According to GroupM’s Global Mid-Year Media Forecast, global advertising will grow 19% in 2021 (excluding US political advertising), which was a significant upward revision of the company’s expectations at the time of its previous post at the end. of 2020. This represents a 15% higher level of advertising revenue than in 2019, as by 2020 the revised estimates fell by only 3.5%. High growth is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
The forecast predicts that global advertising, including US politics, will exceed $1 billion in 2026, up from $641 billion in 2020 and $522 billion in 2016. Industry concentration has increased in this period; In 2020, the top 25 media companies accounted for 67% of total ad revenue. The same group of companies represented 42% in 2016. Several markets are expected to grow by more than 20%, including the UK, Brazil, China, and India.
The forecast indicates that ad growth for the year 2021 will be much higher than previous expectations. This led to a major before-and-after forecasting overhaul. The main drivers for rapid growth are “the faster-than-expected expansion of application ecosystems”, the rapid formation of small businesses “and” the growing role of international media markets”.
Other changes are also starting to take root. Owners of traditional television networks prefer to invest in the content they offer rather than streaming services. While many of them provide some advertising space and take up a share of total television advertising, these revenues will only exceed the smaller expenditures on the medium’s traditional fashion. As a result, we are seeing faster growth in Connected TV+ advertising (what we used to call ‘digital extensions of traditional TV’) than previously expected, but total TV advertising will generally grow steadily or slowly.
GroupM considered four areas in detail as we reached mid-2021, namely digital advertising, TV advertising, audio advertising, and OOH advertising. The forecast is for 26% growth for all forms of purely digital media, up from 15% in the December update. Expectations are also rising for other years, although to a lesser degree.
Television is expected to grow 9.3% in 2021, an improvement from the previous forecast of 7.8%. Connected TV+’s global inventory is estimated to have $16 billion in advertising revenue generated by media companies, an increase of 25% from 2020. + will increase to $31 billion globally in 2026.