India’s ad growth pegged at 22.1% in 2022, poised to be 7th largest mkt

Advertising is expected to grow globally by 8.4% in 2022, GroupM’s ‘This Year Next Year’ 2022 mid-year advertising forecast has revealed. This is slightly below GroupM’s prior 9.7% forecast from December 2021, a change driven primarily by deceleration in China, which is now forecast at 3.3% versus 10.2%.

Within APAC, GroupM forecasts growth of 5.7% now versus its prior 9.3% estimate, although as China represents 56% of the region, relative weakness in China is a drag on the APAC total. Excluding China, regional growth is now forecast to be 9.0%, compared to 8.1% previously.

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Japan, still the world’s third-largest advertising market, is forecast to grow at a faster pace than previously anticipated, and without the benefit of a broadly inflationary economy (consensus expectations per Refinitiv call for CPI increases of 2.5% this year – low globally, although high by Japanese standards, of course). GroupM now forecasts 8.5% growth versus 5.6% previously there.

Expectations in the region’s next largest market, India, are relatively unchanged with 22.1% growth forecast for 2022 as underlying growth there remains strong. There is also significant potential for long-term expansion still in place in India, where the population is broadly similar in size compared to China, but India’s advertising market is less than one-tenth as big.

On current estimates, India is positioned to rise from its position as the world’s tenth-largest market to become the seventh-largest – ahead of Canada, Australia and Brazil – by 2025. Australia is expected to grow more modestly – up 5.8%, down from 6.2% previously – although GroupM notes that current levels of inflation are more moderate there than in North America or Europe.

South Korea is expected to grow at a much slower pace, up only 1.0% under current expectations versus 1.8% previously. Growth has been more moderate in South Korea in recent years relative to other advanced economies, arguably because a lack of pandemic-era lockdowns limited the degree to which new digitally-focused businesses with high advertising-to-revenue ratios emerged as they did elsewhere.