Digiday
Aug 7, 2025
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One could easily be forgiven for thinking disaster was just around the corner.
Excerpt:
Starting in March, analysts made several corrections to ad spend growth forecasts. Madison & Wall, for example, downgraded its expectations to 3.6% annual growth, down from 4.5%. Downward adjustments from WARC, Dentsu and WPP Media followed, the latter principally due to lower projected ad spend in the U.S. Not great.
Most observers expected that if cuts in marketing investment were to be made, they’d show up in the third quarter of the year. But we’re more than a month in, and it seems executive caution hasn’t triggered an advertising recession after all. WPP Media still expects ad spend in the U.S. to grow 5.6% this year, well ahead of the country’s 2% GDP growth in the same period.
“We saw a slight pullback early on, right after the initial tariffs were announced, but since then we have actually seen budgets normalize as more clarity around policies is slowly provided,” said Taji Zaminasli, co-founder and managing partner at indie media shop AXM.
In other markets the weather’s sunnier. In total, ad spend across Europe, the Middle East and Africa is expected to grow 4.5% to $200.7 billion, per Dentsu. The IPA’s Bellwether report, a quarterly survey of top U.K. marketers’ spending intentions, found British advertisers reversing reductions in spending made earlier in the year. In July, the survey found 5.5% more marketers reporting a rise in ad budgets, compared to a 4.8% fall in marketers reporting budget increases in the previous quarter. And WARC increased its 2025 ad spend growth forecast 0.4% for the U.K. market, to 6.8% for the whole year.
All of which suggests marketers are confident that, though overall spending might be lower than previous years, they’re not peering over a cliff edge. “So far, what we’re seeing is a very healthy ad market,” said Madison & Wall analyst Brian Wieser. “Money is being spent despite current conditions.”
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“There is still risk from potential further escalation,” noted Zaminasli. “While we are fairly confident that the budgets we have will remain, we aren’t betting on incremental or opportunistic opportunities at this point in time.” Read the full article on Digiday