
A new study from WARC, the experts in marketing effectiveness, has found that global advertising spend is now on course to close out 2025 with growth of 8.9% to $1.19trn, an upgrade of 1.5 percentage points (pp) from WARC’s September forecast due to strong results from Big Tech platforms and a muted impact on global trade from trade tariffs.
A further rise of 9.1% (+1.0pp since September) to $1.30trn is forecast next year, while growth of 7.9% (+0.8pp) in 2027 would push the market’s value to $1.40trn – a doubling in size since the pandemic and equivalent to $150 spent for every person alive today.
The new projections are included as part of WARC Media’s latest Global Ad Trends: Media’s New Normal report, which finds that the advertising market in 2025 is fundamentally different from the ad ecosystem of the past.
Alex Brownsell, Head of Content, WARC Media, and author of the report, says: “Advertising has broken away from the economic cycle, and behaves in a way that doesn’t feel reflective of the real economy. New money has arrived from digital-native categories, while commerce has redrawn the measured media map, and Big Tech’s self-reinforcing flywheel is harvesting almost all incremental dollars.”
WARC’s latest global projections are based on data aggregated from 100 markets worldwide and leverage a proprietary neural network which projects advertising investment patterns based on over two million data points.