Digital marketing business WARC has made its forecast for 2019, predicting a 4.3 per cent increase in global advertising spending, but with an Internet ad spend decrease of 7.2 per cent.
The forecast, based on data from 96 countries, predicts that the global advertising spend will balloon to US $616 billion.
This follows on from a 5.4 per cent rise in 2018 — the strongest growth since 2011 — according to WARC’s latest Global Ad Trends report, published yesterday.
Despite healthy top line growth, the research suggests that total internet adspend — inclusive of desktop, mobile and tablet — will decline by 7.2 per cent this year beyond the Google and Facebook ‘duopoly’.
Conversely, ad income for the two online giants is expected to rise 22 per cent to US $176.4 billion, equating to a combined share of 61.4 per cent of the online ad market (up from 56.4 per cent in 2018).
WARC data editor and author of the research James McDonald observed: “While advertising investment is stable at the top line level – maintaining a 0.7 per cent share of global GDP since 2011 — the market’s undercurrents have changed dramatically in recent years.
“The amount of ad money available to online publishers beyond Google and Facebook is now in decline, and the repercussions are potentially far-reaching, with several high-profile announcements of job cuts seen among online publishers already this year.
“Print publishers have already been severely hit by the migration of ad dollars online, and while traditional media excluding print have fared admirably to date, their collective take of ad investment is also trending downwards”.
Internet is the driving force in global advertising growth, with spend expected to rise 12.1 per cent to US $287.4 billion worldwide this year.
This would give internet a 46.7 per cent share of media spend globally, but in the US — the world’s largest ad market — internet is expected to account for over half (54.0 per cent) of all media spend for the first time this year.
This prediction also falls in line with the forecast made by research firm eMarketer.
Within internet, mobile adspend is expected to rise 21.9 per cent to reach US $165.7 billion in 2019, placing it as the second-largest ad channel worldwide across 96 markets.
Across WARC’s 12 key markets, however — Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK, US — mobile is predicted to overtake TV to become the largest ad channel this year.
