WPP Media’s mid-year report presents a paradox. With armed conflict in the Middle East, oil prices elevated and consumer sentiment subdued across many markets, advertising should be weakening. Yet revenue continues to surge.
Kate Scott-Dawkins, WPP Media’s global president of business intelligence, describes the global ad market as ‘quite buoyant’.
In the updated This Year Next Year 2026 report, published today (16 June), the agency projects global ad revenue, excluding US political advertising, will rise 8.9% by the end of the year — an upward revision of its December forecast of 7.1%.
To explain advertising’s paradoxical growth, WPP Media reaches for a familiar analogy: the gold rush. The race to build and monetise agentic AI, it argues, is rewriting the normal relationship between advertising and the broader economy.
‘What the Gold Rush and the AI race share most fundamentally is the psychology of the frontier. In 1849, the fear was not that gold didn’t exist — it demonstrably did — but that someone else would reach it first,’ the report states. ‘That feat compressed timelines, inflated risk appetites, and turned caution into a competitive disadvantage.’
That race is helping fuel advertising growth. While economic headwinds remain, the scale of AI investment and the advertising it generates — both from AI-native companies and from established advertisers using AI to improve efficiency and expand marketing activity — is providing what WPP Media calls a ‘powerful countervailing force’. The agency forecasts that advertising’s share of global GDP will reach its highest level since 1999.
The impact is particularly visible in the United States, where WPP Media says the AI race is most concentrated. The agency has revised its US advertising growth forecast for 2026 from 7.4% to 11.9%.
WPP’s findings raise another, broader question, too. If AI investment is helping to fuel advertising growth despite a weak macroeconomic backdrop, how sustainable is that support? Advertising booms driven by investor enthusiasm are not unheard of. The dotcom bubble also juiced marketing revenues before many businesses ultimately failed to justify expectations. WPP Media’s report does not attempt to answer that question directly, and appears instead to be satisfied that we are in the midst of a boom not a bubble.
The report’s most dramatic projection concerns generative search, which WPP Media expects to generate $5.1bn in advertising revenue this year — with the mother lode still to come. The agency forecasts generative search advertising revenue will exceed $100bn by 2030. Regulatory intervention or publisher litigation could slow that growth, WPP Media conceded, but it also notes that developments such as advertising within Gemini or a rapid acceleration in agentic shopping has the potential to push the market even higher.
The rush is reshaping the structure of the advertising market. For the first time, there is not a single traditional media company among the world’s ten largest sellers of advertising inventory, with six Chinese companies in the top 10. The five largest sellers globally — Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon and Alibaba — now account for 58% of the market. Advertising may be growing, but the rewards are accruing to a small group of technology platforms.
The surge in generative search may eventually challenge today’s dominant advertising channels. Social media remains the largest individual channel in WPP Media’s forecast and is projected to grow 12.8% to reach $465.2bn in 2026. Yet the agency expects growth to slow to 8.4% in 2027 and remain in the high single digits thereafter. It attributes that deceleration to declining time spent on social platforms, the introduction of age-related restrictions and the emergence of AI chatbots as an alternative digital destination.
An AI-mediated internet could also reshape the types of advertising that work. WPP Media argues that brand recognition is unlikely to be built through two-second social clips or within chatbot conversations themselves. Instead, it expects brands to place greater value on environments that command attention and earn trust. If that proves correct, the AI boom could ultimately benefit content-driven formats such as streaming, publishing and cinema as advertisers seek places where lasting brand associations can be formed.
That would be a welcome development for a category facing mounting pressure. While global content-driven advertising is projected to reach $720.2bn this year, growing 8.2%, the headline figure masks a more challenging reality. Social media accounts for most of that growth, while other formats struggle to expand. Total TV and total audio revenue are both effectively flat, forecast to reach $169.3bn and $27.3bn respectively. Newspapers and magazines are expected to continue their long decline, shrinking by 2% this year. Gaming is growing rapidly but still minute in scale. A renewed emphasis on brand-building could provide a much-needed jolt.
The AI race is also beginning to affect one of advertising’s biggest success stories of the 2020s: retail media. Global commerce advertising revenue — of which retail media accounts for around 97% — is projected to reach $199.6bn in 2026 before growing 9.3% to $218.2bn the following year. Yet signs of maturity are beginning to emerge. In China, the world’s largest retail media market by a considerable margin, growth is expected to slow to just 3% this year. The report also warns that retail media could face new challenges as shopping behaviour increasingly shifts toward generative search and agent-driven commerce.
The one traditional medium in a position of undeniable strength is out-of-home (OOH). WPP Media describes it as a ‘structural anomaly’ within the forecast. Advertising revenue is projected to grow 5% to reach $57.5bn this year and is expected to climb to $73.7bn by 2031. Its ability to deliver mass audiences in physical environments gives it a distinctive role in the modern media mix, while digital OOH injects the category with enough programmatic principles to satiate advertisers’ appetite for analytics. In an era when many media channels are being reshaped by AI, OOH appears unusually resilient.
There’s a certain irony in that resilience, as tech companies increasingly use billboards and other OOH formats to promote their brands away from the digital landscape they are disrupting.
