A vigorous Japanese advertising recovery following the nation’s devastating natural disasters coupled with anticipated spending on the Olympics, European football and the US elections will contribute to an estimated 6.4 percent growth in measured worldwide advertising spending in 2012, according to a newly revised forecast from GroupM.

The revised spending forecast was made in GroupM’s biannual worldwide report, “This Year, Next Year,” which predicted that globally, 2011 advertising spending in measured media would hit $490 billion, a 5 percent increase over 2010 spending of $467 billion.

The 70-country forecast also predicted that global ad spending in 2012 would reach $522 billion, a 6.4 percent increase over 2011 spending. The figure is down from an earlier worldwide forecast of a 6.8 percent increase made in July.

For the US market, the report predicted 2011 ad spending of $147 billion, a 3.3 percent increase over 2010 spending of $142.5 billion. For 2012, US ad spending should reach $153 billion, representing a 4 percent hike over 2011. Both those figures were also down from the previous report, which predicted a 3.8 percent hike in 2011 and a 4.2 percent increase for 2012.

“Spending growth in 2012 will be driven primarily by local media where we expect 2.5–3 billion dollars in political campaign advertising and advocacy initiatives, said Rino Scanzoni, GroupM’s Chief Investment Officer. “National media will see a slowing in growth as the economy continues to face head winds.”

The study is part of GroupM's media and marketing forecasting series drawn from data supplied by parent company WPP's worldwide resources in advertising, public relations, market research, and specialist communications. It was released today by GroupM Futures Director Adam Smith at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York.

“Japan's advertising recovery has proved substantially more vigorous and resilient than we forecast in our mid-year report,” said Smith. Additionally, the so-called ‘quadrennial effect’ of the American elections, the Olympics and European football are worth an estimated 1 percent of incremental growth in 2012. Smith also pointed out that the report’s forecasts across most of the faster-growing world in 2012 were unchanged from the previous report in July and that those nations account for 66 percent of global ad spending.

Digital Spending Up

Measured digital media investment is predicted to provide 43 percent of the global dollar growth in 2012, according to the report. Global digital ad spending is expected to reach $84.7 billion in 2011, a 16 percent increase over 2010, and $98.2 billion in 2012, also representing a 16 percent hike.

“We expect digital to comprise 22 percent of all measured ad investment in mature western economies in 2012, and 12 percent in the faster-growing world,” Smith said. “The predicted respective digital growth rates in 2012 are 11 percent and 37 percent, so the faster-growing world is catching up fast.”

Global ad spending on paid inventory in social media is likely to be around $5 billion in 2011 or about 6 percent of measured online ad investment. Smith said this is probably the largest single growth component in paid-for digital today, on a trajectory which could double to $10 billion within two years.

 

	2010	2011f	2012f
NORTH AMERICA	154,777	159,769	165,986
yoy %	2.1	3.2	3.9
Of which USA	142,517	147,209	153,028
yoy %	1.2	3.3	4.0
LATIN AMERICA	26,476	29,134	33,260
yoy %	17.0	10.0	14.2
WESTERN EUROPE	105,380	106,153	108,157
yoy %	4.6	0.7	1.9
CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE	17,719	20,254	22,525
yoy %	12.9	14.3	11.2
ASIA-PACIFIC	147,226	159,245	175,430
yoy %	9.1	8.2	10.2
Of which China	47,390	54,582	63,823
yoy %	14.5	15.2	16.9
MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA	15,264	15,728	16,349
yoy %	11.7	3.0	3.9
WORLD	466,841	490,283	521,707
yoy %	6.3	5.0	6.4
Media yoy% adjusted for CPI
	2010	2011f	2012f
WORLD	3.7	1.2	3.8

 

About GroupM
GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our stakeholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.