Global advertising spend roars back | WARC | The Feed
The Feed
Read daily effectiveness insights and the latest marketing news, curated by WARC’s editors.
You didn’t return any results. Please clear your filters.

Global advertising spend roars back
The global ad market has rebounded strongly from the COVID-19 downturn last year, according to new quarterly investment forecasts in WARC Data’s latest Global Ad Trends report, which indicate that spend rose 23.6% to a total of US$157.6bn in Q2 2021 – a new high for a second quarter period and the strongest rise in over a decade.
That followed on from 12.5% growth in the first quarter; consequently, at US$311.5bn, global ad investment was 17.8% higher during the first six months of the year than during the same period in 2020.
This puts the market on course for 12.6% growth during 2021, almost double the 6.7% initially projected. Further growth, of 8.2%, is forecast for 2022, by when the global advertising market will be worth more than US$700bn.
COVID-19 accelerated a digital shift in marketing
- 2020 spend on offline media such as print, radio, TV and cinema fell by a fifth, or US$63bn, equating to the worst downturn for this sector in WARC’s 40 years of market monitoring.
- Spend online, however, rose by 9.4% ($29.2bn) last year, buoyed by rising e-commerce (+27.4%), social media (+18.3%) and online video (+15.9%) investment.
- Online media gained ten percentage points in budget allocation last year in the automotive and financial categories, a rate of increase that was double the pre-pandemic average.
- Spend on e-commerce advertising is projected to rise 35.2% this year, mostly to the benefit of Amazon. Brand spend on search – where Google is the largest player – is set to rise by over a quarter (26.2%) this year, while online video spend is expected to be up by 17.7% and social media by 13.1% this year.
Key quote
“Growth in online adspend has typically tracked some 20 percentage points ahead of offline media, but in the final quarter of 2020 this leapt to a remarkable 41 points – an absolute difference of $41bn” – James McDonald, Managing Editor, WARC Data.
Email this content