Why film marketing's display ad budget is probably its biggest waste

Display advertising reached $56.2 billion in the United States in 2025, outpacing linear TV's $49 billion for the first time. Studios are among the largest buyers. A typical wide-release marketing budget allocates somewhere between 8% and 15% to digital display (banners, programmatic placements, video pre-rolls on entertainment sites, and retargeted ads that follow audiences across the web after visiting a film's official site or searching for tickets).

That is a meaningful slice of a budget that, for a major tentpole, can run to $120 million. The question worth asking is whether any of that spend is actually moving tickets, and the answer is: mostly no, with one important exception.

Standard display banner ads averaged a 0.06% to 0.12% click-through rate in 2026. For every 10,000 people who see a Spider-Man banner while reading an article, between 6 and 12 click it. Native display formats do somewhat better at 0.15% to 0.30%, and rich media formats with embedded trailers reach 0.20% to 0.50%. Studios are spending hundreds of millions against these numbers across a channel whose share of tracked digital ad spend has already fallen 40% year-over-year, from 7.4% to 4.2%, as advertisers broadly vote with their budgets toward social and CTV.

The structural problem is that display ads reach potential customers as they browse content, watch videos, or engage with apps, as opposed to search ads that target users actively looking for specific keywords. They are an interruption channel, not an intent channel.

For film marketing specifically, interruption runs into two compounding problems:

Even so, a well-executed display unit against a broad programmatic audience is mostly generating impressions that overlap heavily with people who were already going to see the film or were never going to.

Retargeting display ads have 3-4x higher CTR versus standard display, and in the film marketing context, retargeting is doing something categorically different from broad awareness buys.

A retargeted display ad reaches someone who has already visited the film's official site, searched for showtimes, or watched the trailer on YouTube, giving them a specific reason to complete an action they already considered taking. That is a conversion play rather than an awareness play, and it is the right use of the channel.

Obsession's Fandango $5 off code GETOBSESSED is the clearest recent example of display retargeting deployed correctly for film. The discount code creates a measurable conversion event (code used equals attribution confirmed), the retargeted ad delivers it to an audience already signaling intent, and the creative does not need to sell the film because the audience already knows what it is.

Dynamic retargeting boosts ROI 3-7x versus static banners, and retargeted audiences assist 30-60% of conversions indirectly, meaning they are often not the last touchpoint before a ticket purchase but a mid-funnel reminder that closes the gap between consideration and action.

At the budget level display typically operates ($2-10 CPM against a retargeted pool), the efficiency case is defensible in a way that broad display simply is not.

Fandango's contextual ad effectiveness study found that genre-aligned display ads generated 72% positive sentiment versus 39% for generic brand ads, and were 2.3x more likely to result in an immediate post-screening online search or product page visit. A horror movie display ad on a horror editorial site reaches an audience that is already in the right mindset, already consuming genre content, and already predisposed to find a horror film relevant. The same ad on a general news site interrupts someone who may have no interest in horror and no context for why this specific film is worth their time.

Studios running programmatic display at scale through Google Display Network or The Trade Desk typically optimize for reach and frequency against broad demographic targets. The algorithm buys impressions cheaply across millions of sites and optimizes for clicks, producing a lot of low-quality inventory: a Coyote vs. Acme ad appearing next to mortgage calculators and travel insurance comparisons. Contextual targeting (horror ads in horror editorial, animation ads in family content, prestige drama ads in film criticism) is more expensive per impression but generates the sentiment and conversion numbers that justify the spend. Programmatic curation, now adopted by 67% of enterprise advertisers, is becoming the primary mechanism for addressing waste by pairing open exchange scale with curated supply paths. Most studio media buying has not yet made that shift, because volume is cheaper and easier to report on than quality.

The display budget that works in a film campaign is the retargeted slice reaching people who already raised their hand, the contextual placement reaching genre audiences in genre environments, and the rich media units that use the format to deliver the trailer itself rather than a poster key art still. Everything else is generating impressions that do not convert, against audiences that were not waiting for a banner ad to tell them what to see this weekend.

PAID MEDIA 📊 Display's share of tracked US digital ad spend fell from 7.4% to 4.2% in 2025, a 40% structural decline as budgets shift to social and CTV (AdClarity) AdClarity's analysis of US digital ad spend showed display investment falling more than 40% year-on-year, with its share of tracked digital spend dropping from 7.4% to 4.2%. Social and CTV absorbed the reallocated budget, with social now accounting for 50.7% of tracked digital spend and CTV at 31.2%. The film industry's continued allocation of 8-15% of marketing budgets to display is increasingly out of step with where the broader advertising market is moving, and with where the data on film discovery and ticket purchase conversion points.

CAMPAIGN STRATEGY 📋 Coyote vs. Acme tracking: 27% awareness, 41% interest, five weeks before release. The paid media window that matters is now (Cosmic Book News) The Quorum's eight-week tracking has Coyote vs. Acme at 27% awareness and 41% interest, the widest demand gap of any film on the board. Three in four moviegoers still do not know the film is coming. Ketchup Entertainment's five-week paid media window is now the primary lever for closing that gap. The film has strong first reactions, a genuine fan community, and an earned media backstory that no banner campaign could manufacture. What it needs is reach, and display is the least efficient way to buy it.