• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, April 16, 2025

 This is a soft advertising market.

If you don’t believe me, ask around.  I did.  After speaking with about a dozen people during the last two weeks, I’m convinced the market is slowing down. 

There are obvious reasons why.  The tariff actions are creating instability in global markets.  New inflation numbers coincide with a dramatic decrease in consumer confidence.

The result is that marketing budgets are being questioned.  That doesn’t mean they are being cut yet.  Most advertisers seem to be saying “maybe.”  They aren’t saying “no” to spend, but they are not saying “yes” as quickly as they were just six months ago.  That results in a softer ad market than expected.

So what?  Soft ad markets create periods of fast innovation, and we are about to witness one.

The advertising market is cyclical. It goes up, it goes down, but over time it just keeps going up.  Those periods of instability and budget cuts are rife with innovation and reallocation.  A new technology will come along, or a new channel will prove itself during a period of intense change, riding the wave when things recover.

Search did this after the dot-com bubble (the bubble burst in 2000, and Google launched Ad Words the same year).  Mobile did this coming out of the financial crisis in 2008 (the iPhone launched in 2007, the app store launched in 2008, and then things went crazy). 

Over the last four months, I’ve heard many forecasts that the creator economy and influencer marketing will expand dramatically, and that hullabaloo has not seemed to die down in the face of a softening ad market.  It feels as if retail media and creator/influencer marketing are the areas poised for the most growth during this downturn.  My prediction is that these areas expand at the expense of traditional display. 

Traditional display is going away because ad views are tied to page views, and the number of page views is decreasing as well.  And as display goes, so go mobile display ads.  Retail media is going to benefit, because it’s the natural place for those dollars to go.  Traditional display creates frequency with little to no action, and advertisers -- like the ‘80s rock band Poison -- want action.  And influencers and creators drive action.

The audience generated by creators is loyal.  It may be top-of-funnel awareness or bottom-of-funnel sales, but creators and influencers deliver attributable value across the advertising ecosystem.   Brands like to work with influencers, but they are going to use this period of uncertainty to find new ways of engaging them and their audiences.  

Advertisers will want a more frictionless way of working with this content, which will deliver a path to fuel the growth of the sector.  In much the same way that display beget search, which beget mobile, which beget video, now we will see influencer/creator marketing continue to grow alongside more traditional CTV video and studio-led programming. 

This leads us to 2026 and 2027, when the two largest line items on a media plan for a brand will most likely be video and influencer/creator content, followed closely by retail media –and, eventually, generative search.

How are you developing your plans for the remainder of the year? Are you seeing the same softening in the ad market?  What other predictions can you make for this period of economic uncertainty?