ADVERTISING PLATFORMS

Ad platforms: Marketers are from Mars and consumers are from Venus

By our African Marketing Confederation News Team | 2025

Kantar global study finds that advertising platform preferences differ vastly between professional marketers and the consumers they target.

When it comes to preferred advertising platforms, evidence from a just-released Kantar study suggests that marketers are from Mars and consumers are from Venus.

The marketing data and analytics company’s Media Reactions 2025 report, compiled from interviews with more than 21,000 consumers and around 1,000 senior marketers in various countries, finds that advertising platform preferences differ significantly between the two groups.

Photo: Greenwish from Pexels

Amazon brands dominate the consumer ranking, with Amazon in first place, Twitch in fourth and Prime Video in fifth. The two other (non-Amazon) brands in the consumer top five are Snapchat in second and TikTok in third.

Marketers’ preferred ad platforms, however, are notably different: YouTube, Instagram, Google, Netflix and Spotify – the same ranking as 2024.

Marketers are not always reflecting consumers’ preferences

Gonca Bubani, Global Director of Media at Kantar, explains the reasons for the differences: “Brands need to fight for people’s attention, but marketers are not always reflecting consumers’ ad preferences. Amazon’s ad properties buck the trend by offering a variety of different experiences from its various channels.”

Bubani continues: “Twitch is a good example: Consumers trust ads [on that platform] more than anywhere else, but many marketers assume that passionate and substantial gaming and live-streaming audiences are niche, narrow groups.”

One brand missing from both rankings is X, formerly Twitter. One year after Elon Musk sued brands for pulling their investment in the platform, things haven’t improved. Almost 30% of marketers interviewed said they plan to decrease their spend on X next year, and nearly one in eight intend to pull their advertising investment entirely.

“Having failed to make progress on content moderation, marketers have ranked X last among all global brands for trust for the third year in a row,” Bubani observes.

Top-ranking global advertising platform brands according to consumer preference:

Amazon
Snapchat
TikTok
Twitch
Prime Video.

Top-ranking global advertising platforms according to marketer preference:

YouTube
Instagram
Google
Netflix
Spotify.

You can find out more about the Kantar study here.

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