2017 Advertising Spending Forecast

Reviewing some numbers today and global ad spending rose 5.2% in 2016. Looking ahead, spending is forecast to grow in 2017 but not at the same rate as last year. WARC anticipates a growth rate of 3.6%. (No Olympics or U.S. presidential election.)

In the U.S., the ad spending growth rate was 5.8% which was the highest rate of growth since 2010. It’s always amazing to be reminded that ad spending in the U.S. represents around one-third of global ad spending–we spend around $180B advertising to ourselves.

There are no surprises in the breakdown of global spending forecasts by medium this year.

Media spending in the US will only see a +1.5% growth rate, which is much lower than the 6.9% growth rate we saw in 2016. What primarily affects this change is the drop in political ad spend and the Olympics. Here in the Northwest, in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, we are expecting to see ad spend at approximately 5.5 billion in 2017 which is a 17% increase since 2012. 

Below is a table from WARC breaking out ad spend by medium. Online ad spend will surpass TV for the first time and we’ll see about a 25% increase in mobile.