U.S. Ad Market Bounces Back In September After Summer Slowdown.

The government shutdown may mean no readings on how the U.S. economy is performing, but there is a fresh data to show how the ad market is holding up in the second half. It shows after two months of pulling back on spending, marketers ramped up their investments in September. The ad tracking firm Guideline reports that total spending increased 3.7% from a year earlier, even though there were significantly fewer political ads.

The increase also suggests that the spending declines in July and August—the first back-to-back monthly pullbacks in spending in more than two years—were not the beginning of a bigger shift in the ad marketplace. Yet they also show a continuation of how marketers are allocating their dollars. Guideline says digital spending jumped 8.1% in September compared to a year earlier; while spending in traditional media channels pulled back 5.4% year-to-year. The result was seven in ten dollars spent in the U.S. ad market during September went into digital media.

The latest update shows the impact of tariffs and the pause in marketing that some brands may have made while things were being sorted out may be fading. Guideline says top ten ad category spending rose 6.3% in September from a year earlier, while spending across all other ad categories was flat year-to-year.

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.