Commentary

Investments In Connected Commerce, Tech Stacks Rise To $585B

Online channels will completely overtake offline channels this year.

Offline overall will decline by an estimated 5.5% year-over-year by the end of 2025, while online marketing spend will grow by 12.3% -- with data, analytics and data infrastructure spending on all channels posting 6.0% growth, Winterberry Group predicts.  

U.S. economic expansion as seen in 2.5% Gross Domestic Product increase will help to fuel this growth, the firm estimates.

Investments in connected commerce and technology stacks will drive U.S. ad, marketing, and data expenditures to $585 billion. Those tech stacks combine software, frameworks, databases, and other tools used to build and run software, including those powering advertising.

Findings from the Winterberry Group Annual Outlook 2025 study suggest connected television (CTV) advertising revenue in the U.S. will surpass linear TV ad revenue in 2027.

advertisement

advertisement

Connected commerce, such as search, social and display combined will drive direct sales, two-thirds of which today occur on retail media networks, now drive nearly $120 billion in media, creative and content spending. That's compound annual growth of 19.7% since 2021.

Search, social, CTV, video and influencer marketing each posted double-digit growth in 2024, and analysts expect the same results in 2025.

The ad-tech stacks are becoming large and now embrace addressability, measurement and attribution across all media channels and channel combinations. 

Data may be the fuel, but the systems require intelligence and activation through artificial intelligence. AI is the reason that data spend will grow >3X GDP (10%) to reach $25 billion in U.S. this year.

The report also shows U.S. ad spend in 2024 grew by 11% – and 8.7% if excluding political advertising for Election 2024.  The latter was nearly three times the corresponding growth in U.S. GDP last year.  

Among selected additional findings from the report in 2024, U.S. digital marketing expenditures reached $360.9 billion -- more than 65% of total online and offline spending combined. In 2020, when COVID-19 broke out, online marketing’s total expenditure share was 57%.

In 2025, online marketing’s corresponding share will exceed an estimated 69%, surpassing $405 billion.

Next story loading loading..