Rising CPMs Aren’t the Problem. Fragile Growth Is.

So many marketers I spoke to in 2025 were asking the same question:

“Why does it feel like we’re spending more… but not getting more?”

CPMs are up. Performance feels stagnant. And no one seems totally sure why.

Is it consumer sentiment?
More competition in the auction?
Less inventory?
Or platforms quietly raising prices and blaming the algorithm?

The truth is: it’s probably all of the above.

But obsessing over why CPMs are rising misses the more important question:

What happens to your business if they keep rising?

Because if CPMs double in 2026, the brands that survive won’t be the ones with the best Meta hacks. They’ll be the ones who built something resilient enough to withstand it.

Let’s start with a hard truth: Meta is still one of the best direct-response channels we have.

If your goal is efficient, scalable customer acquisition, it’s incredibly hard to beat. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is how fragile many businesses have become as paid costs rise.

If Meta went down tomorrow — not forever, just for a week — ask yourself… Would your business be okay? 

In other words,

That’s the lens I use when thinking about rising CPMs. Not panic, but stress-testing the system.

Because history tells us exactly how this plays out.

Remember, there was a time when only the biggest brands could afford TV advertising. Smaller brands simply couldn’t compete. There’s no guarantee social advertising won’t move in the same direction over time.

That doesn’t mean paid disappears. It means paid stops being the foundation.

When performance softens, the most common reaction is also the most dangerous one: “Performance is down. Let’s pull back spend and write off the month.”

That’s understandable. It’s also how brands slowly starve their growth engine.

The stronger response is harder: “Performance is soft. What levers do we actually have?”

Here’s where I see brands making progress right now:

If you’re still evaluating channels in silos, rising CPMs will always look scarier than they actually are.

When someone sees a DTC ad but purchases on Amazon or in retail, CAC appears to inflate. Without the right measurement, that inflation looks like inefficiency — when it’s often just demand shifting channels.

Incrementality testing and cohort-based forecasting are how you see the full picture.

We run regular incrementality tests (often two to four weeks at a time) using regional holdouts. Certain regions don’t see ads. Others do. Then we layer in DTC, Amazon, and retail data to understand what’s actually being driven by paid.

What you learn quickly is this: Paid often looks less efficient on the surface precisely because it’s doing more than you think. When you look under the hood, you realize paid is creating demand that doesn’t always convert where you expect it to — in retail, on Amazon, and other channels that aren’t counting the paid click as the core attribution point.

Without incrementality, rising CAC can trigger knee-jerk decisions that quietly hurt the entire ecosystem.

No one wants to watch an ad. Everyone hates ads.

So the question isn’t “how do we make better ads?” It’s “how do we make ads people don’t hate?”

In a high-CPM environment, creative is the primary efficiency lever. Not because it hacks the algorithm, but because it respects the audience.

If your ads don’t earn attention, higher costs will expose that faster than ever.

Offers still work. Discounts still open floodgates.

But brands get into trouble when offers become the only response to soft performance.

The opportunity right now is in creative offer strategy: understanding when to pull that lever, how to frame it, and how to protect long-term brand equity while doing it.

The goal isn’t to discount more. It’s to be smarter about why and when you do.

One of the biggest gaps I see across brands right now has nothing to do with platforms.

It’s forecasting.

Most brands are managing what’s directly in front of them:

Very few are anchoring decisions in customer cohorts.

But paid media is fundamentally simple:

If you understand those behaviors, you can forecast future revenue, absorb CAC fluctuations, and make decisions with conviction instead of fear.

Rising CPMs aren’t dangerous on their own. What’s dangerous is building a business that only works when paid media is cheap.

In the next chapter, don’t try to “out-optimize” the auction. Instead, focus on building an anti-fragile growth system:

CPMs may keep rising. Or they may stabilize. No one knows.

But the brands that survive won’t be the ones guessing, they’ll be the ones prepared.