After a challenging 2023 advertising market, dentsu has revised its U.S. ad forecast up from 5.4% to 5.8% growth for 2024 to $316.4 billion. That represents an increase of $17.3 billion year-over-year. With a presidential election ahead, $10.2 billion of that incremental increase will come from political advertising. This is up from $9.0 billion in the 2020 presidential contest.
While ad budgets will return next year, dentsu’s investment analysts predict a rebalancing of the U.S. ad market in 2025 with 4.4% growth.
On a global level, the Publicis' forecasting group sees total advertising increasing 4.6% in 2024, outpacing the 2.9% economic growth. That’s down slightly from its 4.7% prediction in May.
The Audio Outlook
Following 4.1% growth in 2022, total worldwide audio ad spend is expected to have increased slightly by 0.7% to reach $35.6 billion in 2023, accounting for a 4.9% share of global ad spend, which remains consistent with previous forecasts. “Online listening options and podcasts are becoming more prevalent with investments shifting from traditional audio,” the dentsu report says. That translates into a 0.8% decrease in traditional audio in 2023, while online audio “continued its robust growth” with a 5.6% increase.
The total audio market is anticipated to grow 1.1% in 2024 to $36.0 billion, maintaining a 4.8% share of global ad spend, and is forecast to grow by a 1.5% compound annual growth rate to 2026.
Dentsu says audio listening is being driven by digital listening, especially among younger demos, helped by the ubiquity of phones, apps and headphones. “Digital audio gives listeners access to an incredibly wide range of on-demand content, from music to news to podcast, and has been shown to deliver brand messages with a high level of attention, potentially similar to online video and TV, but at a lower cost,” the report says. The forecast also calls out “great potential” from generative AI in the areas of content licensing and translation. “This could allow existing podcast brands to become genuinely global, potentially opening the channel to much bigger advertising and partnership deals from a wider range of brands.”
But while podcasting continues to consume much of the oxygen in the audio space, dentsu points to the disconnect between traditional broadcast radio usage and its share of the ad pire. “There are opportunities in converting the significant reach and extensive amount of time spent with traditional radio into proportionate levels of ad spend,” dentsu says. It calls on the industry to work together to “improve performance measurement and capitalize on radio’s high attentional levels (92% for thirty-second ads) and low attention cost per thousand impressions.”
Elsewhere in the global ad market:
Digital is expected to follow an upward trajectory to reach $442.6 billion in 2024, representing 58.8% of global advertising spend.
Total advertising spend on broadcast TV and connected TV (CTV) is forecast to grow by 2.9% in 2024 to reach $173.5 billion.
Following a 4.9% decline in 2022 and a 4.6% decline in 2023, print ad spend is forecast to contract at a slower 2.6% three-year CAGR to 2026.
Out-of-home (OOH) is forecast to grow by 4.4% in 2024 to reach $42.4 billion, representing 5.6% of global advertising spend.
Cinema advertising spend is predicted to have reached $2.6 billion in 2023, up 2.0% year-on-year but still below 2019 levels ($3.4 billion), and its share of global ad spend is expected to remain steady at 0.4%. Growth predictions have been revised up to 6.4% for 2024
Read dentsu’s updated ad forecast HERE.
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