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By Makay Redd, Head of Product Intelligence
The TikTok US sale to a consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX is now behind us. After months of regulatory limbo, during which many CMOs either paused or significantly scaled back TikTok spend in the US, the platform finally has the clarity advertisers were waiting for.
But clarity and confidence are two different things. The bigger question for investors isn't whether TikTok ad spend recovers, it's whether the resolution creates net new budgets, or simply triggers a reallocation war across Meta, Google, Snap, Pinterest, Reddit, AppLovin, and X?
The Hesitation Was Real and Measurable
Throughout the uncertainty, our proprietary data consistently flagged advertiser caution around TikTok. Brands weren't pulling budgets from digital entirely, but they were rerouting them. Meta and Google absorbed the lion's share of the TikTok exiles, but Reddit, AppLovin, and even Pinterest saw incremental flows from advertisers testing alternatives.
Now that regulatory risk has cleared, we're watching closely for signs of budget snapback. Early signals from our Advertising Agency panel suggest TikTok is already re-entering media plans, but not at the expense of every other platform equally. The platforms that gained share during TikTok's limbo period built real performance track records based on return on advertising spend (ROAS) with those redirected budgets. That stickiness matters.
The Tailwinds Are Building Up
TikTok's resolution isn't happening in isolation. The digital advertising market is entering 2026 with a confluence of tailwinds that collectively paints a more constructive picture than many expected coming out of Q4.
ChatGPT and Gemini are both rolling out more advertising within agentic search, opening up an entirely new surface for ad spend. Meta is actively promoting its suite of AI-powered tools, Meta Business AI, to small and medium-sized business (SMB), which is improving ROI and accelerating WhatsApp for Business adoption, a meaningful unlock for performance budgets globally. Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) continues to scale its integrations with Roku and Netflix, pulling budget toward commerce-linked video at the expense of open-web programmatic.
A Structural Shift in the Digital Advertising Ecosystem
Meanwhile, structural shifts underneath the headline numbers are creating durable demand: physical store closures pushing more marketing online, call center optimization freeing up budget, go-to-market rationalization across mid-market brands, companies buying the traffic shortfall from declining organic search, and a growing wave of solopreneurs entering the advertising market for the first time. These aren't cyclical bumps. They're secular shifts.
Q1 Is Running Ahead of Expectations
Our panel data shows Q1 ad spend is accelerating after a slow start. Post-holiday budgets restarted more cleanly than expected, with performance channels leading the recovery. Search and Amazon remain resilient, Meta is holding steady growth driven by automation-led efficiency, and YouTube is gradually improving as mid-funnel budgets re-enter.
AppLovin and Reddit continue to materially outperform, though growth is beginning to normalize from peak levels. OOH remains subdued seasonally but is showing early signs of a spring ramp. CTV and video formats are gaining share, boosted by Super Bowl spillover, which drove an estimated 2% uptick in digital media this month, and early Easter pulling retail and CPG budgets forward into February and March.
The main swing factor is whether this momentum sustains into late March and early Q2, or whether advertisers revert to cautious always-on spending only. Upside comes from stronger ROAS and continued AI-driven bidding and creative gains across the major platforms. Downside risks include soft consumer demand on higher-ticket goods, margin pressure in retail and CPG, and attribution volatility from ongoing signal changes.
What We're Watching Next: ChatGPT ads
Beyond TikTok, we're tracking another potentially significant development: OpenAI's plans to introduce advertising in ChatGPT, which it has already began testing. If and when that goes live, it represents a genuinely new channel, not a reshuffling of existing inventory. The question is whether it captures incremental budgets or competes directly with search? Either way, it's something investors in digital advertising need to be modeling.
We're also seeing tighter planning cycles and more "test-and-scale" behavior from agencies, with budgets consolidating into platforms that offer first-party signal strength and measurable outcomes. Shoppable and commerce-linked video is gaining share fast. Pinterest continues to improve its mid-funnel utility while Reddit is moving from experimental to mainstream in direct-response plans.
Daily Tracking Matters More Than Ever
In a market with this many moving parts, platform shifts, new entrants, regulatory catalysts, and macro crosscurrents, quarterly data simply doesn't cut it. The difference between a budget
reallocation that sustains for two weeks versus two months is the difference between a tradeable signal and noise.
At Oxford DataPlan, we estimate daily KPIs for Google, Meta, Snap, Pinterest, The Trade Desk, Reddit, AppLovin, TikTok, X, and the broader digital advertising ecosystem, including sector-level insights and advertiser-level breakdowns. Our proprietary advertising agency panel and multi-source modeling approach give us a differentiated, real-time view of where budgets are actually flowing.
For investors navigating this landscape, the ability to see ad spend shifts as they happen, not three months after the fact, is where the edge lives.
*For more information or to see a backtest, contact sales@oxford-dp.com*
