Wieser Gives U.S. Advertising Market An Upgrade, Sees 6% Growth In 2025.

It appears that Brian Wieser has had a change of heart.

The noted analyst of the consultancy Madison and Wall is substantially more optimistic about the U.S. advertising market this year. After several earlier downgrades, Wieser now sees growth of 6%. He originally forecasted 5.3% growth in September of last year but downgraded his outlook twice after that.

After a stronger-than-expected Q1 — which saw estimated growth of 9.7% — “the quarter’s results and our interpretation of current economic data cause us to raise our projections for the remainder of the year. We now forecast growth for U.S. advertising of 6% for the second quarter and for the full year, excluding political advertising.”

In his last update in March, Wieser projected full-year growth of 3.6%. “Back then, we wrote about how policy volatility in the U.S. might impact the advertising market,” Wieser says in the Wednesday edition of his newsletter. “It amplified a generally negative view on the advertising market initiated with our December 2024 forecast. In both publications, we anticipated an environment that might look like stagflation with poor or negative ‘real’ growth but high levels of inflation.”

Wieser says he’s sticking to that perspective for the mid- to long run, but “the current reality has delivered a relatively significant turn of fortune for the overall industry, at least for the present time. We could frame this period slightly less favorably by looking at the industry including political advertising in both periods (as advertising grew by ‘only’ 9% on this basis in 1Q25, a deceleration from the 13% pace of growth observed in 4Q24), but either way the trends were much stronger than expected.”

In assessing the rest of 2025, Wieser has been focused on a couple of key questions: Is strength in the ad market due to a strong underlying economy? Or were consumers spending more thoroughly ahead of the arrival of tariffs, meaning marketers were spending more on advertising?

Wieser says the U.S. economy was “superficially in good shape” during Q1, with GDP growing by 4.7% year-over-year in nominal terms. “However,” Wieser offers, “below the surface there were some anomalies supporting that outcome. Imports of goods spiked ahead of the feared imposition of tariffs and accounted for 43% of the growth in GDP in the quarter.”

Put differently, Wieser says, if imports had been stable, GDP would have only been up 2.7% — near the level of inflation.

Wieser remains cautious overall, however, and says various factors could easily change the overall outlook. Among them: tariffs, disrupted supply chains, and restrained capital investment due to uncertain economic policies.

“All of this causes us to maintain a broader outlook that is somewhat pessimistic — with significant downside risks that could occur in the event that the administration’s policies are fully implemented, and foreign suppliers of capital shift their investments elsewhere,” he says. “The relationship between economic activity and advertising is imprecise of course, at best providing a headwind or a tailwind to the real variables that drive advertising growth (primarily the evolution of categories of advertisers with relatively higher or relatively lower levels of competitive intensity leading to relatively higher or lower amounts of spending on advertising).”