As brands plan for 2026, the data from 2025 tells a clear story. Media did not just get more expensive. It became harder to scale efficiently. Looking across Rockerbox customer data, a few themes consistently stood out across BFCM and the full year.
Holiday spend continued to soften year over year, with 2025 coming in below both 2023 and 2024. This was not driven by weaker demand, but by caution. Brands are responding to cost inflation during peak periods and shifting away from a heavy late November spend mentality toward more deliberate planning.
Despite continued experimentation across channels, search and social grew to more than 60 percent of BFCM spend in 2025, regaining share versus 2024. These channels continue to absorb budget because they remain flexible, scalable, and easier to defend under efficiency pressure.
Affiliate also remained elevated compared to 2023 and 2024, driven largely by its relatively low CPA and its position at the very bottom of the funnel (ideal for demand capture). However, questions around true incrementality remain unresolved for many brands, especially for rebate style affiliate partners.
After a rapid rise through mid 2024, TikTok spend declined into 2025. Across many brands, TikTok struggled to demonstrate sustained efficiency at scale, with ROAS often hovering near or below breakeven.
Creative fatigue, fast refresh requirements, and heavy overlap with other lower funnel channels made TikTok harder to justify compared to platforms with broader reach and more stable performance.
Click through rates on YouTube declined dramatically, falling by around 80% from 2024 to 2025. The well documented trend of YouTube increasingly being watched on larger screens and becoming a true competitor to more traditional TV. As a result, engagement metrics are dropping off, since the environments in which YouTube is being watched are becoming increasingly less clickable
This creates a challenge for brands, who already find YouTube hard to measure and are likely to find it harder as engagement metrics become more sparse.
Paid search showed one of the clearest signals of the year. CPAs increased materially while ROAS remained relatively stable. This points to media cost inflation rather than collapsing performance, though in some cases, higher average order values helped offset rising acquisition costs.
The takeaway is not that search stopped working. Efficiency gains increasingly come from smarter allocation and measurement, not simply higher spend.
As brands scale, their media mix shifts meaningfully. Smaller brands skew heavily toward lower funnel channels, while larger brands invest more in upper funnel channels such as TV and CTV to unlock incremental growth.
This transition phase, often around the 5 to 15 million dollar spend range, is where efficiency is hardest to maintain and where incrementality testing and MMM become essential. Without them, brands struggle to understand which channels are driving net new growth versus redistributing credit.
From the end of 2024 to the end of 2025, conversions attributed to AI tools increased almost six-fold. When looking at new customer acquisition specifically, the increase was even higher - an almost nine-fold increase. AI is more than twice as important as a driver of new customer acquisition than it is a driver of conversions overall (based on the proportion of conversions attributed to AI).
This growth is from a low base, but even if the trend slowed slightly these tools will become important parts of the customer journey very soon.
2025 reinforced a simple truth. Scaling media is no longer about finding the next channel. It is about proving what is incremental, planning earlier, and allocating budget with discipline. Brands that win going forward will be the ones that measure with intention rather than volume.