Supercharging the revolution: how advertising transformed from 2018 to 2021

It’s January 2018. Australia had just had a historic plebiscite to legalise same-sex marriage. The #MeToo movement was gaining massive momentum across the world as a protest against sexual violence. Marvel’s Black Panther premiered on its way to becoming the highest-grossing film of the year, and celebrated African-American and Black culture in a way showbiz had never seen.

Meanwhile, the international marketing intelligence service WARC was buoyant about the future of the advertising industry. Its Global Ad Trends report analysed 96 markets across the world, and measured expenditure at a record $572 billion. The agency expected big-ticket sporting events like the Winter Olympics and soccer World Cup, US mid-term elections and stabilising economies in developing nations to produce another 4.7% worth of growth in 2018. Things were looking up for advertisers.

By October 2019, WARC’s previous prediction appeared conservative. The global advertising market outstripped its projected growth to jump by 7.3% in 2018. The rate slowed to an estimated 2.5% in 2019 but a 6% leap was projected for 2020, which would have made the industry worth $656 billion.

Then a year later, WARC solemnly titled its 2020-21 report: “Global ad market will take years to recover from COVID-19”. The year was the “most hostile year for the advertising economy” in WARC’s 40 years, its head of data content James McDonald said. The international market lost $63.4 billion to plummet to $557.3 billion – a 10.2% dive that left expenditure slightly above 2017 levels.

Global advertising expenditure ($B) vs yearly projections, 2017-present. Data: WARC; Chart: Chart Blocks

It’s all a bit grim, wasn’t it?

But every cloud has a silver lining, and this one shone brightest for digital marketers. Online mediums continued to see their global advertising investment grow in 2020, headlined by social media (9.3%), online video (7.9%) and online display (3.3%). All are expected to grow by even more when WARC’s 2021 report is released later this year. Search advertising is also expected to continue growing this year, while online classifieds should claw back about half of its 2020 losses.

Source: WARC

The picture’s not so rosy for legacy media. Broadcast mediums TV and radio will grow a little from their 2020 level, but nowhere near enough to reach their pre-pandemic level. Print formats – magazines and newspapers – will likely drop again after bleeding a quarter of their expenditure during 2020.

These trends are only surprising in their scale, but not in their direction. Despite the doom and gloom surrounding COVID’s impact on the advertising industry, all it really did was supercharge a well-understood shift to a digital marketing economy.