Advertisers are raising budgets in pursuit of new customers, but a new industry study suggests most of the money is landing in front of people they have already reached. Budgets are rising by nearly 10%, according to the research, with about three in ten advertisers naming new audiences as a top priority for the extra spend.
Despite that intent, 81% of advertisers surveyed said they are failing to reach genuinely new audiences, and are instead repeatedly targeting the same segments. The study points to a fragmented path to purchase as the central problem. A single decision can now stretch across mail, news, search, price comparison tools and, increasingly, AI assistants, with U.S. adults spending close to 13 hours a day with media along the way.
Identity is where the chain most often breaks. Three quarters of advertisers reported difficulty recognising the same non-converting customer across different touchpoints before a purchase. Without that link, campaigns default to the pools that platforms can already identify, which is why familiar audiences keep absorbing the new money.
Perhaps the most striking finding is where advertisers say they would go if the problem were fixed. Some 92% said they would reallocate spend to the open web to reach untapped audiences if they could do so effectively. That signals latent demand for inventory beyond the largest platforms, provided the measurement and identity tools are good enough to trust.
For agencies, the lesson is less about buying more media and more about repairing the joins between touchpoints. The advertisers in the study are not short of budget or ambition. They are short of a reliable way to prove that the person seeing an ad today is genuinely new, rather than the same shopper wearing a different device.
The open web’s opportunity, in other words, is conditional. Publishers and technology firms that can demonstrate genuinely incremental reach, with identity and measurement that survive scrutiny, stand to win budget that advertisers openly say they want to move. Those that cannot will watch the same recycled audiences absorb another year of well-intentioned spending.
