By Sam Bradley and Kimeko McCoy • May 5, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
The pendulum is swinging back to the feed, signaling that the crown of digital video dominance is going to social media. Brand spending on social video is set to outpace media investments on connected TV (CTV) ad inventory, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).
While CTV spending is projected to grow year-over-year to 11% in 2026, spending on social video — which includes video on apps like Instagram, YouTube and Reddit — is set to rise faster for the first time, at 13%. Based on a survey of 360 U.S. marketers who spent at least $1 million on advertising last year, the IAB estimated that total digital video spending for the U.S. would reach $80 billion this year.
Media buyers say they’re seeing the phenomenon play out among their own clients. Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing agency DigiShopGirl Media, said social video commands more than 50% of client ad spend. Fashion and supplement brands are transferring more linear ad budgets into digital platforms like YouTube and Meta, per Constantine.
“More of our dollars are going into performance buying and we’re just doing less CTV,” she said, without outlining specific spend figures.
The IAB’s ad spend estimates suggest brands are investing to keep up with social platform users’ hunger for video content. Global Facebook users spent 8% more time watching videos in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the previous quarter, according to Meta’s Q1 earnings call. A similar lift in time spent watching video led to an increase in sales at YouTube of 10.7% in Q1, rising to a total of $9.88 billion.
Falling production costs (thanks to the burgeoning cottage industry of generative AI creative tools) and an emphasis on close audience targeting among small and medium-sized advertisers may also be contributing to rising social video spending.
“We’re seeing this shift play out directly with our clients, with more brands integrating video into their marketing mix and investing in video-first platforms,” Rebecca Bampton, PPC director at performance media agency Roast, told Digiday.
Case in point: Sandra Heidrich, vp of marketing at Health-Ade, told Digiday the company spends up to 40% of its total media budget on paid social — much of that on short-form video platform TikTok, as well as on Meta. Heidrich did not disclose specific spend figures.
Hanna Samad, svp and group director of connection strategy at agency RPA, said the popularity of social video had contributed to a higher proportion of brand awareness dollars flowing into paid social inventory. “More people are using social media as their entertainment channel, [and] the dollars for awareness are then following,” she said.
As social becomes increasingly video-first, platforms like Meta and YouTube are combining awareness and performance into one. Shattuck Groome, chief media officer at Mile Marker media agency, argued that social content is a real-time marketing vehicle, faster and easier to execute in comparison to CTV, where content production takes longer, he said. This is especially true with influencers and user generated content, he added.
Similar to Constantine, Groome is seeing client dollars shift in response. Brands are moving from strictly spending performance dollars to funneling more brand dollars to feed the social video frenzy. Budgets for creative, media, and influencer/creator reach at this point are being pulled from the same pot, he said.
Still, CTV is attracting its own fair share of growth. CTV spending growth is being fuelled, in part, by a rise in programmatic spending on the channel. But the IAB found that among small and mid-sized brands, targeting capabilities were a bigger draw than the quality of adjacent video content, something CTV pitches to the market often emphasize. Nearly half (49%) of those surveyed listed it as their top criterion when deciding where to invest, up 23% on the previous year.
Roast’s Bampton suggested that the falling costs of video asset production due to the emergence of cheap AI tools like Adobe Firefly and Runway had made social video more accessible than CTV to smaller advertisers.
“The capabilities of AI-powered creative tools [are] opening up video production to brands that previously lacked the resource to create these — an opportunity we’re actively exploring internally and alongside our client teams,” she said.
Assaf Toval, co-founder and CEO of marketing data firm BIScience, suggested similar trends were set to play out in other digital advertising markets around the globe.
“Based on the advertising data and insights collected from our 30 million global opt-in human panel, large advertisers are targeting social and CTV today as their primary advertising channels specifically in the U.S.,” said Toval, “but we see the same trend in almost every market.”