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Automotive Video Marketing in 2026: Where the Money Is Going

Dealer advertising just set an all-time record while manufacturer digital growth nearly stopped. Those two facts in the same year describe an industry spending more to stand still, and they explain why owned channels are suddenly interesting again.

Two numbers landed within months of each other and they do not obviously agree.

The first: US automotive digital ad spend grew just 2.2% in 2025, a sharp downgrade from the 11.1% EMARKETER had forecast a year earlier. The second: US dealer advertising spend hit $9.96 billion, an all-time record, breaking a high set nearly a decade before.

An industry cutting back at the top while spending records at the bottom looks like a contradiction and is not one. It is what pressure looks like in the numbers. What follows is what happened, where the money actually went, and what it means for anyone weighing rented attention against owned.

What happened to the top line

In April 2025 a 25% US tariff took effect on imported cars and parts. EMARKETER's forecasting director Oscar Orozco described the sequence plainly: the tariff immediately raised vehicle prices by thousands of dollars, which sparked a brief surge of pre-tariff buying, after which demand cooled sharply in the second half of the year.

For context on how sharp that was, retail, the other hard-hit sector, was downgraded from 12.7% to 7.4% growth. Automotive lost nine points. It was the largest single adjustment in the forecast.

What happened at the dealership

Meanwhile, at retail, the opposite. Dealer ad spending rose 0.4% year over year to $9.96 billion, passing the previous record of $9.82 billion set in 2016 and sitting $2.48 billion above the pandemic-era low recorded in 2020.

The composition matters more than the total.

The underlying business supported it. The average franchised store saw revenue rise 4.5% in 2025, helped by higher sales and rising vehicle prices. The average new-vehicle selling price climbed to a record $48,205, up $553 from 2024. Dealers sold 13.1 million used vehicles, up 2%, at an average of $28,680. Stores wrote more than 276 million repair orders, a 2% increase, and service and parts sales topped $164 billion.

So: prices at records, revenue up, ad spend up, cost per vehicle up. The dealer network is spending more per car than it ever has, in a market where the cars cost more than they ever have, and it is spending three-quarters of that on a screen.

$739 per vehicle. That is the price of introducing one person to one car, and it goes up every year.

Why the two numbers agree after all

Manufacturers pulled back because tariffs hit their unit economics directly and their advertising is a discretionary lever measured quarterly. Dealers could not pull back, because a dealer that stops advertising stops receiving customers this month, not next year.

That asymmetry produces a specific competitive condition: the cost of attention rises while the budget to buy it flattens. Every participant is bidding in the same auctions for the same finite pool of in-market shoppers, and the pool is not growing.

When that happens in any market, the strategic response is predictable. Buyers start asking which parts of their acquisition machinery they are renting and which parts they own. Rented channels are a cost that recurs forever and rises with competition. Owned channels are a cost that happens once.

Who the money is chasing

The 2025 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study, the sixteenth annual edition, surveyed roughly 2,300 recent buyers in autumn 2025. Its findings describe why video specifically is absorbing the budget.

• Digital-first buyers are the most satisfied. Buyers completing more than half the process online reported the highest satisfaction of any group, a finding the study says was reinforced repeatedly throughout the data.
• Buyers arrive open. 66% considered both new and used vehicles, up from 57%. Only 29% began knowing exactly what they wanted.
• Cross-shopping intensified. 29% of new-vehicle shoppers weighed leasing against buying, an all-time high, with leases typically saving over $100 per month.
• Satisfaction hit record highs despite affordability concerns, driven by omnichannel retail and AI-assisted tools. Buyers who used AI tools reported higher satisfaction, greater trust in dealers, and a faster process.

Source: Cox Automotive, January 2026

The picture is a buyer doing long, undecided, screen-based research. That is a buyer video is built for. A photo gallery cannot show how a door closes. A spec sheet cannot show how the cabin sounds at speed. The industry's spend is moving toward video because video is the only format that answers the questions an undecided researcher is actually asking.

The four formats absorbing the budget

Connected TV and streaming

Automotive was historically one of the largest buyers of linear television. As those audiences moved to streaming, the budget followed. The appeal is obvious: television's emotional register with digital's targeting. The catch is equally obvious. It is still rented inventory on somebody else's platform, priced by auction, and the platform sets the rules.

Inventory video

The unglamorous one, and possibly the highest-leverage. A walkaround film per listing rather than eleven photographs shot in a parking lot. It converts because it removes uncertainty, which is the actual friction in a used-vehicle decision.

Social and creator video

Vast reach, real trust, and a structural problem: the audience belongs to the platform. Reach is rented per post. Algorithm changes are unappealable. The creator is one policy update from losing the distribution their business depends on.

Owned destinations

The smallest slice and the only one that accrues. A place the brand controls, where the traffic arrives directly, where no auction sits between the company and the customer.

Notice the pattern. Three of these four are auctions. In a market where budgets have flattened and costs have not, that is the entire strategic story.

The strategic reading

Here is the position an automotive marketer is standing in as of mid-2026:

Every row points the same direction. The channels that scale with money are getting more expensive and less differentiating, because your competitor can buy the identical thing. The assets that do not scale with money, the ones you either own or you do not, are the only place a durable advantage is available.

A category address is the cleanest example of that second kind of asset. It cannot be outbid. It does not have a flight window. It does not depend on a platform's policy. And critically, in a market where 71% of buyers arrive without knowing what they want, it is the address that owns the moment before the search query exists.

The caveats, stated honestly

Tariff conditions may not persist. The 2025 downgrade was driven by a specific policy event. Trade conditions change, and a forecast built on one year of policy is a fragile forecast. If the pressure eases, budgets may loosen and the urgency described here softens.

A record dealer number with 0.4% growth is nearly flat. "All-time record" is technically accurate and rhetorically generous. Growth of 0.4% is a market treading water, not a market booming.

Owned channels are not free. An owned destination costs content, engineering, and years of patience. Its advantage is that it accrues, not that it is cheap. Anyone comparing a domain purchase to a media buy on a same-quarter ROI basis is comparing the wrong things.

We are not neutral. This journal is published by the owner of Auto.TV, who wants to sell it. The figures above are real, sourced, and linked. The interpretation is ours, and you should check it against the primary data.

What it adds up to

$22.25 billion at the manufacturer level. $9.96 billion at the dealer level, three-quarters digital. $739 per car and climbing. All of it spent renting attention in auctions where the price only goes one way and every competitor can buy identical inventory.

Somewhere in that machinery there should be one thing the company owns. One address the auctions cannot touch.