Programmatic Advertising: What Can France's 2015 Digital Advertising Figures Tell Us About 2025? 😲

🎉 It's party time for the French Open Web! 🥳

Let's travel back to 2015 and look at France's Observatoire de l'e-pub, the digital advertising market report published by the SRI (France's association of online advertising sales houses).

Back then, the numbers looked pretty encouraging for the Open Web:

• Display, video and social advertising together represented 33% of digital advertising investment.
• Traditional display and video accounted for 73% of that combined category, versus just 27% for social media, largely driven by Meta at the time.

Ha! Not much to celebrate for Laurent Solly and the social media camp back then! 😉

The catch? Growth rates were telling a very different story.

Why Did Social Advertising Overtake Traditional Display?

🤏 There was just one small problem:

• Display advertising (excluding social) was growing by 4% year on year.
• Social advertising was growing by… 31%! 😮

🤔 Hmm. Extend that trend over a decade and you can imagine a world in which social media captures around 80% of spending in this broad display, video and social category.

Of course, that's an illustration of what divergent growth rates can do, not a reliable ten-year forecast. But it raises a serious question for French publishers: what happens when advertising budgets migrate faster than audiences do?

🚗⚡ Back to the Present: The French Digital Advertising Market in 2025

At the time of the original post, the SRI was due to release its full-year 2025 Observatoire de l'e-pub figures the following morning.

Using the already published first-half results as a guide, the emerging picture was striking:

• Social advertising was on course to represent approximately 61% of the combined display, video and social advertising category.
• Social was expected to account for around 45% of the market's growth.

The remainder of the market was increasingly concentrated among a few types of players:

🥤 Streaming and video platforms: around 14%
📺 TV and radio broadcasters: around 8%
🛒 Retail media players: around 6%

That would leave the rest of the Open Web with only around 10% of spending within this broad category, and facing declining investment.

These figures reflect the categories and projections discussed in the original French post; they should not be read as a newly verified breakdown of the final 2025 annual report.

Why Is the French Open Web Losing Advertising Share?

Here's the paradox: the Open Web still offers enormous advertising reach.

According to the Similarweb estimate cited in the original analysis, France's top 500 websites collectively generated more than 10 billion page views per month.

That's a huge potential audience, accessible through established programmatic buying infrastructure.

So why is such a large part of the market struggling to attract a proportionate share of advertising budgets?

Is it fragmentation? Buying complexity? Measurement? Advertising quality? The dominance of integrated platforms? Or the way the Open Web sells its value to advertisers?

And here comes the €12 billion question:

What Would Make the Open Web Central to Advertisers' Media Strategies Again?

What could publishers, agencies, technology partners and advertisers do to put the quality Open Web back at the heart of media planning over the coming years?

At GreyFox Ads, we've been asking ourselves that question for months. 🤔🤔🤔

And we've come up with LOTS of ideas… 🤑🤑🤑

…But that's a story for another article. 😉

How GreyFox Ads Supports Quality Open Web Advertising

GreyFox Ads is an independent French programmatic advertising curation company. We believe a high-quality Open Web can deliver real advertising effectiveness for brands.

That's why we developed our Master Curated Deal, designed to make quality programmatic display and video buying simpler:

📡 Supply Path Optimization (SPO), prioritizing direct publisher connections
🚫 Exclusion of websites and subdomains overloaded with advertising
📐 Screen-share optimization to favor ad formats that occupy meaningful screen space
🎯 Audience activation across cookie-based, cookieless and consentless environments, using appropriate privacy-compliant methods
🛡️ Brand safety filters
👌 Simple activation for programmatic media traders
🪟 Transparent fees and supply paths

Looking for a quality programmatic advertising partner for your 2026 media campaigns?

📩 Contact GreyFox Ads to discuss your display and video advertising challenges.

Original French LinkedIn post: https://lnkd.in/eA-7Y5qK