By Dom Coleridge, Commercial Director, Scale Digital
The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving and reinventing itself, be it in response to regulatory changes, technological innovations or the emergence of new consumer tastes and behaviours.
In 2025, the media landscape is more varied and, from an advertiser’s perspective, more complex than ever before. Consumers now expect to be reached wherever they engage with a brand, with 71.7% seeking communication across multiple channels and 52.1% wanting multichannel delivery for transactional updates. This included email leads (56.5%), followed by websites (42.9%), and social media ads (41.9%). What’s more, a combined 46.5% of shoppers want to hear from brands through at least one mobile messaging channel.
By contrast, desktop-focused or siloed strategies risk missing the full picture of engagement. Outcome-based CPA activity, however, can thrive far beyond the desktop. Too often, CPA activity is undertaken in silos. For example, a campaign optimised for desktop clicks, an affiliate programme running in parallel, or a TV buy handled separately. As we know, consumer behaviour doesn’t work in silos and neither should your customer acquisition strategy.
Modern shoppers move effortlessly between Amazon, brand websites, influencer content, mobile platforms, and connected TV, which means campaigns confined to a single channel risk being overlooked. Brands that coordinate promotions across multiple touchpoints can more effectively capture attention and turn engagement into meaningful outcomes.
Achieving success during now requires more than optimising creative or copy. It depends on careful planning of channel mix, timing, and messaging to reach consumers at the moments that matter. With Cyber Weekend 2025 once again set to test the agility of brand marketers, let’s examine six channels that any brand can leverage to deliver measurable business impact: Amazon, Influencer Marketing, Mobile, Connected TV, Voice Commerce, and Affiliate.
Amazon and retail media networks
With 63% of shoppers now bypassing Google to search for products directly on Amazon, the platform has become the preferred starting point for online shopping, and CPA measurement ensures those conversions are accurately attributed. Meanwhile, other major retailers are launching their own retail media networks to emulate Amazon’s ad sales success, giving advertisers new opportunities to test targeted offers and campaigns that provide full transparency on CPA and ROAS.
Influencer marketing
Influencers continue to shape product discovery, providing credibility and context during the consideration stage, especially for younger demographics. The influencer and social media creator space is now highly transparent, dispelling the old myth that it is ‘murky’ or unpredictable. Nano and micro-influencers, in particular, are proving exceptionally effective for high-end brands, delivering authentic engagement and reaching highly targeted audiences.
By partnering with creators on a CPA basis, advertisers can make influencer marketing fully outcome-driven, ensuring that spend is directly tied to measurable conversions. This approach aligns incentives for both brands and creators: brands gain predictable, performance-based results, while influencers are rewarded for driving actual action.
Mobile
Mobile is increasingly driving high-value user engagement through in-app post-install events, enabling advertisers to acquire users who take meaningful actions within apps and deliver measurable, CPA-based results. Mobile now powers campaigns that are fully outcome-driven. Paid social channels, such as TikTok and Snapchat, provide precise targeting in their ecosystems, but reaching users beyond these walled gardens requires a broader approach. Agencies can support advertisers by managing campaigns across multiple partners, integrating MMP tracking, and leveraging programmatic DSPs to access the wider mobile landscape, ensuring campaigns reach valuable users at scale. For brands investing heavily in mobile, focusing on post-install and in-app activity ensures campaigns are accountable, performance-focused, and designed to maximise real ROAS.
Connected TV
Connected TV is rapidly becoming a key medium for advertisers, and while concerns about measurability have persisted, recent developments in tracking and attribution mean campaigns can now be properly evaluated. Engagement is seamless and immediate through interactive or voice-enabled formats. In the UK, CTV has reached near saturation, with 94% of the population using the medium, making it a highly effective way to reach audiences that desktop and influencer channels often cannot.
Voice Commerce
Voice is quietly embedding itself into daily routines, from reordering essentials to discovering new products, providing another channel for measurable ad engagement. Advances in interactive voice technology now enable brands to go beyond reach and recall, delivering campaigns with live end-to-end attribution, deep performance data and automated optimisation.
Voice also works as a natural extension to a brand’s existing radio or above-the-line campaigns, turning broad-reach advertising into measurable user acquisition. This approach allows marketers to track CPA directly, ensuring traditional campaigns not only drive awareness but also deliver tangible conversions through a modern, interactive touchpoint.
Affiliate
Affiliate partnerships remain a constant, providing a reliable bridge between intent and transaction. Once regarded as somehow ‘less than’ traditional display advertising campaigns, affiliate partnerships are increasingly being viewed as a valuable and valid way to reach new customers, particularly given the recent evolution of the media marketplace.
Although the UK economy registered only 1.5% growth in 2024, affiliate marketing’s total advertiser spend rose to £1.7 billion, up an impressive 9% year-on-year. In fact, in 2024, every £1 spent on affiliate commissions and network fees returned roughly £16 in basket revenue, an ROI that comfortably outpaces most other digital channels.
Measurable and profitable
Brand marketers should be seeking to measure outcomes across all touchpoints, using unified platforms to capture the full customer journey rather than just clicks. Understanding the full consumer journey allows marketers to better connect campaigns across devices and platforms to influence high-value moments.
By weaving together Amazon sales data, influencer-driven conversions, CTV engagement, and voice activations into a unified partner management or affiliate platform, brands gain a single view of outcomes. This isn’t about chasing impressions; it’s about building strategies that capture profitable actions across the entire consumer journey.
When used strategically, these different media types allow brands to reach customers in the moments that matter, turning engagement into measurable, profitable actions. As we see out 2025, brand marketers should be maximising their chances of success by building robust, omnichannel CPA strategies aligned with contemporary consumer behaviour.
The convergence of tech and brands 