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While the advertising industry is launching the Annual Cannes Lions Creativity Festival, the sunny climate of the Côte d’Azur cannot hide the storm clouds that surround a lot in the business. WPP Media’s latest world forecasts, This year next yearcertainly does not provide a completely austere forecast, but highlights the severity of the challenges faced by marketing specialists, agencies, publishers and their employees.
WPP Media himself has undergone a tumultuosity of the last two years, including the recent announcement that Mark Read, CEO of WPP himself, is exit. WPP Media, the WPP media purchase arm, is still the largest media buyer in the world, but he has abandoned the brand name Groupm familiar and the folded leadership of his agencies, Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom, in a single central organization. The reorganized company has announced layoffs and recently lost several important customers Advertising. Of course, the disruption of the advertising industry is hardly limited to WPP media.
Regardless of the environment, the new WPP Media forecasts provide a number of timely prospects around advertising activity today and its way to follow, and I spent some time with its author, Kate Scott-Dawkins, World President of Business Intelligence for WPP Media. The sweeping of mid -year forecasts, including its global geography, millions of measurable media data points and prospects for the latest developments in AI, provides what WPP Media aims to be “a complete vision of advertising (today)
… Provide a new perspective and a certain momentum to reflect on the future in a different way and and how it applies to business (of our customers). “It does Scott-Dawkins work, as she joked,” to know everything about everything because everyone announces. “I don’t have the same pressure, so I will choose some key points to take forecasts.
The growth of the advertising industry is planned, but much less predictable
Forecasts in the middle of the WPP media project growth of 6% in total income of 2025 after JC. This is not a bad number in the context of our current global, cultural and environmental upheavals. But this is a decrease of 22% compared to the expected growth of WPP Media of 7.7% only six months ago, and the report retrograded its expectations in terms of growth not only for 2025, but also for the next five years.
The report notes “the increasingly opaque economic environment (in which) many marketing specialists have seemed to adopt a waiting approach”. It is hardly a formula for a robust initial market for sellers of American announcements. And traditional television is hardly fertile for all increasing tide of advertising, because the income from the cable television network fell by almost 7% between 2023 and 2024, undoubtedly one of the factors that stimulate large ad vendors in the world of traditional television to restructure.
“The Economy of Creators” in advertising goes beyond traditional media advertising platforms
One of the aspects of this year next year which attracted great attention is the growth of advertising revenues focused on creators compared to traditional video and audio media. In the world of “advertising revenues focused on content” (think of almost anything but research), WPP Media defines advertising revenues “focused on creator” as that appearing on the YouTube and Social Media platforms, and the projects that this category will totaled almost $ 185 billion in 2025, for the first time on advertising revenues of this year. By 2030, WPP Media plans that this turnover focused on creators will exceed $ 376 billion worldwide. WOW – Do traditional media need another difficult data point? The influencer / creator economy is hardly new, but its acceleration scale demonstrates its inextricable integration on the vast advertising market.
Big Tech Ad Domination will continue
The WPP Media report does not give much light at the end of the Big Tech advertising revenue tunnel. According to the report, the 25 main owners of global media, ranging from Google through American media companies via China Xiaomi, represented 70% of all advertising revenues in 2024. And only five companies – Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram and What’s App), bytedance (Tiktok’s Owner), Amazon and Chinese -Commerce. Leader Alibaba – Account for 54% of all AD income. Amazon alone ($ 55.9 billion) has taken more advertising revenue than the combination of the five major American media companies (Comcast, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox). And impatiently, this will not become easier because the WPP media project that the digital advertising part of advertising revenues (think anything except traditional video and audio) will drop from 73% in 2025 to more than 87% in 2030.
The impact of AI research advertising is already on us
There are no conversations on the media, advertising or everything else today who do not touch AI, so of course This year next year I also had to provide information on developments in this area. The challenge, as Scot-Dawkins noted, is “How are you going to cover this capital revolution in a way that seems complete and not obsolete as soon as we have published?”
In the search for advertising revenues, or what WPP Media calls “intelligence advertising” here, the report sees growth of 7.4% in 2025. But as forecast notes, this includes traditional home research on Google but “response engines” such as Openai, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Grok and Anthropic.
The hope that Chatgpt and AI platforms could weaken the hand of the advertising income of the great technology could be illusory. For better or for worse, publishers desperately depend on traditional Google research to stimulate clicks and traffic to their sites. The IA IA tool introduction by Google of AI tools, avoiding the need for consumers to click on Google Blue Web links, combined increased AI research to provoke Declines in the editor’s site traffic In recent years, up to 50% or more. To paraphrase this Sally said Harry once: “You can’t take it back. It’s already there.” At least, the rose will be abundant in Cannes Lions.