Cannes Lions Gathers Ad Business As WPP Media Report Flags Challenges
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As the ad industry kicks off the annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the sunny climate of the Cote d'Azur can't mask the storm clouds that surround many in the business. WPP Media's latest Global Midyear Forecast, This Year Next Year, certainly doesn't provide a completely dour forecast, but does highlight the gravity of challenges confronting marketers, agencies, publishers, and their employees.
WPP Media itself has undergone a tumultuous last couple of years, including the recent announcement that Mark Read, CEO of WPP itself, is leaving the company. WPP Media, WPP's media buying arm, is still the world's largest media buyer, but it ditched the familiar GroupM brand name and folded leadership of its agencies, Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom, into one central organization. The reorganized company has announced layoffs and recently lost several significant clients to Publicis. Of course ad industry disruption is hardly limited to WPP Media.
No matter the environment, WPP Media's new forecast provides a number of timely insights around the ad business today and its pathway forward, and I spent some time with its author, Kate Scott-Dawkins, Global President of Business Intelligence for WPP Media. The sweep of the midyear forecast, including its global geography, millions of measurable media data points, and perspectives on the latest developments in AI, provides what WPP Media aims to be 'a comprehensive view of advertising [today]
The WPP Media midyear forecast projects 6% growth in total 2025 ad revenue. This isn't a bad number in the context of our current global political, cultural, and environmental upheaval. But it is a drop of 22% from WPP Media's predicted growth of 7.7% just six months ago, and the report downgrades its growth expectations going forward not only for 2025 but for the next five years as well.
The report notes the 'increasingly opaque economic environment [in which] many marketers have appeared to take a wait-and-see approach.' That's hardly a formula for a robust upfront market for U.S. ad sellers. And traditional TV is hardly fertile ground for any rising tide of advertising, as cable TV network revenue fell nearly 7% between 2023 and 2024, undoubtedly one of the factors driving major ad sellers in the traditional TV world to restructure themselves.
One of the aspects of This Year Next Year that has garnered a good deal of attention is the growth in creator-driven ad revenue relative to the traditional video and audio media outlets. Within the world of 'content-driven advertising revenue' (think most everything but search), WPP Media defines 'creator-driven' ad revenue as that appearing on YouTube and social media platforms, and projects that this category will total nearly $185 billion in 2025, for the first time surpassing ad revenue from TV (including streaming), which the report projects to hit roughly $162 billion this year. By 2030 WPP Media projects that this creator-driven ad revenue will top $376 billion globally. Wow - did traditional media need yet another challenging datapoint? The influencer/creator economy is hardly new, but its accelerating scale demonstrates its inextricable integration into the broad ad marketplace.
The WPP Media report doesn't provide much light at the end of the tunnel of Big Tech's ad revenue dominance. According to the report, the top 25 global media owners, running from Google through U.S. media companies through China's Xiaomi Global, accounted for 70% of all ad revenues in 2024. And just five companies - Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram and What's App), ByteDance (TikTok's owner), Amazon and Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba - accounted for 54% of all ad revenues by themselves. Amazon alone ($55.9 billion) took in more in ad revenue than the combination of all five of the major U.S. media companies (Comcast, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox). And looking forward, it's not going to get easier as WPP Media projects that the digital advertising share of ad revenues (think anything but traditional video and audio) will rise from 73% in 2025 to over 87% in 2030.
There are no conversations about media, advertising or most anything else these days that don't touch on AI, so of course This Year Next Year had to provide insights on developments in that area as well. The challenge, as Scott-Dawkins noted, is 'how are you going to cover this momentous revolution in a way that feels comprehensive and not obsolete as soon as we published?'
In search ad revenue, or what WPP Media here calls 'Intelligence Advertising,' the report sees 7.4% growth in 2025. But as the forecast notes this includes not just traditional Google-dominated search but 'answer engines' such as OpenAI, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Grok and Anthropic.
The hope that ChatGPT and AI-driven platforms might weaken the Big Tech ad revenue stranglehold may be proving illusory. For better or worse, publishers have long been desperately dependent on traditional Google searches to drive clicks and traffic to their sites. Google's introduction of AI tools such as AI Overviews, obviating the need for consumers to click on Google's blue web links, has combined with increased AI-based searches to bring about declines in publisher site traffic over the last several years as much as 50% or higher. To paraphrase what Sally once told Harry: 'You can't take it back. It's already out there.' At least the Rose will be plentiful at Cannes Lions.
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