Please register your interest prior to the start of the webinar to avoid delayed access. You can register by clicking on the event image below.

An extract of the forecast report follows in this note while corporate subscribers and advisory clients can access the full version of the report here.

Detailed Excel models with quarterly data covering 2019-2030 for ten different media types across each of the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, India, South Korea, Brazil, China and the world in total along with more comprehensive models for Canada and the United States are available to clients upon request.

We will also discuss Madison & Wall’s expansion and broadening of services with the hirings of James McDonald and Michael Leszega in more detail on the call.

Madison & Wall’s New Global Data Shows the Ad Market Is Bigger, More Concentrated, and Less Local

The global advertising market is often discussed through broad channel forecasts: digital versus legacy media, TV versus streaming, search versus social. Madison & Wall’s new global ad revenue data goes deeper. Built from a Wall Street-style financial analysis of hundreds of global sellers of advertising, the data tracks where revenue is actually flowing by market, format, seller, and quarter.

The story of the global advertising market is not that digital advertising is growing. It is where that growth is going, and how much of it is being captured by a smaller group of global platforms. The result is an advertising market that is still expanding, but where the benefits of that growth are increasingly uneven across sellers, channels, and countries.

Global Advertising Revenue to Reach $1.42 trillion in 2026

Global advertising revenue will increase by 8.3% year-over-year in 2026 to reach $1.42 trillion. By 2030, the global advertising market will reach $1.72 trillion, representing a 5.6% CAGR through 2030.

Growth in 2026 is broadly comparable to 2025, although 2026 benefits from several cyclical sports events, including the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. That means underlying growth is slightly slowing. Still, despite geopolitical uncertainty, inflation concerns, trade restrictions, labor supply issues, and very weak consumer confidence, marketers continue to spend on advertising.

Source: Madison & Wall, U.S. Figures Exclude Political Advertising

The Largest Digital Platforms Are Driving Most of the Growth

Across markets, the same broad pattern is visible: the largest digital platforms are outperforming. Growth is especially concentrated in social media, commerce media, and, to a lesser extent, search and other digital formats. Growth is not just shifting toward digital channels. It is also shifting toward the largest platforms within those channels, especially Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and a small group of other scaled sellers.

Social media advertising is the leading source of global growth. We expect social media advertising to increase by 14% year-over-year in 2026 to reach $421 billion globally.

Several factors are supporting that growth. First, AI-powered optimization tools are becoming more widely adopted globally. This includes platforms such as Meta’s Advantage+, which have seen meaningful adoption gains. Advertisers continue to skew budgets toward performance-focused campaigns, and these tools are built to optimize performance above all else, even when that comes with less transparency and control.

Second, social media monetization continues to improve. Vertical-video formats historically monetized below newsfeed advertising. In recent years, they have either caught up or become superior monetization formats, creating another tailwind.

Third, AI-powered recommendation engines are increasing time spent on platforms. Time spent does not translate directly into monetization, or audio would have a much larger share of the total media mix. But it does not hurt. In recent periods, social platforms have benefited from both higher impressions and stronger pricing.

Source: Madison & Wall, U.S. Figures Exclude Political Advertising

Copyright © 2026 Madison & Wall. All Rights Reserved.

Madison & Wall, a data, research and strategy consultancy for the media, advertising and technology industries, today announced an expansion of its global advertising market coverage and the hiring of James McDonald, who joins the firm from WARC as managing director, global markets, and Michael Leszega, CFA, who joins from MAGNA as senior analyst.

The expansion builds on Madison & Wall’s existing focus on the U.S. and Canadian advertising industries, the global agency industry and the companies whose businesses depend on marketing investments. It also bolsters Madison & Wall’s unique proposition as a firm led by financial analysts who integrate best-in-class industry data with syndicated research and advisory services.

The new appointments will help Madison & Wall deepen that coverage over time, with plans to expand to 50 markets and add ongoing written research and analysis. The firm is releasing a new global advertising forecast today, covering the top markets across North America, Europe, APAC and LATAM.

