The IAB Australia Video State of the Nation 2026 report provides an analysis of the digital video advertising landscape, highlighting ongoing growth, evolving challenges, and emerging opportunities across the market. The study offers a timely pulse check on investment trends, formats, measurement, and technological innovations shaping the video advertising ecosystem and assists in setting the direction of future Council initiatives.
The Video Council are proud to launch this report presenting the results of the sixth wave of the annual state of the nation video survey to provide deeper insight into video advertising investment.
$5.4bn
Australian video ad market in 2025
+19.8%
Year-on-year growth
29%
Share of total Australian digital ad spend
Key findings
Video advertising continues to demonstrate strong growth and strategic importance, with expenditure outpacing the broader market.
Macroeconomic pressures have increased as the leading concern for 2026, overtaking cross-media measurement challenges.
Advertisers are increasingly focused on driving sales and conversions, while also maintaining investment in brand-building.
Ad-supported subscription streaming platforms are a key growth area, with strong expectations from ad buyers to increase spend.
Advertising in live streaming events and creator-led content are gaining traction, with the majority of buyers treating creators as core media assets.
Video and retail media will continue to converge, currently driven by usage of first-party shopper data for video targeting.
Fragmentation continues to present challenges for cross-screen measurement, with inconsistencies in outcomes data available across different video platforms.
The industry is calling for standardised metrics and improved cross-platform measurement frameworks to enable more effective, outcome-driven decision-making.
Artificial intelligence is expected to play a transformative role in measurement, with the potential to unlock significant additional media investment by improving the accuracy of performance attribution.