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The job of media planners and buyers has never been harder, and the degree of difficulty is growing exponentially. Whether it’s media platforms from video creators to podcasters to game producers, media planners and buyers need to integrate a variety of swiftly and constantly changing platforms to best serve their demanding advertiser clients.
On the surface, the job of a media planner or buyer should be the same as it ever was – to find the right audiences, the right media platforms, and right creative messages to best serve your client’s business goals. Nothing is revolutionary about clients needing to enhance awareness of their brands and products, drive sales or solidify long-term customer loyalty.
But the media world itself is in an endless state of flux. In 1995, 85% of all U.S. ad spending went to linear TV (broadcasting and cable) and print. By 2025 that combination was down to 27%. Just 10 years ago linear TV still accounted for nearly 75% of media consumption, which dropped to less than 40% by 2025.
As I’ve developed training programs for young media advertising executives in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers, it’s never been clearer that today’s media planners and buyers must embrace a non-stop hunger for learning and rapid and nimble decision-making. We couldn’t be further from the Mad Men world of three-martini lunches and afternoon golf excursions. Shahar Sorek, the Chief Marketing Officer of Overwolf, a platform for gaming creators, noted that “media plans were always built on a stable, enduring foundation; that foundation is no longer there.”
The Interactive Advertising Bureau hosted a series of conferences last week focusing on three areas of media advertising opportunity that weren’t much on the radar screen until relatively recently: creator-driven content, podcasts and games. These are far from the only or areas crying out for greater media investment – it’s hard to call streaming “emerging” anymore – but their growing prominence illuminates the continuing education challenges for media planners and buyers.
Is everyone a creator now?
The “creator economy” is everywhere and cuts across almost every form of media now. YouTube is the home of virtually every creator in the world, from dudes in their basements to each major media company. Substack has 100,000 publishers on its platform, text-first but increasingly with audio and video content as well. Obsession and Backrooms exploded in movie theaters this summer, with directors barely in their twenties. The established streaming platforms such as Paramount+ are adding micro-dramas and vertical video produced primarily by independent creators. AI is dramatically slicing the costs of production in every subsector.
The numbers are unignorable. The growth creator-linked advertising grew from 2024-2025 by over 25% compared to 5.7% for the overall U.S. media industry. The size of this segment of the ad market totaled $11 billion in 2021, and the IAB estimates it will exceed $44 billion in 2026. In the meantime, the estimated total U.S. ad market for 2026 is $51.6 billion. And this gap will be entirely gone before another year goes by. “Tried and true” just doesn’t cut it.
As multiple IAB speakers pointed out, creators aren’t just reacting to and commenting on culture – they are shaping it. Zach Kornfeld, the CEO of The Try Guys, a YouTube-centric creator-oriented producer, noted that advertisers have tons of options to build the “width” of their audience – the extent of audience reach. He pointed out how much harder it is to find “depth” – places where audiences have built strong connections with the content and the creators. But as reach alone becomes more of a commodity, it raises the pressure on media planners and buyers to find the needles in haystacks that will really move the needle on audience engagement. Everybody is looking for the next new thing.
If everyone’s playing games, where are the brands?
A typical question at an advertising conference is “how many of you are gamers?” But the real question is “how many of you play games?” As several panelists noted, people that play games, especially mobile games, aren’t a niche crowd of dudes drinking Red Bull and eating Doritos (not that there is anything wrong with that). The average game-player is 37. Overwolf’s agency partnerships lead Nathan Lindberg told me, “you can find whatever audience you are looking for when they are playing games.”
But there’s a continuing gap between the breadth of game-playing activity and brand presence. Overwolf’s Sorek noted that 67% of media audiences play games while only 2.4% of ad spend goes towards games.
The complexity of buying advertising in gaming can be daunting. For advertisers and their agencies, it’s not simply a matter of shifting some ad dollars to “games.” And it’s not a world of 15- and 30-second ad spots.
Frank Puma, Managing Director, Portfolio Investment at WPP Media, pointed to the customization necessary to not simply place ads but drive performance for the brands. What are the right games to reach your specific target audience? Where are the opportunities to advertise in and around those games that don’t alienate your audience? When is an appropriate moment inside of a game for an ad to appear? What is the right creative?
How do I find my way through the thicket of podcasts?
Randy and Jason Sklar, aka the Sklar Brothers, host a podcast called View from the Cheap Seats and provided the not-true-but-sounds-true statistic that 97% of all Americans now have a podcast. In fact, there are 2.4 million podcasts in the U.S. and a pretty hefty percentage of them sell advertising.
The sheer amount of audience activity in podcasting is impressive – and daunting for media buyers. According to Audacy, listening hours have grown from 167 million hours per week in 2016 to 812 hours per week in 2026. And in the midst of our attention (deficit) economy, MRI Simmons research noted that 72% of heavy podcast listeners listen to the full episode. And now video podcasts – we used to call this TV – are proliferating, including top-shelf talent like Howard Stern and Brian Williams.
With so many outlets for so much content, success here sounds like the old SNL fake commercial for First Citiwide Change Bank, a bank that just makes change. How do you make money? Volume. In fact, Jeffrey Hazlett of the C-Suite Network shared his secret of his company’s success in building an infrastructure of thousands of hours of business-oriented audio and video podcasts. He calls it “riches in the niches,” connecting small but highly engaged audiences to the content that matches their greatest business needs. A hundred here, a hundred there and pretty soon you have a real business.
There is certainly a plethora of niches and maybe even riches in podcasting, gaming and throughout the creator-driven media economy. No person can afford to be an island here. It takes a media planning and buying village to get this right, starting with internal and external partner networks to cover the waterfront in a constantly changing landscape.
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