Digiday+ Research: Programmatic ad spend loses out to email this year

This is according to Digiday+ Research surveys conducted among marketing professionals annually in the first quarter.

Digiday’s survey found that display ads (including email and programmatic ads) are marketers’ second most-used marketing channel this year. Seventy-nine percent of marketer pros told Digiday in Q1 that they currently use display ads (following social media, which 92% of marketers use). That 79% is significant, and it’s an increase over Q1 last year, when 72% of marketers told Digiday they used display ads as a marketing channel.

Additionally, display ads came in second (again behind social media) among the channels where marketers are spending the highest portion of their budgets. Fifty-two percent of marketer pros told Digiday in Q1 2025 that display ads are one of the two channels that get the highest portion of their marketing budgets. This represents another year-over-year gain for the display ads category — in Q1 2024, 46% of marketers told Digiday display ads was one of the two marketing channels that got the highest portion of their budgets.

And marketers are much more confident that display ads drive marketing success this year. Fifty-five percent of marketer pros said in Q1 2025 that display ads are one of the two channels they’re most confident drive marketing success — a big jump from the 38% who said the same in Q1 2024.

All of that sounds like good news, right? But when looking at Digiday’s survey data specifically for programmatic ads, it’s quite a different story.

First of all, marketers’ use of programmatic dropped significantly in the last year. In Q1 2024, 77% of marketer pros told Digiday that they were using programmatic site display ads. In Q1 2025, that percentage dropped to 62%.

Second, the percentage of marketers who are spending money on programmatic has been trending downward for the last few years. In 2022, 100% of marketer respondents to Digiday’s Q1 survey said they spent at least a very small portion of their budgets on programmatic ads. In 2023, that percentage fell to 93%, it fell again to 85% in 2024 and in Q1 2025 76% of marketers said at least a little bit of their marketing budgets go toward programmatic.

It’s worth noting, though, that the percentage of marketers who spend a lot on programmatic ads has remained steady year over year. In both Q1 2025 and Q1 2024, 22% of marketers said they spend a large or very large portion of their budgets on programmatic ads. (But it’s also worth noting that follows a big year-over-year drop from 2022, when 32% of marketers told Digiday they spent a lot on programmatic ads, to 2023, when just 11% said the same.)

So where is marketers’ usage and spending in the display ads category shifting to, if fewer marketers are using programmatic ads and spending in that channel? Digiday’s survey found that marketers’ use of and spending on email advertising has seen a big jump.

Barely more than half of marketer pros (51%) told Digiday in Q1 2024 that they were using email newsletter sponsorships or ads. In Q1 2025, just shy of two-thirds of marketers (64%) said the same.

At the same time, the percentage of marketers who spend at least a very small portion of their budgets on email increased from 71% last year to 84% this year. And while the percentage of marketers who spend a large or very large portion of their budgets on email ads increased as well (from 6% in 2024 to 12% in 2025), it’s still a much smaller percentage than the marketers who spend a lot of their budget on programmatic ads.

Interestingly, Digiday’s survey found that both programmatic’s drop in usage and spend and email’s rise in usage and spend correspond with shifts in the display ad budgets marketers have to work with this year compared with last year.

Just short of a third of marketer pros (32%) said in Q1 2025 that their programmatic site display ad budget increased this year over last year. In Q1 2024, 40% said they were working with a bigger programmatic ad budget.

Meanwhile, 20% of marketers said last year that their budget for email newsletter sponsorship or ads was up over the year before. This year, 30% said they were given a bigger email budget than last year.