IAB Australia recently brought together senior marketers, agency leaders, publishers, and adtech specialists at the IAB Australia Video Summit 2026. Across a packed morning of sessions, speakers explored the forces reshaping the video advertising landscape, from the growth of the creator economy to the ongoing challenge of cross-screen measurement, and the opportunities that CTV and AI are beginning to unlock.
State of the Nation Research
The day opened with an overview of the video market, setting the stage for the conversations ahead. The numbers told a strong story, the total Australian internet advertising market grew 11.5% in calendar year 2025, with video its strongest-performing area, up 19.8% year on year to reach $5.4 billion and now representing 29% of total online advertising spend.
Despite that momentum, the buy-side focused survey revealed a cautious undercurrent. Economic uncertainty emerged as the number one concern in 2026, cited by 48% of respondents, a notable shift from the previous year, when cross-medium measurement held that position. Measurement and AI adoption remain significant challenges, but both are increasingly viewed as opportunities to improve effectiveness and efficiency.
With cost-of-living pressures front of mind, it's perhaps unsurprising that sales and conversions topped the list of media investment goals for this year, though brand building followed close behind, with 42% of buyers planning to increase brand spend. The message from agency folks was clear, the balance between brand and performance matters more than ever.
In terms of where that investment is heading, 71% of ad buyers expect to increase spend on ad-supported subscription streaming platforms, while 47% plan to grow programmatic CTV budgets. Live sports and marquee events have emerged as strong catalysts for platform growth, with 39% of buyers flagging more live content opportunities as one of the most exciting developments in streaming.
The creator economy featured prominently in the findings, with 6 in 10 ad buyers now incorporating video creators into their strategies, and 25% treating it as a core, always-on activity rather than a campaign-based add-on. Retail and commerce media also continued its rise, with 54% of respondents regularly using retailer first-party data to target video campaigns.
On measurement, the picture remains complex. Nine in ten agencies have a unified strategy across screens, yet 25% rarely or never unify their measurement in practice. Digital brand lift studies topped the list of tools being used to assess video effectiveness, while market mix modelling grew in importance. Natalie Stanbury, Research Director at IAB Australia confirmed it has commenced an industry-wide future of measurement review this year, with findings to be shared later in 2026.
Watch session on YouTubeMarketer Perspectives: Going Digital-First in Video Advertising
We then moved into a panel discussion with two major FMCG brands discussing how they are navigating the video landscape. IAB Australia CEO Gai Le Roy was joined by Ben Nagappa, Digital and Media Manager ANZ for PepsiCo and Nisha Warrier, Digital and Media Lead for Magnum Ice Cream Company.
Ben outlined PepsiCo's decision to focus on transacting all inventory programmatically from 2024, showed strong results already. Across all three of PepsiCo's biggest TV advertising brands, brand love, brand salience, and category penetration all held stable or grew, and internal MMM modelling showed up to three times higher ROI for some brands on a fully digital approach. The key driver was consolidation, being able to control frequency across video vendors, optimise toward reach incrementality, and manage everything within a single programmatic platform.
PepsiCo's creative approach has also shifted accordingly. Rather than producing a long-form piece of content and cutting it down for digital, the team now shoots hero films and creator content simultaneously, with content creators featuring in both. The goal is assets that are native to each environment, not adaptations of something built for a different era.
Nisha described a different but complimentary challenge: building the measurement and planning frameworks for a company that only became independently listed from Unilever about a year ago. With 20-plus brands spanning large global names and smaller Australia-only products, the task is constructing a cross-media measurement muscle while the plane is still in the air. She echoed Ben's emphasis on consolidation, adding that the ask of the industry isn't just for more video, it's for a way to understand whether all the video across CTV, vertical formats, creator content, and retail media is collectively delivering results. MMM is valuable, she noted, but requires historical stability to function well, the industry needs something more dynamic alongside it.
Both marketers were asked what they would want most from their media partners:
Ben: Make inventory available programmatically, play nicely in the sandbox with other vendors, and enable universal frequency capping within a unified platform.
Nisha: Harmonise measurement terminologies, standardise data feeds, and make it possible to report on cross-channel video performance in a single, coherent view.
"In a boardroom, what all the discussion is around is: did this actually work? And that needs a single currency to discuss."
— Nisha Warrier, Digital and Media Lead, Magnum Ice Cream CompanyThe Creator Economy: Trust, Scale, and the Art of the Brief
We then moved into more discussions on the creator economy with Nathan Powell, co-founder of Fabulate, delivering a session on the rise of creator marketing in Australia. The category has tripled in value over seven years, from $380 million to over $1 billion in 2025, and is on track to reach $1.2 billion in 2026, and that figure covers only the content itself, not the paid media placed alongside it.
The reason it works, Nathan outlined, comes down to trust. Consumers are increasingly looking for recommendations from people rather than brands highlighting that 81% prefer content from creators over brand ads, and 63% trust what a creator says over what a brand says. When creator content is included in a campaign, their research shows that brands see a 27% increase in ad recall and a 93% lift in engagement.
But he was equally clear about where brands go wrong. The most common mistake is treating creator marketing as a single tactic by briefing a creator, handing over the reins, and hoping for the best. Using a live example featuring the same creators in two executions for the same brand, he illustrated the difference between content that is entertaining but commercially ineffective and content that integrates the product from the first frame while remaining genuinely engaging.
