At approximately 1:30 pm EST on April 9, President Trump announced a 90-day pause that dialed most of his planned tariffs back to 10% – unbeknownst to the AdExchanger editorial team, which was in the midst of recording this episode of The Big Story podcast analyzing the impact of tariffs on the advertising industry.
In other words, by the time we finished our recording, the world had already changed.
It’s hard to plan when a situation is so volatile. CMOs know what we’re talking about.
When President Trump announced the full slate of tariffs on April 2, they were steeper and more wide-ranging than anyone had predicted. Just about every nation on Earth was hit with a minimum 10% import duty, with harsher fees for certain countries like China and the EU.
Markets cratered, with the S&P 500 losing trillions in value over the following two days. Talk of a potential recession was once again back on everyone’s lips, and ad industry pundits started to revise their predictions for 2025.
When the tariffs went into force on Wednesday, the outlook dimmed once again. China and the EU announced reciprocal tariffs on the US, and Goldman Sachs updated the likelihood the US would enter a recession this year from 45% to 65%.
And then, as many pundits predicted, Trump reversed course. Amid growing chaos on Wednesday, he announced the pause and dropped almost all of the tariffs back down to the baseline 10% – except for China, whose tariff rates he increased to 125%.
The markets appeared to reward Trump for solving the problem he’d created. The Dow Jones closed up about 8% for the day, while the S&P 500 rose nearly 10%. Goldman Sachs dropped its recession odds back down to 45%.
However, other financial institutions refused to revise their outlook after the tariff reversal, pointing to a lack of stability stifling investments. Both JP Morgan Chase and MetLife are reportedly sticking to their 60% recession probability as of Thursday morning.
Pity the media planners trying to allocate ad budgets amid all this volatility – not to mention any publisher or ad tech business that relies on ad revenue to survive.
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Uncertainty is running rampant, meaning marketers are likely to remain cautious in their spending regardless of what happens next.
Even if the tariffs were to disappear for good by the time you listen to our episode, “you don’t just go right back to America, the rocket ship,” says AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher. “There’s definitely going to be some long period of pain and resetting here.”
Also in this episode: Be careful about making “Made in America” claims, what the tariffs mean for retail media and other emerging channels and whether we’d be more inclined to ditch our favorite brands for cheaper alternatives. (We also address why – taking a lesson from COVID-era panic buying – consumers should avoid depleting the nation’s strategic toilet paper reserves.)
