Ad Spending Builds Momentum Heading Into 2026.

The ad market closed out 2025 with one last monthly increase, albeit by just a fraction. Guideline reports overall ad spending increased 0.2% during December compared to a year earlier. The modest gain was the smallest of any increase last year, but it capped off a period in which only two months — July and August — posted year-to-year declines in overall spending.

The continued good news for media companies is that the increased spending is broad based as December’s ad gains weren’t pegged to the biggest spenders. Instead, Guideline says ad categories beyond the top 10 posted a 6.9% year-to-year increase in spending during December. At the same time, top 10 category spending declined 4.8% from a year earlier.

Guideline doesn’t release radio-specific figures, but its monthly update offers a larger view of the overall ad environment by combining radio spending with other marketing activity. It shows that during December, the share of spending directed toward digital increased to just under three of every four dollars (74%). That was a four-point increase from the prior month. Guideline credits a 7.9% increase in digital spending vs. December 2024. In contrast, total spending on traditional channels shrank 16.5% on a year-over-year basis. The monthly data once again offers fresh evidence for why broadcasters need to continue to focus on their digital ad products.

Looking ahead, Guideline forecasts total U.S. traditional advertising spending will decline 2.9% in 2026, even with the Olympics and World Cup providing a boost in marketing budgets. Instead, it says those events will have a “stabilizing impact” on spending. The outlook also notes the U.S. dip will be more modest than in other countries like Canada (-5.1%), Australia (-4.3%), and the UK (-2.9%). “The takeaway isn’t that linear no longer matters. It’s that linear must be planned deliberately — by market and around moments of concentrated demand like the Olympics and World Cup,” Guideline says in a social media post.

Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker is a composite monthly index from Standard Media Index, designed to provide a real-world measure of U.S. ad spending, based on actual invoiced media buys, including radio, from the major agencies and their clients. As such, it is mostly representative of spending by larger national advertisers.

The data is powered by SMI and covers radio, television, digital, print, and out-of-home media types. It is based on actual spending data from the SMI pool partners at major holding companies and large ad agencies, representing 95% of all U.S. national brand ad spending.

See Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker HERE.