“Over the past three years we’ve been building out world-class capabilities to analyze and advise on the global advertising economy,” said Brian Wieser, CFA, founder and CEO of Madison & Wall. “With James and Michael joining us we will have, by far, more collective expertise forecasting the advertising economy than any other firm on earth.”

McDonald joins from WARC, where he has spent more than a decade building and leading advertising data products and market intelligence offerings. His work has focused on advertising investment, media consumption, media costs and ROI across 100 markets worldwide. He has worked closely with advertisers, agencies, media companies and industry bodies across the U.K., Europe and other global markets.

McDonald will lead the firm’s development of a broader global research platform, including new datasets, market analysis, visualization tools and client-facing products designed to make Madison & Wall’s research more accessible and actionable.

His areas of focus will include: the creator economy; advertiser-level spending segmented across product categories and verticals; and tools that allow clients to access and use data more directly within their existing workflows.

The opportunity to help build Madison & Wall’s global data and research platform drew McDonald to the firm after more than a decade at WARC.

“WARC has been like family to me, and I never expected to leave,” McDonald said. “But I believe deeply in what Brian, Luke Stillman and the team are building at Madison & Wall. The advertising economy is becoming more complex, more global and more dependent on high-quality data. There is a real need for independent analysis, rigorous datasets and practical insights that help companies make better decisions in a fast-changing market,” he added.

McDonald began his career at Informa, where he advised clients including Sony, Paramount and Warner Bros., before joining WARC in 2013. At WARC, he helped grow the company’s advertising data offering into an international product focused on advertising data leveraged by the world’s largest brands, agencies and media owners, as well as central banks and governments. He holds a degree-level qualification in machine learning, data engineering and DevOps, and recently led the development and successful launch of WARC’s global Media product in March.

Leszega joins from MAGNA, where he worked alongside Stillman for 11 years and helped bolster the firm’s U.S. intelligence by analyzing, modeling, publishing and presenting research on the U.S. advertising market.

“As James said, the advertising economy is becoming increasingly complex, with interesting new channels emerging and consequential trends shaping this trillion dollar global market. There’s a need for deep, insightful analysis,” Leszega said. “I’m thrilled to join the team at Madison & Wall and have the opportunity to leverage my experience to help build out its research offering. I’m so excited to reunite with Luke and finally get the chance to work with Brian.”

The firm’s latest expansion follows the additions of Luke Stillman, CFA, who joined as managing director in 2025 from MAGNA, and Greg McLelland, the company’s global chief revenue officer, who also joined in 2025 as general manager of Canada and CRO advisory practice lead.

At MAGNA, Stillman established one of the industry’s primary global sources for digital advertising data, oversaw forecasting of client billings covering more than $10 billion annually and led an internal consulting practice serving publishers, ad tech platforms and brands.

Stillman serves as a lead voice on Madison & Wall’s current U.S. and global advertising forecasts, while McDonald will focus on expanding global coverage, deepening written research and analysis, and helping build new data products and tools for clients.

Together, the analysts will increase Madison & Wall’s capacity to provide independent market intelligence to senior decision-makers across the global advertising economy.

About Madison & Wall

Founded in 2023 by Brian Wieser, CFA, Madison & Wall is a data, research and strategy consultancy for the media, advertising and technology industries. The firm provides proprietary research, market forecasts, analysis and consulting services to senior decision-makers across advertising, media, technology, marketing services and investment communities.

Madison & Wall’s work is informed by Wieser’s experience across Wall Street, Madison Avenue and ad tech, including prior roles at Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, Pivotal Research, WPP’s GroupM, Interpublic’s MAGNA and Simulmedia. Through its research, advisory work and publishing platform, Madison & Wall helps companies understand how advertising money moves, how markets are changing and what those shifts mean for strategy, investment and growth.

Learn more at MadisonAndWall.Com.

