Financial services ad spend surges, but retail category investment to stall

Celeste Huang

An overview of the global ad spend forecast by product category.

WARC Media’s latest global ad spend analysis found that financial services (+11.5%) is on course to be the fastest-growing sector in 2024, followed by technology and electronics and pharma and healthcare.

Retail, the biggest sector monitored by WARC, is forecast to see a 1% decrease, despite claiming a share of 11.1% of all ad spend, closely followed in share by business and industrial (10.5%). The stagnation in the retail category is “proportional to the pressure consumers are facing in North America and Europe through high inflation”, according to James McDonald, the author of WARC’s latest forecast, Global...

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