Last summer in New York, Gucci covered an entire building with a mural teasing its new campaign. The next morning, the same image was already circulating in WhatsApp threads, a screenshot of someone’s subway selfie. By that evening, it had been remixed on TikTok and debated in Discords dedicated to fashion drops. The mural wasn’t the message. It was the spark, the piece of creative ember that got picked up by the wind, and carried, reframed, and judged across every layer of culture’s media ecosystem.
This is the reality of advertising in 2025: campaigns don’t just live where you buy them. They live in the handoffs that go from screen to screen. From billboards to group chats, from streaming pre-rolls to Reddit threads, brands are discovered in one space and processed in another. If you’re still thinking in the traditional terms of “reach,” you’re missing the way attention actually travels.
Streaming is where the old idea of primetime has gone to reinvent itself. By May 2025, streaming had accounted for 45% of total TV usage in the U.S., surpassing the combined usage of cable and broadcast. That shift would be headlines alone, but the kicker is that audiences are choosing ads. More than 72% of streaming consumption now happens on ad-supported tiers, a reversal of the assumption that people will always pay to opt out of commercials.
Netflix, the famously once-ad-refusing company, has become the case study. Its ad-supported tier now reaches 94 million monthly users globally, who spend an average of 41 hours per month watching. The company has promised advertisers it will double ad revenue in 2025, sending the bold signal that streaming platforms aren’t reluctantly tolerating ads; they’re actively building businesses around them.
But the crown jewel of living-room screens isn’t just Netflix; it’s YouTube. The platform reports over a billion hours of video watched on TV screens every day, collapsing whatever distinction used to exist between “user-generated content” and “television.” The kid streaming creator commentary on a 55-inch screen isn’t thinking in those legacy categories. Neither should brands.
Even so, the screens aren’t the only stage. If you want to understand where influence is actually minted, look at the backchannels. Instagram executives have admitted that most sharing now happens in private messages instead of the feed. WhatsApp counts around 100 million U.S. users monthly, an enormous but largely invisible stage for cultural arbitration. Discord claims 200 million monthly active users, and Reddit now reports 110 million daily actives. These aren’t the sidelines; they’re the control rooms where people decide whether a campaign gets oxygen or gets ignored.
Brands have learned this the hard way. American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney jeans campaign, intended as a Gen Z love letter, was instantly torn to shreds across TikTok duets, finstas, and Reddit threads. The backlash didn’t start on the billboard or even in the feed. It rapidly metastasized in private rooms where tone-deafness spreads faster than any press release can ever hope to contain. Contrast that with Ralph Lauren’s Oak Bluff collection, which celebrated Black joy and Southern tradition. The imagery traveled the same backchannels, but this time, it carried pride and recognition. One campaign was flattened by the group chat; the other was amplified by it.
This isn’t just an anecdote; it’s economics. Out-of-home advertising is booming, not because billboards suddenly became more persuasive, but because they generate content worth carrying into the backchannel. U.S. OOH revenue hit a record $9.1B in 2024, with Q1 2025 hitting another record at $1.98B. Digital OOH now represents roughly a third of ad spend, driven by dynamic creatives that sync with real-world moments. That Gucci mural? It wasn’t bought for eyeballs on the street. It was bought for screenshots, selfies, and shares. It was tailor-made for social.
What makes the screen-to-screen handoff powerful is that each layer has a role. The public stage, streaming platforms, OOH, and YouTube deliver scale. The community middle: Reddit, Discord, and niche forums, delivers credibility. The private layer: DMs, WhatsApp, and iMessage, delivers judgment. Campaigns survive not by dominating one channel but by moving seamlessly between them.
And yet, as media multiplies, visibility contracts. Roughly 40% of U.S. consumers use ad blockers at least some of the time, and global news avoidance sits around 4 in 10 people. People aren’t opting out of stories; they’re opting out of irrelevance. That’s why platforms that balance respect and resonance, streaming ads with lighter loads, OOH that blends into city life, and creators who sound like insiders are thriving.
If you want proof of how the system works, watch how a single cultural object moves. Take Barbie in 2023: Warner Bros. staged hot-pink billboards and subway takeovers, seeded TikTok clips, and let memes multiply on Discord. By the time the movie opened, the group chat had already decided it was an event you couldn’t miss. Fast-forward to today, and the same conveyor belt explains how a streetwear drop on Reddit ends up in an OOH campaign on Houston Street in New York, or how a Netflix pre-roll finds its real traction as a meme in a WhatsApp thread.
The trap for brands is confusing placement with persuasion. Renting the stage doesn’t guarantee your audience will want an encore. An expensive Times Square takeover that dies in the group chat is just expensive and nothing else. A modest spend Discord partnership that hits the right server can spiral into cultural ubiquity and pay dividends.
Even legacy formats are adapting to survive this truth. Out-of-home has become programmable; DOOH boards can update in near-real time to reflect sports wins, album releases, or weather shifts, behaving more like a live feed than a static poster. In other words, even the billboard is now built to be carried into the backchannel.
So, where do audiences actually see you? Everywhere and nowhere. They see you in the pre-roll they can’t skip, the billboard they pose in front of, the Discord post dissecting your unfortunate misstep, the DM where a friend forwards your campaign with “Wait, this is actually sick” or “What were they thinking?” The visibility you buy is just the opening act. The verdict happens in private.
In 2025, the backchannel is the real front row.
