15 May What Irish Brands Need to Know About Video in 2026
Irish digital adspend hit €1.146 billion in 2025 — and video led the growth
The IRM report commissioned by IAB Ireland confirmed what many of us in production have been feeling on the ground: the Irish digital advertising market is growing fast, and video is the engine of that growth.
Non-social video — which includes Connected TV (CTV) and streaming video — grew 22% year-on-year. CTV alone grew 33%. Social video, which includes everything from Instagram Reels to TikTok, grew 12%. Meanwhile, standard display banners fell by 7%.
The direction of travel is not ambiguous. Brands are moving budget toward video, and away from static formats. The question isn’t whether to invest in video — it’s what kind, and how.
Your video brief needs to start with the platform, not the film
Tom Roach, VP of Brand Strategy at Jellyfish, gave what I thought was the most practically useful presentation of the day. His thesis: brand building in 2026 is no longer about one big idea repeated consistently. It’s about lots of smaller executions, each built specifically for the platform it lives on.
The data behind this is striking. Ads that are integrated to a central creative idea but built natively for their channel deliver up to 60% better brand equity impact than ads that are simply repurposed across platforms. And yet, Roach cited research suggesting that 50% of media budgets are currently being put behind ads that are not fit for the platform they run on.
That gap is expensive.
The platforms themselves make this unavoidable. Facebook rewards meaningful, sustained interactions — comments, shares, discussions. Instagram rewards saves and shares, prioritising aspiration and utility. TikTok prioritises completion rate and rewatches, rewarding content that creates curiosity and surprise. YouTube rewards watch time and consistency.
These aren’t subtle differences. A 60-second brand film that performs well on YouTube may completely fail to hold attention on TikTok, and vice versa. A piece of content that earns saves on Instagram may not drive the kind of engagement Facebook’s algorithm rewards. When you brief a production, you need to start with where this will live — not as an afterthought, but as the first creative constraint.
What this means for a video commission is straightforward: plan for platform-native assets from the outset. If your budget allows for a hero film, it should also allow for two or three platform-specific cuts built for different objectives. Shot in the same production, planned together, rather than an edit-suite afterthought.
The creator economy isn’t competition — it’s intelligence
One of the more surprising data points of the day came from WPP Media: in 2025, creator-generated content accounted for over half of ad revenue on social platforms, overtaking professionally produced content for the first time.
The majority of US and UK marketers now spend in excess of $1 million annually on creator marketing, and 61% plan to increase that investment in 2026.
That’s not a threat to production companies. It’s a signal about what audiences respond to.
Tom Roach put it well: creators live or die by knowing what works on their channels. They understand thumbnails, story setup, emotional pacing, and retention in a way that most brand marketing teams don’t — because they’re accountable to it every single day. The most sophisticated brands aren’t choosing between professional production and creator content. They’re combining both: using production craft and brand strategy alongside creator instincts and platform fluency.
For any brand thinking about video in 2026, the question worth asking is: do your production partners understand how your content will actually perform on the platforms it runs on? That understanding should be part of the brief, not something you hope gets figured out in post.
Connected TV is bigger than most Irish brands realise
Google’s presentation included a figure that stopped me: Connected TV now accounts for over 57% of total digital video time among adults, with the average CTV viewer spending two and a half hours per day watching on a connected screen.
In the UK — and Ireland follows closely — YouTube on Connected TV now outperforms traditional broadcasters in total watch time. That’s a significant shift. The television set in the living room, which brands spent decades treating as linear TV territory, is now primarily a streaming device — and the content being watched on it is increasingly YouTube, not broadcast.
For brands that have historically thought of YouTube as a “digital” channel — a second-screen, short-attention medium — this changes the calculus considerably. Long-form, high-production-value content on YouTube is now being watched in the living room, on a large screen, in a lean-back viewing environment. That’s a different context from a phone screen on a commute, and it rewards different production choices.
The brands that are thinking about this now — investing in properly produced YouTube content rather than repurposed social clips — are building an audience asset that will compound in value as CTV continues to grow.
AI platforms are changing how your content gets discovered — and most websites aren’t ready
The Web 4.0 presentation from OMD was the one I’ve been thinking about most since the conference.
ChatGPT and Gemini are now mainstream marketing channels in their own right. AI platforms now have an estimated 1.5 billion weekly users. When someone asks an AI assistant about video production companies in Ireland, or about brand filmmaking, or about corporate video costs — the answer they get is drawn from websites those AI crawlers have been able to read and index.
The critical detail: AI crawlers read text. They don’t see images, videos, animations, or anything that loads via JavaScript after the initial page request. If your website’s content only appears after JavaScript executes — which is true of many modern CMS platforms — AI crawlers may be reading a near-empty page.
The practical implications are significant. Websites that want to be discovered via AI platforms need clean, text-rich content that’s accessible before JavaScript loads. They need fresh content updated regularly — AI search queries frequently include the current month and year, meaning older content is actively deprioritised. And they need descriptive, specific language: not “we make great videos,” but clear descriptions of what you produce, for whom, in what contexts.
At Idiosync Films, we’ve been working on exactly this — restructuring our web content for AI discoverability alongside traditional SEO. It’s a different discipline from what most digital agencies have been offering, and the brands that understand it now will have a meaningful head start.
The one thing that isn’t changing
Amid all of this — the platform shifts, the AI disruption, the fragmentation of attention — one theme ran consistently through the day’s presentations.
Authentic, human-crafted content is appreciating in value, not declining.
As AI-generated content floods digital channels, audiences are actively re-evaluating what they trust and what they engage with. The conference cited research showing that young users in particular are developing sharper instincts for AI-generated content — and are increasingly drawn to work that is clearly made by people, for people, with real skill and real intention behind it.
That’s not a nostalgic argument. It’s a market argument. The supply of mediocre content is increasing rapidly. The supply of genuinely well-made, thoughtful video is not keeping pace. That gap is an opportunity.
What to take from all of this
If you’re a marketing manager or brand director commissioning video content in Ireland in 2026, the practical upshot is this:
Plan for platforms from the start of your brief, not the end. Invest in production that’s built for where it will live. Think about your YouTube presence as a long-term CTV asset, not just a social channel. Make sure your website is readable by AI platforms, not just by humans. And when you’re choosing a production partner, look for one who understands the full ecosystem — not just the camera.
We’d be glad to talk through any of this in the context of your next project.
Idiosync Films is a Dublin-based video production company specialising in corporate, documentary, and brand film production for Irish and international clients. Get in touch.