As global ad spending grows, marketers and CFOs push AI-driven platforms to prove real ROI beyond hype.
By Hadi Khatib
In 2025, the traditional link between advertising spend and ROI was effectively broken. Powered by AI and the massive financial weight of a handful of digital giants, the ad tech sector is sailing seemingly solo, steamrolling markets like a firestorm, creating its own wind. The question on everyone’s mind is: when will the investments in ad tech start to pay off?
The $1.19 trillion ad tech forecast
According to WARC’s Global Ad Trends December 2025 report, global advertising spend was to end the year at $1.19 trillion, an 8.9 percent increase over 2024, and projected to reach $1.30 trillion in 2026.
It was estimated that Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta captured over 56 percent of ad spend in 2025, a share forecast to climb to 58 percent in 2026. WARC estimates ad investments to roughly equal $150 for every person today.
Scale, AI, and R&D
Companies are pouring unprecedented capital into AI-driven optimization and first-party data infrastructure to attract brands.
Google’s Display Network (GDN), a wide collection of over 2 million websites, apps, and YouTube/Gmail properties where advertisers engage internet users with their ads, is on track to suffer declining revenues in 2025, for the third year running, as advertisers migrate from open web to “closed-loop” ecosystems.
Alex Brownsell, Head of Content, WARC Media, said last December: “Advertising…behaves in a way that doesn’t feel reflective of the real economy. Big Tech’s self-reinforcing flywheel is harvesting almost all incremental dollars.”
Digital-native budgets
Legacy pre-internet media channels like TV, radio, print, direct mail, and billboards are showing stable but slow ad spend. Digital-native categories, dominated by e-commerce, are rapidly growing, deepening the power of Meta, Google, and Amazon.
Meta reinvests nearly 30 percent of its quarterly earnings into AI-and retail-focused R&D, given that retail media now accounts for nearly 15 percent of global ad spend.
According to Reuters reporting citing The Wall Street Journal, Meta plans to enable fully automated ad creation and targeting using AI by the end of 2026. Brands need only input a product image and budget, allowing Meta’s AI to automatically generate visuals, video, text, audience targeting, and budget allocation.
This could be a boon for smaller advertisers who lack developed in-house creative or data science resources, effectively democratizing Ad tech access and usage.
Meanwhile, Google continues to be a dominant force in advertising. In late 2025, in a Q3 earnings call, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, highlighted that AI features such as conversational search and AI Overviews could expand advertising reach and formats rather than erode the core business.
Google generated approximately $74 billion in advertising revenue. “AI search features will expand the web’s advertising opportunities rather than diminish them,” said Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search.
Amazon’s Q3 2025 ad revenue rose 24 percent YoY to $18 billion, marked by the integration of AI into performance formats and new interactive formats, including AI-powered CTV ads, according to Amazon’s Investor Relations report. The company’s total net sales reached $180 billion, an increase of 13 percent YoY in Q3 2025.
AI vs. ROI
Aggressive AI spending reaching hundreds of billions in infrastructure and data center investments is prompting industry observers to caution about a potential tech investment bubble.
Alex Tedder, CIO Equities, Schroders, said in December 2025: “Widespread fear of an AI bubble means investors are increasingly interrogating companies’ ROI in relation to AI. This will intensify in the months ahead.”
Meta’s capital expenditure (CAPEX) forecasted an additional $8 billion in AI development support spending to $72 billion in 2025, despite industry analysts expressing concern that short-term returns may not justify such massive outlays.
While ad revenue continues to rise, the cost of AI computing infrastructure and talent is increasing exponentially, putting pressure on ROI expectations.
As we move into 2026, the narrative has shifted from AI Hype to potentially putting AI investments on a leash.
Forrester predicts that enterprises will delay 25 percent of their planned AI spend into 2027 due to pressure from CFOs to demonstrate profit and P&L impact.
It also said that less than one-third of current AI projects can successfully tie the value of AI to specific changes in company profit. While 64 percent of companies say AI enables innovation, only 39 percent report a meaningful EBIT impact at the enterprise level, according to McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report.
Sudha Maheshwari, Analyst at Forrester Research, was reported as saying in January this year: “Every bubble inevitably bursts, and in 2026, AI will lose its sheen, trading its tiara for a hard hat… CFOs will get pulled into more AI deals to ensure tangible ROI.”
Mark Moccia, Analyst at Forrester, said: “In 2026, CIOs will get more budget, but also more pressure to prove every dollar spent is worth its weight in gold-plated AI chips.”
For brands in 2026, this environment means focusing ad budgets on platforms that provide scale, first-party data advantages, and automated performance where ad spend and consumer purchase insights translate into shiny e-dollar signs.
