Japanese holding group Dentsu released its mid-year global advertising spend forecast this morning, predicting 5.0 percent growth this year and 5.5 percent in 2027, a deceleration compared to last year’s 5.8 percent growth.
This marks a slight downward revision of expectations compared with Dentsu’s previous forecast of 5.1 percent growth in 2026, released back in December. The agency attributes this slowdown in part to economic uncertainty tied to geopolitical tensions. It notes, however, that its ad spend projection sits significantly above the International Monetary Fund’s forecast for global GDP growth of 3.1 percent in 2026.
As ever, there is a gap between the major tech platforms and the rest of the market. Dentsu says that confidence inspired by the growth reported by the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta is counterbalancing wider marketer caution. Indeed, one of the strengths of these platforms is their ability to model the outcomes a marketer can expect from their investment. How accurately they do this is up for debate, but regardless it’s an effective tool for enabling advertisers to spend with confidence. And Dentsu predicts we’ll see more and more ad spend funnelled into these types of platforms, predicting that 75 percent of all ad spend in 2028 will be algorithm-driven.
Signs of marketers embracing a brand reset
Unsurprisingly, Dentsu’s data shows that digital channels are accounting for the majority of this overall growth in ad investment. As things stand, across the 56 markets Dentsu looks at, digital channels and platforms receive 69 percent of total investment. And the fastest growing areas — retail media, CTV and video, social, and digital out-of-home — suggest this figure will increase.
Looking at video as a whole, Dentsu expects total video ad spend to be up by 5.1 percent in 2026, matching the overall growth rate of global ad spend. Within this, connected TV is projected to rise by 11.5 percent and digital video is pegged to grow by 8.7 percent. Dentsu expects linear TV to remain flat, as major events including the men’s FIFA World Cup, the Winter Olympic Games, and US midterm elections help counterbalance the longer-term decline in linear TV investment.
Will Swayne, global practice president for media and integrated solutions at Dentsu, said that video’s continued growth may be a sign that advertisers are looking beyond linear TV for brand building. Recent Dentsu research highlighted digital video’s effectiveness at delivering on brand objectives, and the agency group argued that advertisers as a whole were underinvesting in video for brand-building campaigns.
“Our recently published Brand Reset report, an industry-first framework that quantifies how next-gen video platforms, formats and types of attention deliver real business outcomes, unveiled that digital video (including short-form formats) delivers multi-year brand-building effects, and that Connected TV has the power to build brands on par with Linear TV,” said Swayne. “What we are seeing in the forecast suggests that marketers are starting to embrace the new video marketplace to reap these benefits.”
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