Sophisticated algorithms are driving today’s media evolution. As media permeates our lives, it is fast becoming 100% addressable, 100% shoppable, and 100% accountable.
At dentsu, we call this the algorithmic era of media.
This article is extracted from The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends, dentsu’s 15th annual trends report. As video consumption changes, entertainment and tech giants all want a stake in the streaming market. This leads to increasing investments in live content and more sophisticated advertising capabilities, which brands could leverage in 2025.
All eyes on sports
While original content attracts viewers to streaming platforms, licensed content makes them stay. For example, the Netflix Original One Piece grossed 72 million views in the second half of 2023, but Suits, licensed content that stopped airing in 2019, drove more than 1.5 billion viewed hours for the platform during the same period. Yet, streaming executives know live sports reign supreme on delivering audiences – the 2024 Super Bowl saw the highest US television ratings ever for a single-network telecast – and are keen to bring them to their streaming services.
Live sports broadcasting presents many ways to drive the engagement and community feeling sought by platforms. Sporting events gather people tuning in at a given time to share the same media experience, generating high audience peaks. Sports viewers tend to stick around throughout the season. Sports have breaks perfect for advertising integrations and strong potential to tap into fandoms to create related content, such as the live comedy show The Roast of Tom Brady.
As a result, streaming giants have increased their investments, signing long-term deals that indicate sports rights are becoming the global streaming battleground for the years to come. Amazon has signed an 11-year multi-market agreement with the NBA and WNBA. Likewise, Netflix has signed a 10-year international deal with the WWE, and U-Next has signed a 7-year deal with the English Premier League in Japan.
For advertisers, this foray of platforms into sports will increasingly change how they connect with sports fans and casual viewers, and could lead to a renewed inflationary pressure.
Ad inventory makes a leap forward
Platforms also seek to increase engagement from brands by heavily promoting their advertising-supported tiers to viewers – and their efforts are bearing fruit. In the United States, most new paying subscribers to Peacock, Hulu, Discovery+, Disney+ and Paramount+ now opt for the ad-supporter tier. Max and Netflix are not far behind with around 40% of new paying subscribers.
Prime Video went even further by making the ad-supported tier the default option and now boasts a global audience of more than 200 million viewers available for campaigns. Prime Video could add 50 billion impressions to the connected television ecosystem by the end of 2024 according to some estimations. This massive boost of video supply has reportedly already decreased the prices other streamers can command for their own inventory, and could lead these platforms to offer more options for ad integrations (e.g., product placement) to rival Amazon’s unique targeting capabilities.
As platforms open to third-party measurement, targeting and performance assessment of connected television is becoming more sophisticated. Combining the benefits of logged-in, addressable audiences and the premium television experience, platforms aim to help marketers build their brands through powerful stories while keeping tabs on short-term impact.
What’s next?
As streaming platforms strive to drive engagement from both viewers and brands, they will add more sports and more commercials; making connected television increasingly look like broadcast television. The combination of larger inventory and programmatic buying may open the space to new advertisers looking to bring their stories to more specific audiences.
This is the fifth of ten trends discussed in dentsu’s The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends report.
Get your copy of The Year of Impact | 2025 Media Trends report here to see all ten trends.
