Digital advertising budgets in Europe are shifting. Social video now captures more than half of display investments, retail media exceeds ten percent of total digital spending, and traditional formats (banners, traditional search) are losing ground. For a company looking to strengthen its online presence, these shifts are game-changing: the channels that worked three years ago are no longer the same today.
Retail media and social video: the channels capturing advertising growth
According to data from IAB Europe (AdEx Benchmark 2025, published in July 2026), video now accounts for more than half of display investments in Europe for the first time. This phenomenon is not marginal: it reflects a structural shift by advertisers towards short, native formats distributed on social platforms.
Retail media is growing even faster. This channel, which allows brands to buy visibility directly on marketplaces (Amazon, Cdiscount, Fnac), now exceeds ten percent of total digital spending in Europe. Its growth significantly outpaces that of traditional search and display.
For an SME or mid-sized enterprise, these figures raise a concrete question: should part of the Google Ads budget be reallocated to social video or retail media? B2C companies with a product catalog often find a lower customer acquisition cost on retail media. Service-oriented structures, on the other hand, still derive most of their leads from search and organic content.
A web strategy agency can help arbitrate this allocation. You can learn more about Bewise to understand how to structure this type of approach.
Generative AI and marketing content: rapid adoption, uneven results
The adoption of generative AI among French small and medium enterprises is accelerating. Several recent studies converge: more than half of small businesses are already using an AI tool, often free, primarily for content creation (blog articles, social posts, product sheets, commercial emails).
The findings are more nuanced regarding the results achieved. Superficial use generates generic content without differentiation. The texts produced resemble each other, search engines identify them as lacking originality, and organic traffic does not increase.
What distinguishes productive use from cosmetic use
The difference rarely lies in the chosen tool. It is found in the content production chain. Companies that achieve measurable results use AI to accelerate a step (first draft, rephrasing, translation), then inject business expertise that the model lacks: internal data, customer feedback, use cases specific to their sector.
Those that delegate the entire writing process to a free tool, without proofreading or enhancement, produce a volume of pages that dilutes their thematic authority instead of strengthening it. The available data do not allow for precise quantification of the negative impact on SEO, but several major platforms (Meta, TikTok, YouTube) are now flagging or downgrading content identified as entirely AI-generated.
Natural referencing in 2025-2026: what Google updates change concretely
Recent updates to the Google algorithm reinforce a criterion that classic SEO guides mention without always measuring its scope: direct experience (the “E” in E-E-A-T, for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
In practice, this means that an article written by someone who has tested a product, visited a place, or engaged in an activity will be better positioned than a text compiled from secondary sources. For a company, the operational translation is clear:
- Publish content that relies on proprietary data (customer feedback, internal statistics, field photos) rather than generic summaries.
- Internally identify employees capable of signing content with verifiable expertise and involve them in the editorial strategy.
- Favor depth on a limited number of topics rather than superficial coverage of dozens of keywords.
A site with thirty high-value pages outperforms a site with three hundred generic pages. This principle, already true before 2025, becomes crucial with the strengthening of Google’s anti-spam and anti-AI content filters.
Social networks and content strategy: where to focus efforts
The temptation is to multiply platforms. The correlation between the number of active platforms and commercial results is not established.
Field feedback points in another direction: consistency on one or two well-chosen channels produces more results than a scattered presence on five. The choice of channel depends on the target audience and the format of content that the company can sustainably produce.
Criteria for selecting a social channel for an SME
- Does the native format of the platform match the content that the company can create without outsourcing (short video, photo, long text, carousel)?
- Is the target audience active there and in search or discovery mode (LinkedIn for B2B, Instagram or TikTok for visual B2C, YouTube for long educational content)?
- Does the company have someone capable of posting at least two to three times a week on this channel, over the long term?
Without positive answers to these three questions, opening an additional account amounts to creating an empty showcase, which harms credibility more than the absence of an account.
The digital solutions that enhance a company’s visibility are not limited to a list of tools. The choice of advertising channels, the quality of the content produced (with or without AI), the depth of natural referencing, and discipline on social networks form a whole where each link conditions the others. The next useful decision is not to add a tool, but to remove a channel that produces nothing.