Guideline: U.S. Ad Market Extends Growth Streak As Digital Spending Climbs.

Despite a new war in the Middle East and the impact of rising inflation on consumers, marketer remained bullish in March. Guideline reports total U.S. ad spending rose 2.8% from a year earlier, producing three consecutive months of expansion for the market during the first quarter.

Chief Insights and Analytics Officer Sean Wright said on a recent Guideline podcast that 2026 has had a solid start. “First quarter looks decent, and I think second quarter will probably chug away,” Wright said. “Maybe we’ll start to see some softness in Q2 and Q3, but it’s also going to be a masked by the World Cup.”

Spending increases were broad based during March. The data shows top ten ad category spending grew by a combined 0.4%. But spending growth was even larger among smaller categories, rising 6.2% in March from the prior year.

The fastest growth came in digital advertising. Guideline says it grew 8.8% during March, compared to a year earlier. Traditional ad spending was softer, however. It was down 11.1% year-to-year. The result was digital accounted for 74% of total U.S. ad spending in March.

Guideline announced this week that it is expanding its platform to provide CPM benchmarks for locally geo-targeted digital audio and podcast buys across more than 60 of the top U.S. publishers. Guideline SQADCosts Local has been often-cited reference point for local broadcast pricing. The new digital extension — which is also adding CTV capabilities alongside digital audio — uses the same Average/Low/High benchmarking framework for audio streaming and podcasting.

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.