Like so many Olympics-and-Election years before it, 2024 offered a perfect, welcome formula for advertising growth.
And like so many of the immediate years that follow, 2025 promises some deceleration.
The recent Global Advertising & Marketing Spending Forecast 2025-2029, from PQ Media, spells out exactly how good the globe had it last year, with an 8.7% rise to more than $1.77 trillion. And if its forecast is correct, that growth will slow to 5.3% in 2025, due in no small part to what PQ Media attributes to “inflation and recessionary fears.”
(Source: PQ Media)
“Early pacing data in 2025 shows that brands are starting to trim their budgets in anticipation of the Trump tariff policies, despite consumers still spending online and shopping at brick-and-mortar stores,” says PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn. “But we expect the overall advertising and marketing sector to grow at an accelerated rate in 2026, bolstered by numerous political elections worldwide, particularly in the top 20 global markets, and we anticipate a large influx of media investments during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be tri-hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico.”
In the United States, total advertising and marketing grew 9.7% to $708.45 billion in 2024, and is forecast to grow 5.4% this year. And while traditional advertising and marketing fell 4.1% across the world, digital and alternative advertising and marketing grew 13.3%, accounting for $935.07 billion and a 52.6% share of overall spend.
“Brands are … exploring other digital & alternative media that offer more one-to-one connections with target consumers at points of decision, such as digital out-of-home advertising, experiential marketing, product placement and influencer marketing,” PQ Media says.
Taken in full, MediaPost’s Joe Mandese calls PQ Media’s forecast a “pretty bullish outlook for post-quadrennial years, especially given the kind of mixed geopolitical and macroeconomic indicators that many of the ad industry’s ad-forecasting units were caveating with when they released their year-end outlooks nearly two months ago.”
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