Nathan also addressed the freedom-versus-direction tightrope. His advice: be explicit about brand rules and parameters upfront, then give creators room to do what they do best. Full scripts are a bridge too far and zero guardrails leaves too much to chance. And always pair organic creator content with paid amplification, without it, even the best content is at the mercy of an algorithm.
Watch session on YouTubeBuy and Sell Side Panel: Sophistication, Standards, and What's Next
A panel bringing together Tess O'Brien from FreeWheel, Diana Molinaro from News Australia x Tubi, Casey Greig from Audience Group, Brooke Aniseko from PMX / Publicis Groupe and Julia Edwards from Nine Entertainment, led by IAB Australia's Technology Lead, Jonas Jaanimagi, tackled the state of the market from multiple angles.
Tess opened with a global perspective, noting that while macro video trends are broadly consistent across markets, Australia stands out in one striking way: programmatic adoption in CTV here sits at around 60%, compared to roughly 33% in the US and approximately 19-20% in Europe. That sophistication, she outlined, is both an advantage and an obligation as the market that leads on adoption also tends to encounter the challenges first.
One of those challenges came into focus when Julia Edwards discussed live sports. Nine has been running programmatic live sports for over a decade, facing some technical challenges along the way. An NFL game running for four hours is a very different technical proposition from a two-hour NRL match, and the ecosystem has not always kept pace with local needs. The IAB Tech Lab's live event ad playbook, developed with input from a number of vendors including Nine, represents a step forward to this challenge, including APIs to share concurrence data and better scheduling signals for DSPs, but meaningful adoption is still required.
Diana made a strong case for AVOD's place in the Australian video ecosystem, with Tubi's positioning as a free, on-demand platform that offers content for niche audiences including a creatorverse of 200 creators drawn from TikTok and YouTube, now producing long-form content exclusively for the platform. The new IAB Tech Lab CTV Ad Portfolio, finalising seven new formats including pause, screensaver, and squeeze-back variants, was flagged as a resource worth exploring.
Casey brought the agency perspective to measurement, arguing for radical simplification. Data, she said, can be as overwhelming as it is useful and the agency's role is to cut through to what actually signals early performance, long-term brand effect, and short-term outcomes, without getting lost in the noise. Attention, share of voice, and cross-channel signals all feature in how Audience Group frames success for clients.
Brooke reported that Publicis's own market sophistication assessment, benchmarked against a global framework, came out very strong, a point of genuine pride for the Australian market. The focus for PMX is shifting from reach toward outcomes-based planning and buying, with sell-side decisioning opening up more scalable and targeted ways to reach audiences as the volume of global streaming content continues to grow.
Julia spoke about the technical issue of using IP addresses that the panel agreed deserves more attention: using IP addresses as the foundation for frequency management in Australian programmatic streaming was far too widely adopted. Given the limited rollout of IPv6 locally, a single IP address can represent many households, making frequency models built on that signal significantly less reliable than they might appear.
To round out the session, panellists were asked what excited them most about the rest of 2026, the panel's answers spanned a growing creator content library, the continued evolution of live sports monetisation, faster creative asset approval processes that will make planning more agile, and the Australian market's distinctive capacity for buy-side and sell-side collaboration.
"Given Australia invented Wi-Fi, we can solve a lot of problems around the video marketplace."
— Julia Edwards, Director – Programmatic Sales, Nine EntertainmentClosing Comments
As Suzie Cardwell from Nine opened the day with a quote from the IAB Upfronts, 'the old model is over', the IAB Video Summit 2026 made clear that Australian video advertising is in a period of genuine strength, growing fast, adopting programmatic at a rate that leads the world, and producing sophisticated work across a diverse and expanding range of formats and environments. The challenges that remain including measurement harmonisation, live event infrastructure, creator marketing effectiveness, and navigating economic uncertainty are shared ones, and the appetite for collaboration to address them was evident throughout the morning.
Key Points from the Summit
- Video is growing fast, and buyers are focused on effectiveness. Economic uncertainty has emerged as the number one concern, and the balance between brand and performance matters more than ever.
- Australia leads the world on programmatic CTV. Local adoption is well ahead of the US and Europe, a position that brings both advantage and the responsibility of working through new challenges first.
- Marketers are asking for greater consolidation. Universal frequency capping, harmonised measurement, and a single coherent view of cross-channel performance are increasingly the priorities, a single currency to discuss in the boardroom.
- Creator content is now always-on, not a campaign add-on. The most effective work integrates the product from the first frame and pairs organic content with paid amplification, with clear briefs and room for creators to do what they do best.
- Measurement is still the area with the most opportunity. Most agencies have a unified strategy across screens, though fewer apply it consistently in practice, MMM remains valuable and the industry continues to explore more dynamic approaches alongside it.
- Technical foundations are evolving. Frequency management signals and live event infrastructure are areas where continued industry collaboration, including through IAB Tech Lab frameworks, will lift performance for the whole ecosystem.
- Bottom line: Australian video is in a period of genuine strength, and the challenges that remain are shared ones. IAB Australia, the IAB Australia Video Council, and IAB globally have a central role to play in driving the standards, frameworks, and collaboration the industry needs to move forward together.