Advertising market grows by nearly a quarter to $771bn

According to Warc, more than half of this money has been paid to just three companies: Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. The findings have been published as part of the service’s new Warc data premium suite.

Following on from the strongest reported growth in Warc’s four decades of market monitoring, advertising investment is forecast to rise by a further 12.5% and 8.3% in 2022 and 2023 respectively, with ecommerce platforms set to lead this growth.

The research is accompanied by a proprietary survey recently carried out for Warc’s marketer’s toolkit 2022 of more than 1,500 marketing practitioners, which shows that two in three of those already committing budgets to Amazon intend to increase that spend. A full 66% of advertising professionals are planning to up spend on TikTok next year, while YouTube ( 61% of surveyed practitioners), Instagram ( 60%) and Google ( 57%) are also set to benefit from higher spend in 2022. 

Currently, Warc said that all product sectors are projected to top pre-Covid-19 investment next year, while most sectors were able to record a full recovery this year. Notable exceptions include transport and tourism, which led growth with an absolute increase of $12.5bn this year, but is still almost $2.9bn down on pre-pandemic spending levels.

Commenting on the findings, James McDonald, director of data, intelligence & forecasting at Warc, said: “Despite potential headwinds, market data show that we are currently witnessing a boom in advertising trade like none seen before, led by increased demand for retail media and ancillary publishers such as Google and Instagram, which is now the world’s largest social platform.

“Our projections show that this trend is set to continue, with Alphabet, Meta and Amazon on track to account for more than half of an advertising market worth $1trn in 2025.”