According to a new report from the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) entitled Outlook for global advertising spending 2024/2025: A decade of consolidation.
The report, published on August 22, was written by James McDonald, the research firm's director of data, intelligence and forecasting. According to his findings, the figures suggest that global advertising spending will increase by 10.5% to $1.07 trillion this year, with increases of 7% also expected in 2025 and 2026.
Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are “expected to attract 43.6 percent of all advertising spending this year, and more than half of spending outside China,” the report said.
The connected TV sector (where AVOD and FAST platforms are located) is growing rapidly and is expected to be worth $35.2 billion to advertisers this year. It will account for two-thirds of the video market growth in 2024 and all of it in 2025.
Furthermore, social media is expected to see around $241 billion in spending this year, accounting for 22.6% of total global ad spending. And while Meta is the dominant player in this market with a 62.6% share, the study points out that TikTok's owner ByteDance is emerging as a strong competitor, heading for a 20% share of all social spending this year – a sharp increase from 9.3% in 2019. However, TikTok's growth curve faces a major hurdle in the form of a potential US ban on the app – which would mean losing US teens, who make up a large portion of the regional audience (around six in 10 TikTok users, according to Pew Research).
Staying on the topic of advertising but looking at it from a different angle, another study was released last week that looked at the food and beverage advertisements seen by U.S. children. Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago reviewed Nielsen TV ratings data from 2013 to 2022 for the Trends in children’s exposure to food and beverage advertising on television Report published on August 22nd.
The key finding is that children under 12 still see more than 1,000 food advertisements a year, and about 60% of them promote unhealthy products – even though the number of food and drink advertisements shown during children's programming has fallen by 95%. To address this problem, the study recommends that regulations against advertising unhealthy food should focus more on the times of day when children are likely to watch television.
The researchers behind this report also highlighted that mobile devices are another way children are exposed to an increasing number of food advertisements and they recommend further research. “We really need to understand where else food companies are targeting children and what they are seeing,” said co-author and professor Lisa Powell.
Image courtesy of Glenn Carstens-Peters/Unsplash
