Who doesn’t love a good forecast revision (especially when it’s revising in the right direction)?
Financial analyst Brian Wieser, who projected the 2024 U.S. ad economy to expand 4.3% back in September and revised that number to 5.2% in November, has revised his outlook again, now putting spending growth to 5.6% (excluding political).
As he wrote in last week’s Madison and Wall newsletter in explaining why future expectations have improved so much, “GDP forecasts for 2024 in real terms were up by nearly a percentage point in February vs. November in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Professional Forecasters’ release, with implied nominal GDP expectations approaching 5% for 2024 vs. closer to 4% previously.”
This revision arrived shortly before Guideline reported the largest rate of ad-market expansion since March 2022, increasing 10.4% YoY in February for the 11th consecutive month of growth and, as MediaPost says, “providing a further indication that the U.S. ad economy is well out of recession.”
(Source: Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker via MediaPost)
“Looking beyond 2024,” Wieser writes, “with forecasts of 4-5% over subsequent years in nominal terms, presuming personal consumption expenditures (which historically correlate more strongly with advertising than GDP) grow by a similar amount, a 4-5% baseline continues to feel like the right starting point through 2028.”
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