Latest Marketing & Advertising News
WARC Raises 2025 Global Ad Spend Forecast to 8.9% Growth
WARC now expects global advertising spending to rise 8.9% in 2025 to about $1.19 trillion, driven by strong results from major tech platforms and muted trade impacts; growth for 2026–27 is also forecast positive with the US and China remaining largest markets.
Big Tech to Capture Majority of Incremental Ad Dollars Through 2027
WARC forecasts Alphabet, Meta and Amazon will absorb most incremental global ad spend between 2025–2027, increasing their combined share (ex-China) to 58.8% by end of 2027, highlighting concentration in platform power.
Performance Marketing and AI: Industry Moves from Experimentation to Core Stack
Industry data show generative AI became embedded in marketers' workflows in 2025—platforms and tools reported millions of ads and hundreds of thousands of AI prompts, indicating AI-driven creative scaling and workflow changes across 133 countries.
Google Performance Max 'Black Box' Transparency Improvements
Google has updated Performance Max to surface channel-level reporting (Search, YouTube, Display, Maps), giving advertisers clearer placement and conversion data and enabling deeper optimization across surfaces.
Meta Prepares New EU 'Ad Choice' Model to Comply with DMA
Meta will offer EU users a lighter personalization option for ads to meet the Digital Markets Act, forcing advertisers to treat EU targeting as a unique testing environment and invest in first‑party data and modeled conversions.
Rise of Hyper‑personalisation and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Marketing analysis identifies hyper‑segmentation and hyper‑personalisation—using AI to create 1:1 strategies—and the emergence of GEO (optimizing for AI-generated overviews) as critical trends reshaping SEO and content strategy.
Industry Trend: Short-form Video, UGC and Creator Investment Persist
Market analyses list short videos (≤15s), heavy investment in UGC and creators, and influencers as enduring 2025 trends, with many brands allocating significant budget to creator-driven commerce.
Agencies and Startups Launch AI-Native Marketing Services and Partnerships
New agency moves include Gutenberg announcing a strategic partnership with CambrianEdge.ai to scale AI-powered marketing services and resources starting January 2026, reflecting agencies' enterprise AI transformations.
Social Platforms Becoming Search and SEO Channels
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are increasingly used as search engines; platform indexing changes (Meta allowing crawlability of public posts) have turned social content into discoverable search assets for brands.
Creative Systems Scale: More Animated and Vertical Formats in Global Campaigns
Platform export data from creative tooling show animation and vertical, social-native formats rose sharply in 2025 while traditional horizontal formats remain important—driving creative systems that must flex across many sizes and platforms.
Privacy, Fragmentation and the Need for First‑Party Data Strategies
Platform policy changes and regional regulations have intensified signal fragmentation, prompting marketers to prioritize server‑side tracking, modeled conversions, and first‑party data collection to sustain performance measurement.
Marketing 'Moments' and Cultural Campaign Wins of 2025 Inform 2026 Planning
Industry roundups highlight key marketing moments (sports wins, entertainment franchises, and consistent brand storytelling) from 2025 as lessons for durable creative strategies and brand-building in 2026.