If “Austin Powers” supervillain Dr. Evil wanted to hold the world ransom for $100 billion, the global advertising industry might actually be able to afford it – at least, according to GroupM’s end-of-year forecast.
In a new report published on Monday, GroupM projected the advertising industry will surpass $1 trillion in total revenue in 2024 and grow 7.7% to $1.1 trillion in 2025.
More than half of that trillion dollars will go to the top five digital advertising companies – Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon and Alibaba. And digital advertising will account for 81.7% of revenue in 2025, including money made from streaming TV, digital out-of-home and online newspapers and magazines.
Streaming TV will overtake linear in 5 years
Total TV revenue is only expected to grow 1.9% in 2025 to $169.1 billion. But streaming TV is expected to grow 19.3% during that time, while linear TV will decline 3.4%.
Still, that doesn’t mean linear won’t have a place in advertising budgets anymore – at least, not until streaming revenue overtakes linear revenue in the US, which GroupM predicts will happen in 2029.
In the meantime, linear will represent 72.6% of total TV revenue in 2025 (roughly $122 billion), while streaming will still only represent 37.5% by 2029.
One of the factors affecting TV’s slow overall growth is the sizable gap in inventory between linear and TV, noted Kate Scott-Dawkins, global president of business intelligence. Currently, ads take up 12 minutes an hour on linear TV, but only four to five minutes an hour on streaming.
“I think the question is, for advertisers and media owners, ‘How valuable are those minutes?’” said Scott-Dawkins during a call with journalists on Thursday. “If the ad pod is shorter, people are less likely to get up and leave the TV set. Because it’s shorter, it’s more engaging.”
Retail media is bigger than TV
But while TV may still be considered the most effective form of advertising, it’s retail media that will be raking in the most money.
After an 18.2% growth increase this year, global retail media ad revenue is expected to grow another 13.8% to reach $176.9 billion in 2025, surpassing TV revenue for the first time ever.
In North America, retail media revenue has grown “nearly four-fold,” the report states, to $50 billion. However, that’s still a little over half of the $97.6 billion the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) will likely earn in 2025, with $74.4 billion coming just from China.
“The US and China really continue to be the drivers of growth for the global economy and for advertising,” Scott-Dawkins said. “So those are the two economies that we have to look at and pay very close attention to.”
Of course, their relationship to one another could change in a number of different ways. Pronounced growth within China might have an inverse effect on the US economy if Chinese manufacturers decide to focus on domestic trade – not to mention the possible effect of tariffs that President-elect Trump promises to enact.
In other countries, like Brazil, India and Germany, retail media represents the fastest-growing channel within digital media. In India, it’s even poised to take over search advertising revenue for the first time in 2025.
Top global ad platforms roll out their own AI tools
Although GroupM’s report only touches on the possible effect of artificial intelligence tools, it supposes that widespread adoption of AI agents (meaning autonomous systems that can perform tasks based on a combination of machine learning and natural language processing) will have a pronounced impact on the space.
“Competition in the age of AI does require significant resources and scale,” Scott-Dawkins said, noting that many of the biggest sellers – such as Amazon, Google and Meta, who will represent 41% of global ad revenue in 2025 – are investing heavily in their own large language model (LLM) tools.
However, so far, companies seem less interested in allowing AI to make purchases and more in understanding their own influence in the market, the report notes – effectively using LLMs as a sort of glorified search engine for brand awareness and identity.
“Most folks will tell you that we’re still a little ways away from really being able to hand over the reins” to AI, Scott-Dawkins said.
