Premium video advertising volumes recorded steady growth in the final half of 2025, driven by sustained CTV usage and increased programmatic adoption across European markets. According to the latest Video Marketplace Report (VMR) from FreeWheel, total premium video ad views rose by 11% YoY globally. In Europe, the data highlights a region rapidly shifting toward automated workflows to manage and monetize content inventory, frequently outpacing the U.S. in digital acceleration metrics.
While Connected TV maintained its position as a dominant device for ad consumption, the European market demonstrated the fastest expansion, posting a rapid 33% year-over-year increase in CTV ad views. This outpaced the 11% growth seen in the U.S. and brought Europe’s share to exactly half (50%) of its total ad views. This regional acceleration has been supported by the deployment of automated CTV buying platforms designed to simplify publisher-advertiser connections, alongside live programming, which secured a steady 25% share of European CTV ad views.
Programmatic transactions grew significantly in the region, with European programmatic ad views climbing 38% YoY, compared to a 28% increase in the U.S. This automated ecosystem saw a 21% global influx of unique programmatic advertisers, indicating that automated delivery is successfully lowering the barrier to entry for a more diverse pool of buyers. Programmatic channels now represent 22% of total advertising traffic in Europe, growing by 3% year-over-year. Emmanuel Josserand, Senior Director of Brand, Agency, and Industry Relations at Comcast Advertising, noted that automation tools are shifting the supply chain toward predictive systems for VOD and real-time autonomous interoperability between buyers and sellers.
The report also highlighted the role of metadata signaling in driving programmatic marketplace transparency across European borders. Content owners are increasingly enriching the bidstream to prove inventory value to buyers. On the site dimension, ‘AppBundle’—a unique application store identifier—served as the most common field, appearing in 53% of metadata-enriched endpoints. For video content characteristics, ‘Genre’ remained the dominant field at 56%. Despite these figures, the relatively low adoption of other metadata fields suggests that European publishers have a remaining opportunity to better define and clear the value proposition of their premium inventory.
Targeting strategies showed a distinct geographic split, with European campaign execution heavily favoring behavioral targeting, which led demographic data by a 60% to 40% margin. Conversely, U.S. programmatic delivery showed the inverse trend, with a slight 54% to 46% preference for demographic targeting over behavioral methods.
