Ad industry to ‘normalize’ in 2023: report

The advertising economy is going to keep on keepin’ on, according to a new industry forecast.

US ad revenue is expected to grow about 5% in 2023, predicts former GroupM exec Brian Wieser, who’s now an industry analyst and author of the Substack Madison and Wall. The projection, which excludes political advertising, has the US ad industry growing to about $363 billion this year, with a jump of 4.3% predicted in 2024 (the 2024 figure jumps to 8.1% including political advertising, largely as a result of the presidential election).

It’s a return to “normalized growth,” Wieser wrote, meaning the days of double-digit growth seen earlier in the pandemic are behind us.

“We’ve had remarkable and entirely unsustainable growth levels in the advertising industry…over the last decade, really,” Wieser told Marketing Brew. “It feels like we’re going into a period where normalcy should return, and the old models that roughly connect economic growth to advertising growth should dominate.”

His forecast is based on an analysis of different data sets, including public filings from roughly 80 companies and a “significant volume of US government data.”

Digital “platform-focused” companies ranging from social to retail media networks will account for 64% of advertising spend, growing 11% this year, per Wieser’s report. Meanwhile, he noted that the television ad sector is experiencing an “what might feel like an existential crisis at the moment,” citing strikes, carriage disputes, and cord-cutting concerns.

“It’s almost certainly the case that it’s going to be harder and harder with every passing year to accomplish goals that they’re used to accomplishing,” Wieser told us, noting that ad buyers may “reassess the role of television in their media mix.”

Though advertisers have pulled back in some respects because of recessionary concerns over the last year, “If anything, it could be considered a positive that the industry didn’t fall faster, or even decline over the past year and a half, especially as much of the industry seemed to try to talk itself into a downturn last year by fearing for a recession that never came,” Wieser wrote.

The forecast is somewhat in line with many of the major advertising groups—in its mid-year forecast, GroupM projected growth of 5.1% this year, while Dentsu said it expects US investments to rise just 2.6%.