Digiday+ Research: Half of marketers say ad spend will grow this year

That’s according to a Digiday+ Research survey of nearly 50 marketer professionals conducted in Q4 2024.

Digiday’s survey found that marketers have big expectations for ad spend this year — just short of half of marketer pros (48%) said in Q4 that they agree advertisers will spend more in 2025. Just under a quarter (24%) said they disagree, and 29% said they’re not sure.

Taking a closer look at the data, though, does show that marketers aren’t overly confident in their prediction that ad spend will rise this year. Forty-one percent of marketer pros told Digiday that they agree only somewhat that advertisers will spend more in 2025, while just 7% said they agree strongly.

The pattern is similar on the other end of the scale too. Nineteen percent of marketers said they disagree just somewhat that ad spend will rise this year, while only 5% said they disagree strongly.

While the data shows an undeniable optimism among marketers when it comes to ad spend this year, it also shows a significant amount of uncertainty regarding how things will shake out in the ad industry.

Marketers’ optimism around ad spend comes on the heels of a year in which nearly half of agencies saw their ad spending on behalf of clients increase. Forty-two percent of marketer pros said their companies’ ad spend on behalf of clients increased throughout 2024, Digiday’s survey found. Fewer than a third (31%) said that spending decreased in 2024. (It is worth noting here, though, that 40% of marketers said their ad spend on behalf of clients increased only somewhat in 2024, while just 2% said it increased significantly.)

And this optimism is made stronger looking at the data for this year. Digiday’s survey found that nearly two-thirds of marketers (63%) said they expect their companies’ ad spending on behalf of clients to increase in 2025. Twenty percent said that spending won’t change this year, and just 16% said it will decrease.

Not only does the percentage of marketers who said ad spending on behalf of clients will decrease this year make up the smallest group in Digiday’s survey, but the full 16% said that the spend will decrease only somewhat. Not one survey respondent said their ad spend on behalf of clients will decrease significantly this year.

Again, though, we must point out that those marketers who said their ad spend on behalf of clients will increase only somewhat far outweigh those who said that spend will increase significantly. More than half of respondents to Digiday’s survey (55%) said their companies’ ad spend on behalf of clients will increase somewhat this year, while just 8% said it will increase significantly.

This likely won’t come as a surprise in the age of digital everything, but Digiday’s survey also found that the vast majority of the increased ad spend that marketers expect this year will happen online as opposed to off. Just short of three-quarters of marketer pros (74%) said they agree that online ad spend will grow in 2025. That’s compared with the 39% of marketers who said they agree that offline ad spend will grow this year.

It’s clear that online ad spend is the winner here — but it’s important to contextualize this data by comparing it to last year’s expectations. In Q4 2023, 82% of marketer respondents to Digiday’s survey said they agreed that online ad spend would grow in 2024, which means the 74% who said the same in Q4 2024 is actually a drop. Meanwhile, 21% of marketers said in Q4 2023 that they agreed that offline ad spend would grow in 2024. In Q4 2024, that percentage was 39% — a significant jump.

It’s hard to define this as a trend based on just two years of data. But it will be worth following into next year to see if the discrepancy between online ad spend and offline ad spend will continue in this direction.