Marketers should use creator shoutouts, interactive chat, and stream sponsorships to tap Twitch's purchase influence.

The old athlete-brand relationship playbook is changing quickly as athletes become creators. Instead of waiting for networks or press offices to shape their narrative, athletes are building the studio themselves, streaming from on their smartphones, with no scripts in sight on platforms like Amazon’s live-streaming service Twitch. When WNBA stars Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman turned the 2026 All-Star Weekend into a 72-hour Twitch livestream with a peak audience of 36,000 concurrent viewers, or when former Boston Celtics forward Jaylen Brown processed a trade to the 76ers with nearly 30,000 viewers, they were doing more than traditional press hits. They were talking directly to their fandom and sponsors followed.

Spending on social remains very strong, thanks largely to automation tools. And with social video continuing to pull in ad dollars, the platforms make a push for live video.

Gen Z’s digital world no longer fits into neat categories. Entertainment, commerce, and AI now overlap, while trust is harder to earn. Shifting discovery, media habits, and decision-making are reshaping consumer engagement.

CTV is becoming the center of video advertising, but bigger budgets bring demands for measurement, pricing, and performance. Here’s where the market is headed and how advertisers can deliver results.​

TikTok’s influence across Western Europe keeps expanding, but its biggest opportunities vary by market. This report explores where user growth, advertising, and social commerce are accelerating.

For years, AliExpress has competed in the US largely on one promise: low prices. But its recent Summer Sale suggested the company is looking to broaden that proposition.

iHeartMedia expands Amazon ties: iHeart taps Amazon’s DSP and shopper data, making audio easier to buy, target, and measure across channels.

Sports content is one of the last bastions of live, appointment viewing. Key data shows who’s watching, which platforms they use, and how they engage with content between events.

Esports and gaming creators represent two distinct but overlapping opportunities for marketers seeking to reach engaged audiences.

Teens live on their phones, bouncing between short-form video, gaming, shopping, and AI. As social feeds become storefronts and AI doubles as a tool and companion, brands must rethink how they earn attention—and trust—in teen digital life.

Amazon’s Twitch platform is testing pause ads as 51% of viewers act on them, betting on less intrusive formats to drive livestream reach.

Australia has enacted the world’s first nationwide ban on social-media accounts for anyone under 16, forcing platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat to remove underage users or face major penalties. Policymakers and researchers will study the effects on mental health, offline behavior, and migration to unregulated platforms—insights that could influence US policy, where similar proposals are already gaining traction. For advertisers, the implications are significant: removing millions of teen users would constrict future reach curves, shift youth attention toward gaming-adjacent spaces, raise competition for compliant inventory, and complicate early brand-building. Australia’s experiment may foreshadow US market disruption.

Twitch introduced livestream shopping ads powered by Amazon’s advertising platform. The ad launch reflects the burgeoning popularity of livestream commerce, which despite being slow to take off in the US is now gaining traction thanks to TikTok, a booming collectibles market, and the rise of “shoppertainment.” Amazon is betting that an easier path to purchase will encourage more viewers to pull the trigger on products they discover via livestreams. However, a successful live shopping strategy requires thinking about the channel less as an avenue for direct conversions and more as an opportunity to engage potential customers and build lasting relationships.

YouTube is making livestreaming a central pillar of its platform with its most sweeping update yet. More than 30% of logged-in viewers watched live video in Q2 2025, and new features aim to boost engagement and monetization. Updates include YouTube Playables, dual horizontal and vertical streaming with a unified chat, AI-generated highlight Shorts, and side-by-side ad formats that don’t interrupt streams. The company is also enabling midstream exclusivity for members. For creators, livestreaming is now easier to scale and monetize; for brands, it’s a fresh avenue to connect with highly engaged audiences—and increasingly, to drive commerce.

Consumers in Japan have been slow to embrace digital technology, but they are gradually warming to it. Recent data shows consumers are changing their online shopping and media consumption behavior.

The news: Instagram added new limitations to its livestream feature, now requiring creators to have a public account with over 1,000 followers to go live, per TechCrunch. Our take: While it could benefit Meta’s competitive position in the livestream space, Instagram’s latest restrictions will harm creators looking to break into the influencer space—necessitating rapid adaptation. Smaller creators could shift attention to other platforms with less restrictive livestream requirements—think YouTube, which only requires 50 subscribers to go live, and Twitch, which has no livestream minimum.

The news: YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok each offer unique advantages and drawbacks for gamer ad reach, per HypeAuditor’s 2025 State of Gaming report. Choosing the right platform depends on what kind of impact marketers want to make. Our take: Marketers should boost campaign performance with influencer partnerships on these platforms since creators often understand their audience better than companies do. Track success platform by platform to help tailor ad strategies, capitalize on UGC, and maximize return on investment.

The news: Despite its massive reach, gaming still accounts for less than 5% of worldwide media investment, per Dentsu’s 2025 Gaming Trends report—indicating a disparity between where audiences spend their time and where advertisers invest. Our take: Concerns about brand safety with in-game advertising linger, but brands that are willing to take the risk stand to gain through an approach that considers that simply investing in the format isn’t enough to drive results.

Gen Z is driving the vertical video revolution: Platforms and marketers must meet them where they are—on mobile and with creators.