Global advertising spend is now on course to close out 2025 with growth of almost 9% to $1.19trn, an upgrade of 1.5 percentage points (pp) from WARC’s September forecast due to strong results from Big Tech platforms and a muted impact on global trade from trade tariffs.

The new projections are included as part of WARC Media’s latest Global Ad Trends: Media’s New Normal report, which finds that the advertising market in 2025 is fundamentally different from the ad ecosystem of the past.

The story in brief

The ad market used to help tell the story of the economy as a whole, but a structural shift has taken place since the pandemic. Advertising has broken away from the economic cycle, and behaves in a way that doesn’t feel reflective of the real economy, explains WARC Media head of content, Alex Brownsell.

New money has arrived from digital-native categories, while commerce has redrawn the measured media map, and Big Tech’s self-reinforcing flywheel is harvesting almost all incremental dollars.

Growth dynamics

Next year, total global advertising is forecast to reach $1.3 trillion at a year-on-year growth rate of 9.1%. Growth of 7.9% in 2027 would push the advertising market’s total value to 1.4 trillion: a doubling in size since the pandemic and equivalent to $150 spent for every person alive today.

Consolidation

• Alphabet, Amazon and Meta take a combined market share of 56.1% excluding China this year – equivalent to $556.6bn – rising to 58.0% in 2026.
• Big Tech’s scale gives it an unparalleled ability to invest in research and development, especially AI-driven optimisation, creative automation and first-party data infrastructure.
• The impact of these closed ecosystems is being seen on the open web, where advertising spend on display formats has declined in recent years.

In context

While ad spend races ahead, most other indicators of economic health look fragile. Real wages have stagnated in many developed markets, inflation has eroded purchasing power, and higher interest rates have made borrowing costlier for brands.

For many large advertisers, growth is coming more from price than volume, which has increased the strategic value of brand-building even as consumer demand stays weak.

Data from WARC’s Voice of the Marketer, a survey of 1,093 practitioners, shows that of those expecting their marketing budgets to grow next year, more than half (51%) intend to increase brand investment.