New Ad Forecast! +PayPal Ads Interview, Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary and More
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for June 7, 2025
We have several upcoming speaking engagements over the coming days on the web and in Cannes to highlight
On Thursday June 12 at 1:30pm EDT, we will be participating in a free webinar hosted by Adobe’s Sam Garfield and featuring Warner Bros. Discovery’s Bridget Jayaram entitled “Redefining the Future of Advertising.” We’ll highlight some of the work we were recently commissioned to produce around the role of creative vs. media in driving outcomes. Register here
On Monday June 16 at 3:30pm CET we are speaking in Cannes with Ana Milicevic, Tom Triscari and Criteo’s CMO Brendan McCarthy to discuss commerce and the shifting economy aboard the Criteo HQ Yacht. Request an invitation link here
On Tuesday June 17 at 10:00am CET we are joining McKinsey and Google executives at McKinsey’s Cannes space to talk about how new AI-enabled workflows can power media buying, ROI optimization, and marketing transformation, related to our recent publication on the topic. RSVP link here
On Wednesday June 18 at 3:00pm CET we will again be speaking at McKinsey’s venue joining executives from Adobe and Roku to explore challenges and opportunities in full-funnel marketing, with a focus on the balance between creative and targeting across the funnel. RSVP link here
After the Cannes Lions, are you returning via Paris? If so, on Sunday June 22 we will be organizing another “chocolate marathon.” It’s a nearly 26-mile path around Paris, France over the course of a day. To see a past route and get a sense of what it looks like, visit www.chocolatemarathon.com. If you would like to join in for some or all of the day please reach out and let us know.
On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week and provide additional commentary on new economic data points. Separately, on Agency Business, Olivia Morely and I interview the North America CEO of Stagwell’s Assembly, Jill Kelly about her new role leading a large challenger media agency and how she’s thinking about pricing models, technology, and talent in an increasingly complex media ecosystem.
Weekly Work:
US Advertising Industry Growth Update
Ad Forecast: Additional Considerations Explaining Current Ad Market Strength
An Interview With PayPal Ads' Mark Grether
More Context:
As we wrote in our forecast update this past week, the US ad market is surprisingly healthy, arguably despite current economic conditions rather than because of them. This week we upgraded our forecast for US advertising excluding the effects of political advertising to 6% from 3.6% previously.
However, this doesn’t mean that meaningful risks don’t persist: a proverbial “sword of Damocles” hangs over the industry and the economy because of current economic policies that look very likely to produce either stagflation or a recession or worse.
Of course, timing for this sort of thing remains as tricky as ever to forecast, but it’s important to think of economic conditions as producing “headwinds” or “tailwinds” to growth in the ad market which are driven by other factors, including the economy’s rate of “creative destruction” and the competitive intensity inside of individual categories.
Our full data set featuring quarterly industry data from 2018 through 2030 covering dozens of different media types is available upon request to our corporate subscribers, consulting and advisory clients. Reach out to learn more!