traditional divisions in our end-of-year analysis of the main advertising channels. You’ll find some of our insights — into TV, audio, OOH, influencer marketing and retail media — below. We hope that it gives you some food for thought as you consider ‘how to spend it’ in 2026.

And if you like the cut of our jib, join us at MediaCat Live in London on the evening of 3 December. Expect an hour of lively talks about creativity and innovation in media, and then some food and drink while you chat with like-minded industry folk. Or you can just skulk in a corner. We don’t mind.

Tickets are free but space is limited, so reserve your place (and check out the line up of talks) by using this link. 

TV

The aphorism that ‘TV isn’t dead, it’s having babies’ felt more pertinent than usual in 2025.

Unfortunately, TV’s offspring appear to have developed the same instincts as African social spider babies which — as you’ll know if you watched BBC’s Parenthood — eat their own mum before devouring every other adult in the colony.

To wit: YouTube spent its year trying to convince marketers that it was a broadcast channel in an effort to win some of their TV ad budgets.

YouTube’s manoeuvres promoted a good deal of debate over what is and isn’t TV. It’s got to the point that TV marketing body Thinkbox’s CSO, Elliott Millard, has put ‘sort out the definition of TV’ on his list of priorities for 2026.

‘It’s pretty simple,’ he says. ‘It's not about the device, it's not about the delivery system. If it's regulated content that’s been watched by a human before it turns up on a screen it's TV. So, there is TV on YouTube, but that doesn't make YouTube TV.’

This definition hits TV’s babies where they’re weakest. In 2025 the mood of the public — and actions of governments — turned decidedly against the platforms’ lax approach to moderation.

Millard hopes it will mark a turning point, when brands start thinking about the moral implications of shoving so much ad spend into big tech platforms. There’s no sign it’s happening just yet, but Millard says that he’s hearing more clients are at least asking their agencies, ‘What would happen if we took money out of Meta?’.

Outdoor

If you compare the trajectory of out-of-home advertising over the past decade to other traditional media, it doesn’t look so bad. According to figures from the Advertising Association and Warc, OOH’s share of UK adspend declined from 6% in 2013 to 4% in 2024. Over that same period, TV’s share went from 30% to 13%, while publishing’s slice of the pie declined from 24% to just 4%.

But it’s only in comparison with other, harder-hit channels that you can say outdoor’s doing well. Looked at from every other lens, OOH’s had a rough time of it in 2025.

‘It's probably been a slightly disappointing year for out-of-home,’ says Phil Hall,

group CCO and UK CEO at Ocean Outdoor. ‘There's macro factors and there's industry factors, and the macro factors are obvious — an economy that's less buoyant, global politics, concern about the budget.’

That macro-economic situation is unlikely to change much in 2026 — not for the better, anyway. But there are still bright spots for OOH.

The restrictions on ads for junk food on TV and online may shift a little budget into the channel, for a start.

It’s also possible that the difficult economic landscape will force more large brands to turn to traditional brand-building next year because they’ll need to increase their prices as a result of trade tariffs. Selling a price increase to consumers requires a strong brand, and strong brands are generally built with high-attention media that signals trust and quality — which plays to OOH’s strengths.

Indeed, Isba’s 2026 Media Budgets Survey found that 37% of advertisers were planning to increase their brand marketing spend next year. But saying is not doing, and we’d advise any organisation hoping for a change in marketers’ spending habits to have a back-up plan. ‘It still feels like we're in a very, very performance-led market,’ says Hall.

Influencers

Semantics be damned! Whether or not influencers are technically a media channel is irrelevant now. In 2025, they became too big to leave out of any conversation.

They were already a big deal for marketers, of course. But in 2025, influencers were elevated to another level of prominence.

In March, Unilever’s new CEO, Fernando Fernandez, announced that, under his direction, the conglomerate would work with ‘20 times’ more creators than before. In September, digital creators even got their own all-party parliamentary group.

Anyone at Cannes could see which way the Mistral was blowing. ‘There was not a single panel or event I went to that didn’t mention creators,’ says Detch Singh, CEO Hypetap, ‘even if the panel had nothing to do with them.’

But brands’ enthusiasm for creators doesn’t mean they always know how to use them.

Kantar’s global creative thought leadership director, Vera Sidlova, told MediaCat that she had data showing only 27% of influencer content is strongly linked to the advertiser.

There was some deft influencer marketing on display among the winners at Cannes, but these tended to be campaigns that turned regular people into influencers (eg, Skol’s Retro Influencers) or which focused on less well-known creators (eg, Vaseline Verified).

One reason that the execution of influencer campaigns might be lacking is that, as a relatively young media channel (or whatever it is), ‘the industry’s gotten away with being quite experimental,’ as Born Social’s CSO, Callum McCahon puts it. That looks set to change.

‘As brands increase their spend on influencer marketing,’ adds McCahon, ‘more questions will arise around the brand-building power of creators. Things like brand-lift studies and marketing-mix modelling are going to be a massive conversation next year.’

Audio

2025 was the year that podcasters and radio stations stopped flirting with video and got serious.

‘Video has been bubbling around for the last four or five years,’ says Podnews editor James Cridland, ‘but I think it’s been a real jump this year.’

News UK’s TalkSport is a good example. Derek Brown, News UK’s director of digital for broadcasting, told Press Gazette in October: ‘We don’t think of ourselves as a radio station anymore…People are as likely to be watching us as listening to us.’

Spotify meanwhile told investors in July that consumption of video podcasts was growing 20 times faster than audio alone.

Audiences aren’t abandoning audio media. Across Europe, radio listenership is relatively stable, at least. The money’s not rapidly drying up, either. Global audio ad spend is projected to hold steady at $26.5 billion in 2025, according to WPP. Nonetheless, a belief has taken hold that visuals are essential for getting people’s attention.

But the more audio tries to be seen, the harder it is to define. ‘We don’t really know what a podcast is anymore — nor do the ad buyers,’ Cridland warns. ‘Where is this budget coming from? YouTube? Podcasts? Influencers? The lack of definition is actually quite harmful to the industry.’

Retail Media

‘Investing in a channel that can be tracked directly from an ad to a sale is a much more valid use of a marketing budget than, say, trade marketing, maybe even TV advertising,’ said Colin Lewis, founder of Retail MediaWorks in an interview with MediaCat UK earlier this year.

Retail media isn’t (yet…) threatening TV ad budgets in the same way as Youtube, but EMarketer predicts that retail media spend in the UK alone would reach £4.2bn in 2025, and could account for nearly a quarter of all ad spend in the US by 2028.

Offering broad reach and precious first-party data, retail media doesn’t have to try too hard to appeal to marketers. But it’s nice when it does, and this year, retailers, like Walmart, invested in AI tools to list deals available at the store nearest the customer, give directions within stores to the right item, and sort wishlists by their location in stores, encouraging people to spend more time on the app and consume more of its retail advertising.

2025 has also been a big year for in-store ad formats — major chains like Sainsburys, Aldi and Lidl have all rolled out digital shelf-edge labels, which advertise products where shoppers are already looking.

Lewis is confident that retail media will continue to gain share of marketing spend, saying that it will attract ‘more than 15%’ of adspend because ‘all marketers are on the hook for proving return on investment.’

Creativity is the next step for the channel, however. ‘When you go to a retail media conference,’ adds Lewis, ‘you don’t really see anybody talking about creativity. I would argue that it is going to now be a key theme.’

If you found this analysis useful, join James and the MediaCat team at MediaCat Live in London on 3 December for an evening of talks on creativity and innovation in media.

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