December’s second week delivered a familiar pattern: brands announced splashy investments in emerging channels while quietly revealing that their foundational marketing infrastructure is crumbling. Between CTV fraud revelations, influencer marketing’s measurement struggles, and social platforms’ continued metric changes, the industry is sprinting toward novelty while the house burns behind them.
The core thesis this week? Marketing budgets are flooding into unproven channels not because they work better, but because they’re easier to sell internally than fixing what’s broken. It’s organizational theater disguised as innovation strategy.
CTV Fraud Finally Gets Uncomfortable for Buyers
The latest Pixalate research on connected TV fraud should terrify anyone moving linear budgets to streaming. Their Q2 2025 data shows that 18% of global CTV impressions are invalid traffic—and here’s the part nobody wants to discuss: buyers have known about this for months and kept spending anyway.
Why? Because admitting CTV has fraud problems means admitting the “future of TV advertising” might have the same verification issues as display ads from 2015. That’s politically untenable when you’ve already moved millions from traditional TV. According to Adweek’s coverage of digital advertising trends, CTV platforms are projected for 26% growth in 2025 despite these known issues.
Meanwhile, traditional TV measurement—imperfect as it is—has decades of standardization and third-party verification. But those budgets keep shrinking because “streaming is the future.” The future of what, exactly? Paying for bot-served impressions in a fragmented ecosystem with no unified measurement?
Influencer Marketing’s Measurement Crisis Gets a Shrug
The Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2025 Benchmark Report revealed what agency folks whisper at conferences: 60% of marketers struggle to measure influencer marketing ROI at all. Brands are paying creators $10,000-$50,000 per post for engagement that they can’t even prove translates to site traffic, let alone sales.
The response from marketing leaders? Double down anyway. Research shows 75% of brands still plan to dedicate budget to influencer marketing in 2025—though that’s actually down 10% from prior years as scrutiny on ROI intensifies. The reasoning remains circular: “Our competitors are doing it, our CMO likes seeing our products on Instagram, and it’s easier than arguing for more search budget.”
This is budget allocation as organizational psychology, not marketing strategy. Influencer marketing feels modern and lets executives screenshot posts for board meetings. Meanwhile, unglamorous channels like email marketing—with its reliable 20-30% open rates and direct conversion tracking—get flat or declining budgets because they don’t generate executive dopamine hits.
Social Platforms Change Metrics (Again) and Brands Pretend It’s Fine
Meta’s shift to “Views” as its primary metric across Facebook and Instagram represents yet another significant measurement change that brands must navigate. As Social Media Today documented, Views will now replace Plays for videos and Impressions for stories and posts—counting each time content appears on screen, including repeat views.
The institutional response? Silence. No major brand or agency issued statements demanding standardization. No industry bodies called for audits. Everyone just updated their dashboards and pretended the new numbers represented actual improvement.
This isn’t new—Facebook’s video view inflation scandal from 2016 supposedly taught the industry to demand verification. Instead, we’ve normalized metric manipulation as a platform prerogative. Brands tolerate this because challenging it means admitting they’ve been optimizing toward inconsistent metrics for years. Better to go along with the charade and chase the next new thing.
Retail Media Networks Multiply Despite Zero Standardization
With over 200 retail media networks now operating globally, brands face unprecedented fragmentation. As AdExchanger reports, each uses different measurement standards, targeting parameters, and reporting systems. None are transparent about their margin structures or whether advertised products actually get preferential algorithmic treatment.
Instead of demanding standardization or interoperability, brands are hiring “retail media specialists” to manage the complexity. According to Digiday’s coverage of the retail media talent crunch, expectations for these hires are unrealistic—job postings demand 15-20 years of experience in a field that barely existed a decade ago. Large CPG companies now have entire teams dedicated to managing retail media relationships—essentially paying employee salaries to work around the industry’s refusal to create standards.
This is the same fragmentation pattern that plagued programmatic advertising for a decade, except now it’s happening faster and with less pushback. Why? Because saying “we’re investing in retail media” sounds strategic in earnings calls. Saying “we’re fixing our attribution modeling” sounds like an IT problem.
The Real Story: New Channels Are Organizational Cover
Connecting these stories reveals an uncomfortable pattern: marketing organizations are using new channel investments to avoid confronting failures in existing ones. CTV lets teams avoid fixing TV measurement. Influencer marketing lets brands avoid admitting their social strategy doesn’t work. Retail media lets CPG companies pretend they’ve solved the digital shelf problem without actually solving it.
This isn’t innovation—it’s organizational avoidance with budget implications. As one anonymous VP of Marketing put it: “It’s easier to get $5 million approved for a ‘strategic TikTok partnership’ than $500,000 to audit why our Facebook ROAS dropped 40% in two years.”
The question isn’t whether new channels deserve investment—many do. The question is whether brands are investing in them for the right reasons or because they’re organizationally easier to defend than doing the unglamorous work of fixing fundamentals.
What Actually Matters Going Forward
The 2026 planning season will reveal which marketing organizations are serious about effectiveness versus which are engaged in budget theater. Watch for these signals:
Yellow flag: Companies increasing new channel spend by 30%+ while maintaining flat measurement budgets. You can’t evaluate effectiveness without investing in evaluation infrastructure.
Green flag: Organizations that pause new channel expansion to conduct cross-channel attribution audits. Boring, but it suggests adults are making decisions.
Red flag: Marketing leaders who cite “learning investments” or “strategic experiments” without defining success criteria upfront. That’s code for “we’re spending money to avoid harder conversations.”
The advertising industry faces a choice: actually innovate by solving measurement, verification, and effectiveness problems in existing channels—or keep chasing novelty while fundamentals deteriorate. This week’s news suggests most are choosing the latter, which means 2026 will bring more of the same: impressive innovation announcements masking declining marketing effectiveness.
The companies that win won’t be the ones with the most experimental budgets. They’ll be the ones brave enough to fix what’s broken before building what’s next.
Sources
- Pixalate – Q2 2025 Global Ad Fraud Benchmarks Report (18% CTV IVT Rate)
- Adweek – Digital Ads Set for Double-Digit Growth in CTV, Social
- Influencer Marketing Hub – Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2025
- Social Media Today – Facebook Switches to ‘Views’ as Its Primary Metric
- AdExchanger – Is 2025 The Year Of Retail Media Standardization?
- Digiday – How retail media’s identity crisis is fueling a talent crunch