The US Ad Market Tracker: Standard Media Index's "US Ad Market Tracker" is a composite of ad spending from major agencies, to get an overall picture of how much is being spent on both traditional and digital advertising. In Inside Streaming, we've frequently spoken about the slump in the online ad market, which prompted belt-tightening and less ambitious content budgets across the industry. Looking at the raw numbers, it's clear that a portion of the US advertising economy entered a recession in mid-2022. 2021 Was a Record Year: Part of what makes the 16.4% total drop in growth across 2022 such a shock to the system was the massive overall boom in the digital ad space throughout 2020 and 2021. Nearly every ad spending measure that's tracked by major agencies and analytics firms were climbing at their fastest rates ever in 2021. The sudden and unanticipated slump in the digital ad market also coincides with an expected, trend-based drop in spending on the conventional ad market, which slipped 0.9% in 2022, and shows few signs of returning to its previous health. Looking Forward: Data from eMarketer suggests that media ad spending will continue to grow over the next few years, but at a slower rate than the growth the market experienced during the pandemic. They're forecasting 6.9% overall growth in worldwide media spending by the end of 2023. |
