WPP Media released its annual global midyear forecast on Tuesday, and the report’s central theme should be enough to give pause to anyone who paid attention in history class.
That theme? How today’s modern ad tech landscape compares to Manifest Destiny, the 19th century ideal that American expansion westward was preordained – regardless of the damage done along the way.
The comparison is apt, if a little bit ominous.
In the tech industry writ large, there is a similar rhetoric of inevitability regarding AI and a “rush to succeed at all costs,” WPP Media President of Business Intelligence Kate Scott-Dawkins told members of the press while presenting the report’s key findings last Thursday.
Because the advertising industry overlaps so closely with tech these days, the resulting metaphorical “gold rush” is having a pronounced impact. As a result, WPP Media has amended its 2026 forecast to predict that global ad revenue will grow 8.9% this year, excluding the impact of US political advertising.
USA Number One?
This new guidance is almost two percentage points higher than the one WPP Media released in its December report, which only foretold 7.1% growth in global advertising revenue. So what’s different now?
Some of the increase has to do with higher-than-expected Q1 numbers, Scott-Dawkins said. Those numbers demonstrated strong growth against several macroeconomic pressures – the war in Iran, for example, or the rising costs of consumer goods due to tariffs and supply-chain issues.
Despite bearing a lot of those pressures, the US market is driving a huge amount of revenue growth, in no small part because it represents 40% of all global ad revenue. Thanks to the benefits of the FIFA World Cup and a predicted $12.4 billion in political advertising for the midterm elections, North America is expected to achieve 11.6% growth in 2026.
Meanwhile, at 13% revenue growth for 2026, Latin America is projected to be the fastest-growing region this year, thanks to a huge amount of retail media growth and pronounced World Cup enthusiasm.
AI’s ad impact
The overlap between AI and advertising technology does a lot to drive growth in ad revenue, mostly because the top ad sellers are likely using all that income to fund their AI development.
According to the report, the top three ad sellers outside China are Alphabet, Meta and Amazon, which together make up 57.6% of advertising revenue. Not surprisingly, all three of those companies are also investing heavily into AI technology, particularly for their advertising products.
When those Chinese companies are factored back in, however, WPP’s analysis shows that, as of 2025, all of the top 10 advertising sellers represent digital-first companies rather than traditional media owners. The first legacy media outlet to show up on the list in 2026 is Disney, in 11th place (although a finalized Paramount-WBD merger would put that new company in ninth).
Altogether, the top 25 ad sellers represent 75% of the global industry.
No wonder none of them seem to be worried about an impending economic collapse.
“These are companies that are able to absorb maybe weakness in a certain sector, because they see strength in others,” said Dawkins. “They’ve been using AI to optimize, and to be able to tell a story of optimization and ROI, for a long time.”
A shiny new toy to measure
Another new consequence of AI is the introduction of an entirely new digital advertising channel, in the form of generative search. That’s the term WPP is using to refer to ad revenue that appears within AI overviews or chatbots, like the new ad tier available in ChatGPT.
Of course, the problem with a new channel is that there isn’t any existing data to help guide predictions on how it will perform, Dawkins noted.
That dissonance is likely why WPP has chosen to combine traditional search and generative search into a new category called “intelligence” for the time being, as a way to measure both more cautiously. Together, both forms of search are projected to represent 21.8% of total advertising revenue in 2026.
Only 0.4% of ad revenue is expected to come from generative search on its own this year, but even that small percentage represents a lot of money – $5.1 billion globally. In fact, WPP also expects that generative search will be the fastest channel to reach $100 billion, sometime in 2030.
All that growth will be coming from Americans just like the rest of the advertising industry’s global revenue. Right now, the US accounts for roughly 60% of global generative search revenue, brought on by early access to OpenAI’s ads business pilot.
And that’s just in AI search. Once shoppers trust AI agents to do their buying for them (or if they trust AI agents, for the skeptics out there), it’s going to be a “really new world,” said Dawkins.
“We do have a role in helping to determine how that [AI infrastructure] gets built, what it looks like, hopefully making it more helpful for humans and agents,” she added.
