Online advertising market grows, industry seeks cookie replacement
The advertising industry reports strong growth in online advertising market. The Online Marketing Circle develops a cookie successor for user identification.
(Image: krungchingpixs/Shutterstock)
In 2025, more than 7.5 billion euros were generated in the German online display and video advertising market – an increase of 9.6 percent compared to the previous year. This was reported by the Online Marketing Circle (OVK) within the BVDW. The finance (+27 percent) and services (+17 percent) sectors showed particularly strong growth.
(Image:Â OVK im BVDW)
For 2026, the association expects further growth to almost 8.2 billion euros, which would represent an increase of 8.7 percent. The main growth drivers are programmatic advertising and online video advertising. Programmatic advertising now accounts for 78 percent of all bookings, and this share is expected to rise further to 80 percent in 2026. Video advertising is expected to overtake traditional display advertising for the first time in 2026: with a projected 4.2 billion euros, it would then account for 51 percent of the total market.
The industry is looking for a cookie replacement
Beyond the growth figures, the industry is grappling with a strategic question: How can users be reliably identified since third-party cookies are hardly functional in many browsers anymore? The OVK's answer is: deterministic IDs. These are identifiers that are not based on fragile cookie crumbs but on “hard” signals such as an email address or phone number provided and confirmed by the user. Anyone who logs in to a publisher and consents to personalized advertising is assigned such an ID, which then makes them recognizable on other participating websites and apps.
Videos by heise
This is useful, for example, for frequency capping: Without a functional ID, a user might see the same ad spot ten times on different pages because no system notices that they are already “saturated.” Deterministic IDs could prevent this, but only if as many publishers and marketers as possible use the same solutions.
This is precisely where the problem lies. The OVK sees itself as a standardization body and aims to bring together agencies, demand-side platforms, and ID providers. The industry uses the metaphor of an “open park” for this: In the closed garden of large platforms like Google or Facebook, there have long been reliable guidance systems – in the open web, one has so far been groping in the dark. Deterministic IDs are intended to provide the signage there.
(jo)