Madison & Wall testimonials can be found at MadisonAndWall.Com/Testimonials.

This interview with PayPal Ads’ SVP & General Manager, Mark Grether was conducted by email. It follows a prior conversation with him we posted around this time last year.

Mark, you’ve been bold calling PayPal Ads a “Financial Media Network” rather than just another retail media play. How are you distinguishing it from a retail media network — and is that framing landing with the industry yet?

Let me start by adjusting the term, because the word matters. I’d retire “financial” here. The asset isn’t financial records. It’s verified purchase behavior, and “Commerce Media Network” captures that far more precisely. It also keeps the discussion centered on consumer spending decisions rather than financial account data.

It is also not just what people buy. Across PayPal, Venmo, and Honey we see three distinct layers of behavior: what people buy through PayPal’s verified transactions, how they share and move money through Venmo’s peer-to-peer signal, and how they shop. Honey gives us a window into browsing and shopping behavior across the entire customer buying journey, from initial browsing to final purchase. Three layers of commerce intent on one identity, and no single retailer has any of them at this breadth.

The real distinction is the data layer. A retail media network is built on what consumers do inside one retailer’s ecosystem. PayPal is built on what they do across all of them. When someone buys running shoes in one place, books travel in another, and does the weekly grocery run somewhere else; we see all of it. An RMN can tell a brand its share of one shelf. We can tell that brand its share of the entire wallet.

That breadth comes from real, verified purchases across more than 430 million consumer accounts and tens of millions of merchants. No single retailer has that view. We’re not simply adapting the retail media model. We’re building something fundamentally different, based on a different asset. Is it landing? A year ago, I was explaining what the Transaction Graph is and now I’m being asked how to access it.

How do you keep Transaction Graph signals clean and trustworthy as you grow — and how do you maintain consumer trust that you’ll be responsible with that data?

Start with the incentive structure, which protects the consumer. A standalone ad tech company that crosses the line loses an ad business. PayPal would lose a 25-year-old payments company.

Governance isn’t adjacent to the strategy. We operate inside strict frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, and internal standards that in many cases go beyond what regulation requires. The signals we use for advertising are aggregated and anonymized. We don’t sell individual transaction records. We use population-level patterns to help brands reach the right consumers at the right moment.

One thing people often miss is that scale improves the signal. Most behavioral data gets less reliable over time because it’s built on cookies and browsing activity, which can quickly become outdated. A completed purchase is a fact, and a fact doesn’t drift, because it already happened. The more transactions we process, the sharper the picture gets. That’s the opposite of how the rest of the data ecosystem ages.

Getting consumers to actually shop inside an ad unit is no small thing. What’s been the biggest surprise in how people respond to this?

The biggest surprise is how context rewrites behavior. Consumers have been trained over decades to treat ads as interruptions. With Storefront Ads, when the offer reflects something they’ve genuinely demonstrated interest in through their own purchases, the friction disappears. It works because we’re not guessing. Most of programmatic spends its money inferring intent from proxies whereas PayPal has already observed it.

That’s the line I’d draw for the industry. The old model is an attention economy where ads compete to interrupt you and capture a moment. What we’re building is an attachment economy: relevant offers serving people who’ve already shown what they care about. When the offer matches real behavior, it stops reading as an ad and starts reading as a service. That’s why consumers don’t feel interrupted.

The conversion behavior is above benchmark on both transaction volume and brand metrics, which is different from anything I’ve seen in standard programmatic. Brands running Storefront Ads are seeing new shoppers convert and come back. It builds loyalty, and it’s what turns commerce media from a performance tactic into a long-term investment.

Incrementality is still keeping marketers up at night. Where is PayPal genuinely moving the needle — and how close are you on closing the loop to in-store purchases?

Incrementality is the right question, but the industry has been answering the wrong version of it. Last-click attribution tells you who was in the room when the deal closed. It doesn’t tell you who closed the deal.

