3 Key Takeaways From Brian Wieser’s 2024 U.S. Ad Growth Forecast

U.S. advertising spending should grow 6.3% in 2024, according to a forecast released by Brian Wieser, an advertising industry analyst and founder of the consultancy, Madison and Wall. Wieser, who earlier this year forecast a slightly lower growth rate of 5.6%, acknowledges the market is growing better than previously expected.

Wieser expects total advertising spend will add up to $379 billion this year—excluding spending related to politics, amidst the U.S. presidential election. The analyst, who previously led forecasting for WPP’s GroupM, now publishes forecasts on a quarterly basis and projects spend trends through 2028.

Here are the key takeaways from Madison and Wall’s forecast.

Marketers are spending more

The U.S. ad market, excluding political advertising investments, grew by 10.1% during this year’s first quarter, according to Wieser. The growth exceeded the 8% that Wieser had previously projected, leading him to project 6.7% second-quarter growth.

Wieser expects that the first quarter’s outsized growth will dim by the end of the year, and decelerate to 4%. Relatively young ecommerce behemoths, Shein and Temu, propped up advertising spend during the last three months of 2023, and it’s still unclear whether they will continue to impact the market as significantly as they did during that time.

Marketers spent a lot on advertising during the last three months of 2023, too, propelling 11.1% growth compared with the previous period.

Political ad spend is down

Political advertising spend appears down, compared to the last Presidential election cycle, according to Wieser’s research. Although, because digital platforms do not categorize political and issues ad spend in the same way that traditional media owners do, it is difficult to predict with certainty.

Political fundraising is also slowing down, given its grown only 12% from 2019. Underscoring the extent of this slow down, fundraising grew 82% in 2019, compared with the 2015 fundraising year. Even in 2015, category spend was up 47% from 2011.

One explanation for this is that there are fewer candidates competing for the GOP nomination in this election cycle than there were during the 2020 election cycle, when several contenders vied for the conservative party’s nomination.

Despite its deceleration, political ad spend remains significant. It will reach $15.1 billion this year, compared with $14.1 billion in 2020, Wieser forecasts. With political spend incorporated, total advertising spend growth in the U.S. will amount to $384 billion in 2024.

Digital is still up, TV is still down and OOH is back

Digital advertising still commands the majority of marketers’ budgets, and the channel is still growing. It accounted for 66.1% of total U.S. advertising investments in the first quarter, growing 17.4% when compared with the same time period in 2023, when digital made up 62.4% of spend.

Retail media investments are driving this growth, given the channel’s 22.2% first-quarter growth rate. Wieser expects this to temper during the second quarter, and to decelerate to about 18%.

By contrast, national and local TV advertising growth declined in this year’s first quarter by about 2.8% and 2.3%, respectively, when excluding political spend. A pivot to invest in CTV or other entertainment options created “conditions of permanent secular decline” for the TV medium, assuming linear TV’s business model remains the same, Wieser wrote.

Outdoor advertising stood out in the report for its 6.1% category growth, which finally surpassed the category’s pre-pandemic growth rates and supports that marketers are prioritizing OOH advertising again.