Researchers at media agencies GroupM and Magna Global are forecasting double-digit gains in ad spending in 2022 as the industry continues to bounce back from a Covid-ravaged 2020.
GroupM’s annual forecast projects farther out than Magna’s, estimating that global ad spending across all platforms will top $1 trillion by 2025. In 2021, according to GroupM, the tally was $763.2 billion, up 22% from 2020. Magna’s figure for this year was $710 billion, also up 22%.
Like 2021, which exceeded GroupM’s earlier outlook of 19% growth, 2022 is “poised to grow faster than we predicted in June,” the company wrote in the report. The forecast for 2022 is now nearly 10%, up from the prior expectation of 8.8%. The company sets aside U.S. political ad spending, but accounts for spending across TV, digital platforms, audio, print media, cinema and outdoor media.
Magna is calling for a 12% uptick in 2022, to $795 billion globally.
Digital has surged during the pandemic, growing 30.5% this year per GroupM, and now represents almost two-thirds of the total outlay on ads. Social media and audio are two of the categories propelling the increase. The share of overall spending accounted for by digital will reach almost 72% by 2026, GroupM predicts, more than double what it was in 2016.
Despite the rise of digital, many large companies and top-tier product launches rely heavily on television as well as ad-supported forms of streaming. But GroupM sees TV’s share of total campaigns shrinking in the coming years. TV advertising will reach $171 billion in 2022, with about 10% of that devoted to what the company calls “Connected TV+,” mainly ad-supported streaming, a category projected to triple to $33 billion by 2026.
While some in the media trenches assume that the $60 billion-plus in traditional TV spending will simply migrate over to streaming, one acronym is standing in the way of that: SVOD. “Much of this space is, and will remain, ad-free, largely because the dominant players, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+, are ad-free and plan to remain so in most of the world for the foreseeable future,” the GroupM report observed. While there are other service providers that intend to sell ads, they are investing less than these three in original programming, which will likely result in lower viewing shares. Consequently, the emerging world of television will simply offer fewer opportunities to advertise.”
