The Rising Cost of Advertising: Creative Optimization is the Only Way Forward
- Greg McConnell
- Sep 9
- 5 min read
For years, digital advertising was celebrated for its efficiency. Marketers could target precisely, measure instantly, and optimize continuously. But in 2025, the cost of reaching audiences online is rising fast, and without a proportional increase in performance.
Media Costs Are Climbing
Across platforms, cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), and cost-per-lead (CPL) are all moving higher:
The trend is not limited to social or search. Programmatic costs are rising, too. 80% of global digital display spend is already automated, expected to climb to 90% by 2026. The programmatic display market is projected to hit $861 billion by 20335. As automation scales, advertisers are bidding against each other in black-box auctions, further inflating prices.
Snapshot: Key Digital and Social Ad Price Indicators
Trend / Metric | Insight |
Snapchat +27.6%, TikTok +9.3%, Meta +1% rates | Ongoing platform-specific cost increases |
Instagram CPM of $9.46 in Q2 2025 | Elevated platform-specific pricing trend |
Global Social Ad Spend: +15% (2024), +10.9% (2025) | Robust YoY growth in social investments |
U.S. Social Ad Spend projections +9.2% (2025) | Strong domestic growth momentum |
Global Digital Ad Market: +14.9% CAGR to 2025 | Broad-based digital ad market expansion |
U.S. Digital Ad Revenue: $259B (2024), +15% YoY | Sustained increase in digital ad revenues |
CPC +12.9% YoY, Facebook CPL +21% | Higher costs for performance metrics |
Programmatic Display Growth to $861B by 2033 | Automation fueling scale and pricing dynamics |
AI and Automation Are Driving Bidding Pressure
AI-driven ad systems are a double-edged sword. Tools like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ can optimize placements and targeting, but they also reduce transparency. Marketers often do not know where ads run, which audiences see them, or why costs spike.
As The Wall Street Journal put it: “AI will soon dominate ad buying, whether marketers like it or not”6. That domination often means ceding control to opaque algorithms that prioritize spend velocity over efficiency.
Google’s AI Overview (Search Generative Experience) is also reshaping the landscape. By reducing organic clicks—down 34.5% CTR under AI summaries—businesses are forced to lean more on paid ads, pushing up competition and CPCs (AdExpert.io).
Efficiency Gains Aren’t Keeping Pace
While platforms tout efficiency gains, the numbers tell a different story:
In short, media costs are rising faster than media efficiency.
Creative Is the Performance Lever
If marketers cannot control auction dynamics or AI black boxes, they can control the creative.
Google Media Lab found that 70% of advertising impact comes from creative quality, making it the single biggest driver of performance.
This is echoed by new research from eMarketer and TripleLift, which found that 83.5% of marketers say creative drives performance, yet only 58.5% of teams share a clear definition of what “great creative” actually means. As Toccara Baker, VP of Marketing at TripleLift, explained: “True creative excellence remains elusive because we lack a shared language and common metrics”.
Marketers also admit they struggle to scale creative:
54.3% say assets are not updated often enough, leading to fatigue.
51.8% say they don’t produce enough versions for different audiences or formats.
43.9% cite over-reliance on a single format as a driver of poor performance8.
Measurement remains a blind spot. While 71.3% of marketers say evaluating creative is more important than ever, only 58.5% regularly connect creative quality to performance, and only 51.2% have reliable dashboards to measure it9.
As Izzy Morris, Paid Social and Programmatic Lead at Vodafone, explained: “The key is to close the loop between creative diagnostics and outcome metrics. That means going beyond last-touch attribution by using incrementality testing to measure creative impact”.
AI is also reshaping creative workflows. Half of marketers now use AI to generate ad copy, 38% to create images or video, and 26% to adapt formats. More than half (54.9%) expect workflow automation to be AI’s biggest contribution in the next two years10.
As Max Willens, Senior Analyst at eMarketer, noted: “If marketers want AI to deliver an exponential, rather than linear increase in productivity, they will need to feel comfortable integrating it into multiple steps of the creative production process”.
In practice, that means:
Rapid A/B testing to find high-performing variations before budget burns.
Monitoring creative fatigue so dollars are not wasted on declining assets.
Shifting spend to winners early—reallocating 15–20% of ad spend to proven higher-ROI assets can meaningfully offset rising media costs.
Investing in creative analytics and metadata to tie creative attributes directly to outcomes. As Ed Dinichert, Chief Revenue Officer at TripleLift, put it: “The future will bring the rise of creative metadata, offering a much deeper understanding”.
The Bottom Line
Digital and social ad prices are rising across the board—search, social, programmatic—and AI-driven automation amplifies the trend. Efficiency gains are not keeping up, leaving marketers squeezed.
The way out is not trying to beat the platforms at their own bidding games. It is optimizing the one lever you control: your creative. As costs climb, creative becomes not just the message, but the multiplier.
About mktg.ai
mktg.ai is the Creative Intelligence System for marketers. The platform unifies every ad asset and KPI into a single, color-coded dashboard, delivering AI-driven insights that show what is working, what's not, and why. By surfacing real-time “stop, refine, scale” guidance, mktg.ai helps marketing with creative optimization, teams cut wasted spend, reallocate budgets efficiently, and boost ROI through smarter creative decisions. Trusted by modern brands and agencies, mktg.ai gives marketers full ownership of their creative data and the clarity to act confidently in an era of rising media costs.
Footnotes
Market Vantage – Digital Advertising Cost Effectiveness: Recent Trends and Google’s Impact (2025) ↩ ↩2
Gupta Media – How Much Do Social Media Ads Cost in 2024? ↩ ↩2
Search Engine Land – Facebook ad costs jump and beat Google (2025) ↩ ↩2
Wall Street Journal – AI Will Soon Dominate Ad Buying, Whether Marketers Like It or Not (2025) ↩
eMarketer & TripleLift Survey, June 2025
eMarketer & TripleLift Survey, June 2025
eMarketer & TripleLift Survey, June 2025
Max Willens, Senior Analyst, eMarketer, quoted in Redefining Creative: TripleLift & eMarketer Report (Sept 2025)