Madison and Wall, the advisory and consulting firm set up by analyst Brian Wieser, has this morning announced a downgrade to its US advertising growth forecasts across the next five years, citing the impact of the current US government’s policies on expected growth. Total US ad market growth for 2025 is now predicted to sit at 3.6 percent excluding political advertising, down from 4.5 percent.
This 4.5 percent figure itself represented a downgrade last December from M&W’s previous forecast of 5.3 percent growth. At the time, Madison and Wall said the early signs suggested that Donald Trump’s policies were more likely than not to have a net negative effect on the US ad market. Now that Trump is in power and policies are being put into force, the consultancy says it sees “a certainty of additional negative factors”, hence today’s update.
Looking further ahead, underlying annual growth of around 3.5 percent is expected over the next few years. This is also a downward revision from December’s forecast, which pegged growth at around 4 percent in the coming years. M&W notes that 3.5 percent growth “isn’t terrible in historical terms”, but is nonetheless lower than what the industry has become accustomed to in recent years.
From uncertainty to reality
The current US administration’s policies aren’t the only factor behind the downgrade. M&W notes that growth in the final quarter of last year was slightly slower than it had previously expected, at 6.0 percent excluding political advertising. This suggests that by the end of the year, “at least some of the factors that were otherwise elevating advertising growth were no longer at play”, according to the consultancy.
But the policies being pursued by Donald Trump are a major factor. While the president has previously threatened to impose tariffs on trade partners and begin mass deportations during his campaign, there was still uncertainty around the time of his inauguration about how quickly and forcefully these measures would be implemented. Now there’s less uncertainty, and recession fears are growing as tariffs start to bite.
M&W said it also now sees increased volatility around trade policies and more extreme threats to supply chains and corporate decision making than it had previously expected.
There were a few positive considerations too. A reduction in trade with China could have big implications for the ad industry, as Chinese companies which ship goods to America are big ad spenders on platforms owned by Meta and Amazon. M&W however said it has not yet seen any negative impacts on shipping of goods from China. There also haven’t yet been any clear indications that pharmaceutical TV ads will be banned — a policy which had been floated by Trump’s health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Nonetheless, the overall picture suggests negative impacts on growth, which will in turn bring down ad spend, according to M&W.
Local TV suffers
Looking at individual media channels, the overall trends remain largely the same since Madison and Wall’s previous forecast. While total national TV advertising (including CTV) was up by 1.7 percent in 2024 excluding political advertising, the consultancy notes that conditions “didn’t feel quite so positive to everyone in that business”. While the overall pie grew, there are more companies grabbing a slice of that pie, with Amazon, Netflix, Roku, and others taking share.
Conditions were particularly difficult for local TV broadcasters and operators. Local TV advertising, excluding political advertising, was down by 5.4 percent in 2024, and tough conditions are expected to persist. The growth of CTV is partly the cause here — the targeting capabilities offered by CTV services owned by national broadcasters and streamers are increasingly being adopted by geographically constrained marketers, essentially pulling spend out of the ‘local TV’ bucket and putting it into the ‘national TV’ bucket.
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