WARC Forecasts $1.3tn Ad Spend Shift With Retail Media Search And Social Dominating

WARC’s Future of Media 2026 Report opened with a sentence that should have stopped every South African marketer in their tracks: “The established model for media planning and buying is breaking apart, and nobody knows exactly what comes next.” Those are the words of Paul Stringer, managing editor at WARC, the global authority on marketing effectiveness.

“For South African brands, the timing of this report matters more than we’re letting on, because we have just over seven months until our entire television currency is replaced too,” says Cheryl Ingram, founder and CEO of TDMC (The Digital Media Collective). Here, Ingram and Caleb Shepard, Media Director at TDMC, unpack what this means – and what brands need to do this year to win in 2027 and beyond.

What the WARC report revealed

The Future of Media 2026 forecasts global ad spend at $1.3tn in 2026, a 9.1% jump on 2025. “But the more important number is where that money is going,” says Ingram. Almost 80% of ad spend will flow into just three categories: retail media, paid search, and social platforms. The remaining 20% is shared across every other channel – television, radio, print, out-of-home, podcasting, gaming.

WARC’s response to that fragmentation is a new operating model that manages paid, owned, and earned media as a single connected system. The report also flags two further forces: AI-powered search has created a second audience for marketing – the machines themselves – making Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) a discipline most brands haven’t started implementing; and creator marketing is now a primary brand-building channel, but significant investment is being wasted through poor brand fit and weak measurement.

The collapse of traditional pay-TV

While WARC’s findings are global, South African brands face a compounding local factor: our television measurement is being rebuilt from the ground up at precisely the moment that the audiences it was built to measure have already left.

Google South Africa’s market research is unambiguous. South African pay-TV dropped 9.6% in a single year, falling to 6.7 million subscribers. Over five years, MultiChoice lost 1.6 million linear broadcasting subscribers – a compound annual decline of 5.2%. Total broadcast revenue declined 4.6% to R33bn, yet programming spend surged 7.6% to R17.2bn.

“That last number is the one that should alarm every advertiser,” says Shepard, who leads the agency’s performance and media planning function. “Broadcasters are spending more to produce content for an audience that is shrinking,” says Shepard. “The cost of reaching an engaged viewer on linear TV is rising at exactly the moment that viewer is choosing to watch somewhere else. That is not a trend – that is a structural failure.”

South African viewers spend an average of 1 hour 52 minutes per day streaming – among the highest figures of any measured market globally. The streaming market has also been reshuffled: Showmax, which held 27% of the local streaming market, shut down on 30 April 2026, replaced by Canal+. Brands carrying Showmax as part of their video strategy now face an immediate measurement and reach question – before the TVM transition has even begun.

Where the waste is hiding

Google South Africa’s research exposes a structural flaw in how linear TV spend has always worked here. Just 21% of the population absorbs 61% of all TV ad impressions, receiving an average of 27 impressions each. Linear TV effectively caps out at 60-63% reach – beyond that ceiling, every additional rand buys frequency waste, not new audiences.

“This is what the new TVM currency is going to make visible for the first time,” says Shepard. “When you can see reach and frequency across all screens in a single view, the inefficiency of a linear-heavy plan becomes impossible to ignore.”

A new measurement system for a new viewing reality

In September 2025, the Broadcast Research Council of South Africa (BRC) appointed GfK to design and deploy the country’s new Total Video Measurement (TVM) service, ending Nielsen’s 38-year run as the TAMS provider. The rollout runs in three phases: a new daily TV currency goes live on 1 January 2027; broadcaster on-demand and streaming are added by end of 2027; and a unified all-screens view – linear TV, BVOD, OTT, mobile, and connected TV – completes during 2028.

“Brands and agencies will be entering a viewing landscape they have not seen before. The way we plan, buy and prove TV will look different on 2 January 2027 to how it looks today,” says Ingram.

The connected TV opportunity brands are underestimating

YouTube reaches more than 25 million South Africans monthly, including over 7.5 million Gen-Z viewers aged 18-29. More than 8 million South African households now have a Smart TV. YouTube watch time on connected TV is up 16%, with views up 29% – CTV already accounts for 32.6% of all YouTube watch time in South Africa, challenging mobile as the primary viewing platform.

“As a Google Premier Partner, we have early sight of where this audience data is heading,” says Shepard. “And the story it tells is unambiguous: the living room is back, but it’s streaming now. YouTube on a Smart TV is the new prime time for a significant and fast-growing share of the SA audience. The brands that plan for this ahead of Phase 3 of the BRC rollout will have a measurable head start.”

When that Phase 3 unified measurement arrives in 2028, YouTube and other CTV platforms will be measured alongside linear for the first time. Brands that haven’t started building CTV into their video strategy will be entering that landscape cold.

What this means for brands

The budget shift is already under way. Google South Africa’s Q1 2026 data shows roughly one-third of linear TV advertisers are actively reducing their legacy linear budgets, with 30% of that shifted spend being captured by Google and YouTube. “If you’re a South African brand still planning media the way you did in 2022 – with budget allocations split by channel, separate teams running paid social and TV, and no view of how AI search is reshaping discovery – you are not behind by a year. You are behind by a generation,” says Ingram.

TDMC is telling clients to take five steps in 2026:

• Audit your media plan against the WARC 80/20 split. If your spend mirrors the global pattern, ensure your measurement and creative are equally evolved. If it doesn’t, ask honestly whether that’s strategic or inertia.
• Treat creator investment as a core media channel. Google’s data shows that combining creator-driven content with branded assets drove 8% higher conversion volume, 20% higher value per conversion, and a 41% boost in watch time. It needs to be always-on, properly measured, and integrated with the rest of the plan.
• Get your AI search visibility audited now. GEO is the new SEO. ChatGPT.com is already the fourth most visited website in South Africa. AI-referred sessions jumped 527% year-on-year in the first five months of 2025. If your brand isn’t being cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, your discoverability is eroding right now.
• Audit your video strategy for the connected TV gap. Google’s data shows that reallocating 32% of a linear TV budget to YouTube breaks the linear reach ceiling and drives up to 64% more total sales. YouTube Connected TV delivers 4.5x higher ROAS versus streaming TV and 1.89x higher long-term ROAS than linear TV.
• Plan now for the 1 January 2027 TV cutover. Identify the people in your business who will run the transition. Put pressure on your media partners to show you their preparation roadmap. The grace period the industry will need in early 2027 is not a luxury – it’s a planning input.

Plan now, benefit later

Ingram says brands have seven months to decide whether they treat 2026 as a year of preparation or a year of denial. “WARC has told the world that the old model is over. The BRC has told South Africa that our most established media currency is being rebuilt. The ones that prepare will start 2027 with a competitive advantage. The ones that don’t will start 2027 with a measurement system they cannot interpret, a spend allocation that no longer reflects where audiences are, and a creator strategy that costs more than it returns. That isn’t a forecast. It’s just maths.”

For Shepard, the data closes the loop. “WARC tells us the global model is broken. Google’s South African numbers tell us exactly how it is breaking here. The pay-TV subscriber base is declining. The linear reach ceiling is real. The audience is on connected TV and it’s growing fast. TDMC’s job, as a Google Premier Partner and a performance agency, is to make sure our clients are already operating in that new reality before the measurement catches up with them in 2027.”