Global market sustains 5.8% annual growth: GroupM

At the close of 2023, the global advertising market remains on pace for 5.8% annual growth, despite inflation, high interest rates, China’s sluggish economy, and lingering impacts from the pandemic, reveals the 2023 global end-of-year forecast by GroupM.
Global advertising in 2023 is forecast to total $889.0 billion (exluding the impact of US political advertising).
While nominal growth will decelerate slightly in 2024, the five-year outlook remains strong, with retail media and digital out-of-home poised for aggressive expansion.

Three major shifts

Direct-to-Consumer

Advertisers, even those enlisting the expertise of agencies, are drawing on deeper and often more direct relationships with their customers. This is especially true of the automotive, media and entertainment sectors, disintermediating customer marketing and allowing for more personalized messaging (where consented/logged in).

The report says that there has been significant variation across markets in 2023, but overall "we have avoided a global recession and inflation is retreating."

While the US and China retain their positions as the two largest ad revenue markets, respectively, the UK has overtaken Japan for the third spot, says the report. Germany and France maintain their rankings, with Canada moving back from seven to nine, Brazil rising from eight to seven, and India climbing from nine to eight. Australia remains the tenth largest market for ad revenue. These rankings are expected to hold for 2024, unless, of course, U.S political ad revenue is counted as its own market, in which case it would soar past Australia and sit just behind Canada in tenth.

Sports & events

In the face of atomization of an individual’s day-to-day experiences—where their entertainment, search and shopping recommendations, and even their news digest, is increasingly customized and algorithmically driven—brands are leaning into shared experiences and live, fan-based events as something that can create a sense of community.

Artificial Intelligence

Just as every business is now a “digital" company, the same will soon be true of AI—especially in the world of advertising. Artificial intelligence will permeate products, services and operations at all companies, even if early benefits accrue primarily to those technology providers developing large language models and supplying the compute needed to train and query them.