In preparation for my recent presentation at INMA’s CEO Roundtable at Napa Valley, I reviewed global advertising spend projection data from a variety of sources and synthesised as much as possible into an “apples-to-apples” view. 

My primary sources were eMarketer’s Worldwide Ad Spending Forecast 2025, PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2025-2029, IAB’s Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report 2025, and WARC’s The Future of Media 2025, supplemented with a few others in areas like events and branded content.

A few notes of caution when reviewing spend projections:

• Advertising outlook projections are just surveys of what the “buy side” (agencies and brands) say they’re going to prioritise more or less of in the future — and typically you’ll see a sample size of a few hundred to a few thousand respondents, depending on the source — so the outlooks can always change.

• While I focused on global studies for the most part, the United States and China are the biggest advertising spenders by far, and that tends to skew the projections accordingly. So if you’re seeing or sensing something different in your market, that doesn’t necessarily mean you or your data is wrong. It’s important to keep that in mind.

Here’s the topline

• Global advertising spend is projected to grow to US$1.3 trillion 2028.

• Digital advertising (originally projected to be about 75% of 2025’s total) will now land closer to 80% of total global ad spend by 2025 and approach 85% by 2028.

• Traditional media continues its decline but does look to eventually stabilise over the next few years to around US$125 to US$130B of global spend.

• Traditional display is declining while digital video surges.

A few interesting details

When we look at growth, creators/influencers are projected to be the fastest-growing channel with a 30%-35% CAGR. But by share of spend, they will still fall outside the top 10 through 2028.

That despite the report back in June that “content on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and, Instagram will attract more advertising income this year than content from traditional media companies,” according to research from WPP Media. 

Note the distinction between what constitutes “user-generated” and “professional” content is extremely blurry and more than a bit sensationalised for the headline (a paid TikTok campaign is arguably also a traditional paid sponsorship at this point), but creators/influencers are certainly an increasingly important channel, even with those caveats.

By 2028, the second biggest category of spend will be “performance media,” consisting mostly of paid search/SEM and retail media, both of which are projected to continue growing at significant rates. Those two channels combined will equate to less than 29% of all spend in 2028.

Keep in mind with the rise of AI browsers and zero-click search, we don’t know exactly what SEM will look like over the next few years, but safe to say brands will still want to be as close to the consumer query as possible, even as formats and contexts evolve.

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