Digital continued to strengthen its position across CEE in 2025, with the local market reports consistently pointing to growing investment, more mature planning and an increasing focus on targeting, measurement and performance. While the pace differed between markets, digital increasingly functioned as a core part of the media mix rather than a complementary channel.
Bulgaria provides a clear example of this development. Digital reached approximately 37% of total advertising investment, making it the country’s second-largest medium. Search, social media and online video remained the main growth drivers, supported by increasing investment in performance marketing and data-driven communication. Mobile-first and multi-screen consumption continued to shape media planning, while AI was increasingly used for campaign optimisation, audience targeting and content production.
In Serbia, Online was one of the two main drivers of overall media-market growth in 2025, together with OOH. The market also saw increasing interest in retail media and highly targeted digital advertising, supported by access to first-party purchase data. This reflects a wider regional shift towards using data not only for targeting, but also for connecting advertising more closely to the purchase journey.
First-party data became increasingly important across the region as third-party cookies continued to decline and privacy requirements increased. The focus moved towards building and using owned customer data to create more personalised communication and improve the path from advertising exposure to purchase.
Platform concentration remained another defining feature. In Slovenia, around 65% of digital advertising investment went to Meta and Alphabet, highlighting the strong position of global platforms and automated buying environments. Hungary similarly saw international platforms control roughly two-thirds of online advertising revenue, while local platforms retained a significant share of the market.
At the same time, digital consumption continued to fragment. Romania moved further towards a platform-driven, video-first and mobile-first environment, with audiences dividing their time between streaming, YouTube, TikTok, social media, gaming, podcasts and online news. Short-form video became particularly important, while AI began influencing how people search for and consume information. This fragmentation also reduced the ability of any single environment to deliver mass reach.
Search itself began to change. The Slovenian analysis notes that while Google remained dominant, users increasingly discovered content through TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, particularly younger audiences. Social search therefore emerged alongside traditional search as an increasingly relevant part of digital discovery.
Retail media was another major development. Romania identified it as the most important emerging trend of 2025, with retailers increasingly monetising customer data, websites, apps, loyalty programmes and in-store digital screens. Serbia also pointed to the expansion of retail media networks and the growing value of purchase data for targeted advertising.
Overall, 2025 marked another step in the maturation of CEE’s digital market. Growth was increasingly driven not simply by shifting budgets online, but by the development of more data-driven, measurable and automated environments. At the same time, platform concentration, audience fragmentation, changing search behaviour, AI and the rise of retail media were reshaping how digital advertising is planned, delivered and measured.
