Video ads in Australia continue to surge at 27.5% of all online advertising investments currently allocated to video. Despite flagging macroeconomic conditions, cross-channel media measurement and AI as key challenges for advertising and marketing investments in 2025, this is also a concern that despite marketers, understanding how consumer viewing will evolve, according to IAB Australia's 2025 State of the Nation Report.
Now in its fifth year, Video Advertising State of the Nation Report provides insight into video advertising investment, valuation and planning from media agencies across all forms of video advertising.
The report found that nine teenagers have a unified strategy for planning and purchasing across screens, such as television, mobile, computer, retail, outdoor or film, while 31% do not uniformly measure effectiveness across screens.
Gai Loy, CEO of IAB Australia, commented: “Digital video ad ad spending has seen extraordinary growth at a CAGR of 21.8% over the past six years, doubling the overall rate of Australia's digital ad market. However, this increased investment and diversification of environment and form will continue to pose new challenges.
“More than anything else, cross-channel measurement is currently the number one focus area in both Australia and the US. In Australia, marketers are particularly focused on improving data signals and quality in marketing mix modeling,” says Le Roy.
Respondents are keen to continue growing and evolution of the video streaming ecosystem across CTV, online video and social video, with 66% thinking that the future of streaming is linked to offering better cross-platform measurements.
However, when asked about their biggest concerns about the ecosystem, 51% of respondents flagged the lack of unified television and video currency as their biggest concern. They also identified challenges in ecosystem complexity (41%), frequency management (43%), and challenges as the biggest threats in purchasing management across a variety of self-service platforms (46%).
Marketing and advertising ROI was identified by 57% of respondents as the most important indicators of the contribution of advertising investments to the business as a whole, while only 38% of agency respondents reported measuring ROI or revenue contributions, while 37% measured sales lifts. The report shows that the most important measurement tools for the institution are online conversion tracking, market mix modeling, and brand lift surveys.
Additional data points from the report are:
- 26% of agencies identified channel-wide optimization campaigns as the biggest opportunity to incorporate AI into video planning, activation. The next four flagged opportunities include viewer identification and segmentation (24%), tracking and optimizing ad delivery or conversions (24%), resulting in an incremental campaign lift (24%), and analyzing and reporting performance data against campaign goals (24%).
- A wide range of data signals are used by agents to target digital ads and notify creatives. Demographics (age and gender) remain the most common signal used in 74%, but context in page or video-level content is second at 67% (and also 67%), along with location data.
- Reach and frequency remained the most used performance indicators to assess the delivery and effectiveness of campaigns used by 63% of respondents, with brand lift metrics (60%) very closely following. The report notes that there are limitations using Reach as a key metric for the impact of video campaigns on results, as agencies are considering a full funnel video advertising strategy.
- Brand building is the dominant purpose of digital video. However, it is increasingly used to lower funnel targets, such as increasing sales and conversions, or increasing purchase or action intent.
- While 84% of agency respondents identified video and social media influencers as having community-building talent that is very suitable for increasing the impact of the creator economy, 87% of survey respondents in Audio State previously offered the same opportunity for podcasts.
The IAB Australia Video Advertising State of the Nation Report Fieldwork was conducted in May 2025 with decision makers from 76 independent major holding group institutions completing the survey. The study collects industry information about video ads posted on connected devices such as connected televisions, computers (desktops/laptops), smartphones and tablets, and includes video ads for all kinds of long and short digital content and social platforms.
The 2025 results of this report were compared to results from four previous waves in the IAB Australia Video State of the Nation video survey (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).
