Wieser Upgrades '24 For The 5th Time, Cites Stronger-Than-Expected Q2

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, 8 hours ago

For the fifth time in five consecutive quarterly updates, ad industry economist Brian Wieser has revised his 2024 U.S. ad-spending growth outlook upward.

Citing a "much stronger than expected" second-quarter expansion of 9.6%, Wieser now projects that 2024 will grow 7.2% over 2023. Importantly, the growth estimate excludes what is projected to be a banner year for U.S. political ad spending, which if added in, would boost the 2024 U.S. ad economy up in the double digits -- 10.5% -- if included.

Since first benchmarking his 2024 outlook a year ago at +4.3%, Wieser has boosted the expansion 2.9 percentage points.

Wieser, who was a long-time Wall Street analyst and ad industry forecaster at both Interpublic and WPP before launching Madison and Wall a year ago, is highly regarded for the accuracy of his forecasts.

As for political ad-spending growth, Wieser now says it will be "helpful" to the U.S. ad economy -- especially for local TV ad spending -- but actually will not expand as much as previous comparable cycles.

In an interesting side note, Wieser cited the World Federation of Advertisers' (WFA) recent closure of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) as a "negative factor" contributing to the slowdown of open web ad spending.

The WFA shuttered GARM in response to an antitrust suite brought by X Corp, which alleged the voluntary, self-regulatory ad industry body colluded to deprive the X platform of advertising market share.

"Weakness among this group of media owners is largely responsible for our underwhelming view on the future of the open web," Wieser writes, noting: "In lieu of a global standard-setter such as the WFA’s GARM – discontinued in August after five years – spending on these sorts of media owners will probably be further deprioritized because of the additional costs involved in ensuring satisfactory standards for inventory quality and brand safety."