The latest edition of WPP Media’s bi-annual media report has dropped, signaling muted short-term optimism and some soul-searching for the near future. We chat with its author.
Global media spend is up - but forecaster warns of interlocking future uncertainties
In its first major release since holding company WPP consolidated all its media agencies last month, WPP Media has released the latest edition of its twice-yearly media revenue report, This Year, Next Year.
Following widespread concern in the marketing industry that ad budgets would take a substantial hit in the wake of tariff turmoil, the report projects total global ad revenues for 2025 of $1.08tn – a 6% increase on last year. It’s a prediction in line with other forecasters who have downgraded their initial predictions for the year (but not as drastically as might have been expected at the peak of tariff mania) – WPP had initially predicted 7.7% growth when it last released stats in December of last year.
The report predicts a very similar rate of growth for 2026 (6.1%) and an overall ‘compound annual growth rate’ for the years between now and 2030 of 5.4%.
As a WPP briefing for the report put it, revenues have thus proved “resilient in the face of significant technological and geopolitical change.”
Behind that global 6%, there’s a slower 5.6% growth rate in the US, with the report predicting a shift of at least some of that spend to the UK (which sits at 6.5%). Despite geopolitical tensions, the forecast still expects all the world’s major ad markets to grow.
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The ever-increasing share of the pie taken by digital advertising continues to grow, with 81.6% of total global revenues expected to come from either pure-play digital ads or digital extensions of other formats this year.
Other growth areas will come as no surprise either: the retail media juggernaut continues apace, reaching a global total of $169.6bn in total revenue this year. It’s projected to hit $252.1bn by the decade’s end, at which point it will account for 18% of all ad revenue.
Influencer/creator-driven revenues have also shot up, by 20% from last year to a projected $184.9bn this year. That number’s expected to double by the time the decade’s out, hitting $376.6bn.
TV revenues are up slightly, by 1% to a total of $162.5bn. Within that, streaming TV continues a rapid incline, from a projected $41.8bn to $71.9bn in 2030.
The figures for out-of-home (OOH) and audio advertising remain flat. Print continues to fall, by 3.1% to $45.5bn.
This year’s report encourages no small amount of soul-searching for marketers as it tackles questions of existential importance for the ad industry: What happens to media spend in a world where AI agents overtake real human beings as the principal users of websites? In a world where traditional news media is supplanted by solo creators and user-generated content? In a world where the global ad market is no longer dominated by two players (the USA and China)? In a world where the development of globalization has wobbled from its predicted trajectory?
There are, in other words, the present uncertainties associated with the ‘Vuca’ paradigm (‘volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity’), but also future uncertainties that make long-range forecasting a bit like playing multidimensional pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.
That doesn’t mean forecasting is impossible, the report’s author Kate Scott-Dawkins tells The Drum, but it does make it hard. “This was the hardest forecast to wrap my head around out of all the ones I’ve done. I didn’t do the one right as Covid hit, but since then, everything has felt like it was changing every day, between the trade and political news pieces that were coming out, and then the speed of innovation across AI and the number of things that were happening there.”
What the moment demands, Scott-Dawkins says, is not to factor in every daily development in AI or trade wars, but to keep one’s eyes open to the range of scenarios branching out ahead of us. She wants to “spur marketers, and ultimately the industry, to start to think about some of these multiverse scenarios. Let’s be very open-eyed as we walk into these next five years about what could happen and what our role is in ensuring that we do the best we can to get this one right, or to do it better than with past technological transformations like the move to mobile and social media… Yes, things are going to shift from place to place, but there are big moving pieces that we need to take into account for the longer term.”
To that end, Scott-Dawkins’s team has shifted its top-level taxonomy of ad spend for this year’s report – a reflection of the shifting dividing lines between types of media. By far the biggest of those buckets is ‘Content,’ making up $628.8bn of total revenues, with digital and social media dominating that category, followed by linear TV, then streaming TV, audio and print.
Across that whole content bucket, the report predicts that a remarkable tipping point will be reached this year: user-generated content will comprise a bigger share (just over 50%) of ad revenues this year than all ‘professional’ content. Amid that rapid continued growth in creator channels, user-generated video ad revenues alone will top $150bn.
Alongside the report’s econometric analysis, it includes reporting from a questionnaire for media experts. That questionnaire found 62.9% agreeing that by 2030, most news consumption would come from a combination of individual creators and AI bots.
The second-largest bucket in WPP’s taxonomy, ‘Intelligence,’ accounts for ‘traditional’ search and the space it’s moving into. Revenues are up here by 7.3%, on track to hit $226.2bn this year.
One predictable growth area is the rapid adoption of AI-enabled ‘answer engines’ like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Google alone, as the world’s biggest media owner, already accounted for $224.9bn in ad revenue last year and other players are seeing growth, including Microsoft’s ‘search and news’ ad revenue growing in the double-figures this year.
Voice search is still also expected to grow as is tech like Google’s image-recognition software Lens.
The third bucket, ‘Commerce,’ accounts for retail media’s stratospheric growth to a forecasted total of $169.6bn this year – a huge opportunity, Scott-Dawkins says, for media agencies like her own: “Layering commerce data on to all media forms continues. The ways in which that happens can be varied and that’s part of the reason why WPP media is so excited for [its new media proposition] Open Intelligence and federated data, because we can help clients combine it in ways that are safe and private and you don’t have to move it around.”
Most of that retail media growth so far has been located in the world’s two biggest ad markets, China and the USA, though the rest of the world is expected to catch up over the next few years, with growth predicted especially in Mexico, Brazil and India.
Cinema makes up only a tiny sliver of the fourth bucket, ‘Location,’ alongside OOH, while within the Content bucket, audio is stable and print is seeing declines.
So while digital media continues to suck up more spend, Scott-Dawkins encourages marketers to avoid the lazy conclusion that traditional media is in an inevitable pattern of decline unto death.
Traditional media owners, she says, would do well to remember that while the world’s top media spenders are still spending big on traditional channels, the behavior of longer-tail advertisers is often even more digital-centric: digital ad revenues for the latter reach to 80%. Finding reliable routes to that longer tail would prove valuable for traditional media owners, she says.
“If they’ve only been thinking about their target audience as those 350 brands that buy through agencies and they already have relationships with, they’re missing 75% of the market. Why aren’t they thinking about taking on some of that 80% of spend from that group that’s going to digital channels? Can they add more self-service platforms? Can they make it easier to buy? Can they add technology so that they tag their content better and their audiences better, so that people can buy in the same ways or with the same level of sort of granularity that people are used to from digital? I’m not saying we should take all the learnings from digital and apply them to traditional. That wouldn’t be good. But I do think there are opportunities.”
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If uncertainty has been the dominant theme of the year so far, Scott-Dawkins says that the message right now comes down to cautious optimism. 6% growth isn’t as good as hoped for last year, or as bad as feared a few months back – while the last few months have brought some fluctuation in that number, she says, (and though her team has only run its full analysis once for this report) she was never forecasting lower than 5%.
While fears like global recession still bubble away in the background as “non-zero risks,” the marketing world can take heart from a growth rate that remains above nominal GDP growth even in the US and opportunities in AI, social and retail media.
Scott-Dawkins notes that in the media expert survey aspect of the report, the portion of experts predicting world-shifting upheavals over the next few years in the ways we consume media has declined from recent years, giving a little time, perhaps, for those who want to prepare themselves for those bigger shifts. “Yes, things are happening very quickly, but maybe that scale of change isn’t quite here yet.”
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