August Extends U.S. Ad Market’s Growth Streak.

Despite an end-of-summer ad market lull, Guideline’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker recorded an eighth consecutive month of growth. It shows the U.S. ad market grew 0.7% last month vs. a year earlier. That was a stepdown from earlier in the summer, when the World Cup helped boost marketer spending. Newly updated data from Guideline shows total ad spending increased 19.1% in June and 12.5% in July. Guideline doesn’t release radio-specific data. But the firm does share national television numbers, and those figures were down overall as the impact of the World Cup faded.

Advertisers continued to pour a larger share of their dollars into digital media. Digital’s share of the ad market rose four points from a month earlier, to a still a dominant 81% of total U.S. ad spending in August. Traditional media accounted for the other 19%. That compares to a 78% to 22% split from a year earlier.

Guideline reports that ad spending among the top 10 product categories ticked 2.4% higher in August. That compared to a 1.4% increase by all other product categories — both are smaller gains vs. what was recorded in June and July.

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.