Magna Ups Its 2024 Media Spend Forecast

IPG’s Magna unit, whose market intelligence arm regularly forecasts media spend across all media, just upped its predictions for U.S. media spend in full-year 2024, based on strong actual revenue for the first half of the year.

Digiday.com reports the agency group now expects full-year “non-cyclical ad spend,” which means not including the Olympics or political spend, will grow by 8.9% to $377 billion, one of the best performances in decades. Earlier this year, Magna was predicting 8.2% growth.

When adding in cyclical spend — and 2024 is shaping up to be a banner year for political advertising with Kamala Harris replacing incumbent president Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee earlier in the summer — Magna is predicting growth in U.S. ad spend of 11.4%. That represents an expected $10 billion in incremental ad revenue to reach $377 billion, due to the elections and summer Olympics.

Vincent Létang, Magna’s evp of global market intelligence and author of the report, credited the increase in spending estimates to a strong second quarter, which grew 11% based on his team’s analysis of media companies’ financial results.

Digital, of course, is where much of the growth is happening, and Magna’s analysis pointed to Google, Meta and Amazon as attracting 80% of all digital ad dollars in the U.S. Despite the aforementioned tough comps to second half ’23, Létang said he expects them to continue their strong growth rates, with percentages in the teens.

Magna’s Mike Leszega, the company’s vp of global market intelligence, analyzed other media performance for H2 2024, and found that streaming TV’s growth will more than offset a slide in ad spend on linear TV. National video ad sales in total are forecast to round out at -1.1% to around $11 billion, “the best performance in two years,” noted the Magna report.