Where is the advertising market going? After the debacle of 2020, when the coronavirus crisis led to a reordering of all accounts and all forecasts on ad spend, marketers want to know when it will return to normal and how ad spend is progressing. If the first studies of a year ago spoke of a certain pessimism, now things are much more different.
The advertising market is surrounded by a certain optimism. The latest projections on the immediate future in advertising investment are those of Warc, full of green numbers. In fact, the main conclusion of the Warc study is that the market is going to take off. Global ad spending is expected to rise 12.6% this year.
The market will thus achieve a final valuation of 655,000 million dollars, which means exceeding previous forecasts, but also recovering everything that had been lost last year. In the initial forecasts, it was not expected to return to cover what was lost.
In 2022, in fact, the market is expected to exceed 700,000 million dollars of investment for the first time, an accelerated growth. Going from $ 500 billion to $ 600 billion took the global market six years. Going from 600,000 to 700,000 has been in a matter of four, with the pandemic in between.
The reasons for the growth
This growth is closely connected to the acceleration that has taken place in recent months. During the first quarter of the year, it grew a lot, true, but much more rose during the second. Investment during the first quarter rose by 12.5%, while in the second it did so by 23.6%.
To understand these growth rates, you have to look at what happens on the internet. As explained in the study’s conclusions, growth during the second quarter of the year has been driven by growth in investment in digital advertising formats.
They rose 31.2% year-on-year. Among them, electronic commerce has been the one that has been the best. Its year-on-year increase is 59.5%. At the same time, online media are seeing some key advertising categories allocate more resources to invest in their sector.
For example, there has been a rise of ten points in online investment made by the automotive or finance. To all this, we must add that Warc’s forecasts indicate that, in the remainder of the year, consumer companies will accelerate investment in advertising. The spending of these companies will increase, even though in some niches (such as tourism) recovering pre-crisis values will still take years.
It is not the only study
The study is not the only one that gives such optimistic data. The latest Dentsu Ad Spend Report also notes that the global ad market has recovered. They position the growth rate this year at 10.4% and the investment figures at $ 634 billion. Compared to how the advertising market was in 2019, that of 2021 will be 2.5% larger, which implies that what was lost has been recovered and extra has been gained.
This growth is marked by a general increase in all markets – except in Western Europe, where the forecast has been lowered in both continental Europe and the United Kingdom – and by good internet data. The digital marketplace is expected, at least in Dentsu’s accounts, to account for half of all global ad spend this year.