New Downgraded 2025 Ad Forecast, Accenture Read-Throughs, Auto Advertising Trends + Ads101 With Stacey Schulman on Media Agency Research
Madison and Wall: Saturday Summary for March 22, 2025
To start this week’s newsletter, do you like chocolate? And will you be in Cannes for the Lions? Save the date! On Sunday June 22 (the Sunday following the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity) we will be organizing another “chocolate marathon,” a nearly 26-mile path around Paris, France over the course of the 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.
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Each week on the M&W Podcast, we discuss Madison & Wall’s latest research and continue with our Advertising 101 series, an ongoing tutorial that will explain how the industry really works and why money flows as it does.
After our initial multi-week phase focused on marketers and the ways in which they make decisions, we’re now onto agencies. We started with Tim Nollen to provide an overview of the agency holding companies, then continued with Carl Hartman to discuss the role of the global client leader, went into more depth on media agencies with Prof. Janna Greenberg and the engaged in a discussion on the media planning function with Scott Wensman. This week, we are exploring media research with Stacey Schulman. It’s all available on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also hear more about our work on agencies through the Agency Business podcast, a collaboration with FusionFront Media’s Olivia Morley. This week’s episode features Jane Crison, CEO of Rain the Growth Company, one of the largest independent full service performance agencies in the country. That recording is available here
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Weekly work
Our newest US advertising industry forecast was released this week, revising 4Q24 estimates and updating quarterly figures through the end of 2030 across dozens of different media. We now expect reduced growth for 2025 with policy volatility adding to existing uncertainties and likely contributing to constrained results for the year.
We reviewed the recent history of automotive advertising to illustrate that even before new risks emerged to potentially impact ad spend, budget cuts had become increasingly meaningful in recent years.
We looked at new results from RTL which showed declines in advertising for 4Q24, but noted that European TV advertising appeared to grow during the full year (albeit by much less than digital platforms did).
We wrote about Accenture’s latest quarterly data and management commentary, which included news of a global media account consolidation win for Song from the telecommunications sector – which could be significant – and looked at other read-throughs for agencies and media companies.
More Context
In December, we wrote about 2025’s uncertainty in the wake of a U.S. federal election that produced what appeared to us as a negative outcome for the advertising industry given the incoming administration’s articulated policy preferences, including less free trade and fewer foreign workers as well as an increased reliance on the idiosyncratic preferences of the president rather than the more predictable institutionally-driven policy-making processes businesses have historically relied upon in the United States. By now, nearly three months into the year, what we can see is a certainty of additional negative factors, including volatility around trade policies and a more extreme threat to supply chains and corporate decision-making than we previously expected.
This has a wide range of consequences for companies, who necessarily become more cautious in their investment choices, and in for consumers, who shift their resources in order to prepare for negative economic scenarios. If there are any positive considerations for the advertising industry, it’s that we are not aware of any negative impacts on shipping of goods from China (as Chinese-based cross-border advertisers are a significant source of revenue for Meta and Amazon, at minimum) and there are not yet any active signs we are aware of indicating that pharmaceutical television ads will be banned.
With this context, we are reducing our expectations for advertising growth in 2025 and beyond. Our new forecast for 2025 now calls for 3.6% growth excluding political advertising, down from 4.5% previously. Growth will likely be slightly stronger in the first half than in the second half, in part because the full consequences of government policy changes won’t be experienced right away, and so our forecast for 1Q25 is for 4.0% growth, excluding political advertising. Note that the quarter features a difficult comparison with 1Q24’s 10.5% ex-political growth rate, so it is fair to be mindful of the high plateau against which this growth will be based upon.
Additional data (including quarterly estimates for dozens of media types from 2017 to 2030), written analysis and speadsheets are available to corporate subscribers and advisory clients. Please reach out to us if you would like more information about how to access this work.