What we do differently is close the loop at the transaction layer. When a consumer sees a PayPal-served ad and then completes a purchase, either in a retailer’s app, or in a physical store where PayPal is the payment method, we can connect those events with real transaction data, not modeled inference. That capability is live and growing.

There’s a second dimension of incrementality the industry rarely talks about, and it’s the one a CFO actually cares about: not just did my ad work, but where did my ad dollar work hardest. Since we see purchases across merchants, we can show a brand which retailer, channel, and moment drove the most incremental volume per dollar. A single-retailer network can’t answer that because they only see their own four walls. We can tell a brand where it performed well and where to put the next dollar.

The in-store piece is where the structural advantage shows up. A cookie can’t follow you into a store, and a loyalty card only works at one chain. The payment instrument is the one identity that travels everywhere a consumer goes, and it allows us to close the loop in the aisle. The marketers leaning in are moving from “we think this worked” to “we can show you exactly what happened, and where it happened.”

How are brands thinking about PayPal Ads relative to Amazon and Walmart Connect — complementary or competitive?

Complementary, and the reason is built into the data. Those retailers see what consumers buy in their stores, while PayPal sees what consumers buy everywhere. These are different signals.

The sharper point is that the walled gardens’ blind spot is each other. Amazon can optimize the Amazon shelf brilliantly, but it can’t see what that same shopper buys at another retailer the next day. PayPal can help a brand understand cross-channel behavior, find new audiences, or attribute across touchpoints, that’s not redundant with retail media. The major walled gardens give you depth inside their ecosystems, but the Transaction Graph gives you breadth across the whole landscape.

There’s a trust dimension that brands are starting to weigh. A retailer-owned media network is also a retailer that is bidding against the very brands buying its ads. We don’t sell this way. PayPal is a commerce media network that isn’t also competing with the advertisers on it. The most sophisticated buyers are the fastest to adopt us, because they’ve already hit the ceiling of what single-retailer data can tell them.

Looking ahead — when AI agents start doing the actual buying, how does that change what advertising even is?

It’s one of the most important questions in the industry, and not enough people are taking it seriously. Consumers are already starting shopping journeys on Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity instead of search – we see it in our data. Once agents can complete purchases rather than just recommend them, the entire model built on capturing human attention at the moment of intent breaks down. The agent now decides, and the consumer ratifies.

In that world you can’t buy attention, because there’s no attention left to buy. You can only earn your way into the recommendation, which is won on evidence. The question becomes how you get a brand in front of an algorithm, and you do it with proof of relevance. Clicks are opinions, but purchases are proof. When an algorithm is the buyer, proof is the only currency left, and the richest proof of consumer preference is what they’ve actually bought.

This is why we’re building toward agentic commerce. PayPal isn’t trying to be an ad network bolted onto the agent layer. We intend to sit underneath it, in the identity and settlement that the agents will run on. The brands that have established relevance through real transaction signals will be better positioned for the agent layer than those whose signals are built on clicks and impressions. When the human is no longer making the micro-decision, the data that trained the agent becomes the advertising currency.

For PayPal itself, you’ve moved fast since we last spoke. What does winning look like for PayPal Ads through 2026 and into 2027?

Winning starts with a reframe of who ads are even for. PayPal Ads doesn’t win by extracting value from the ecosystem. It wins by creating more of it, for consumers and merchants, and by accelerating the PayPal flywheel itself. Better, more relevant ads and offers give consumers a reason to choose PayPal and Venmo more often. That engagement gives merchants more reach and better-performing media, and in turn, drives more transactions through PayPal. PayPal Ads isn’t a side business bolted onto payments. When done right, it’s an accelerant for the whole company.

Everything else follows. Revenue and performance at a scale that earns PayPal Ads a permanent line on the media plan. We’ve grown quarter over quarter, and the advertiser and partner pipeline we’ve built gives me real confidence in where we land this year, operating alongside the major commerce media players. As for category ownership, I want “Commerce Media Network” to be the term the industry uses for a distinct, recognized category of advertising infrastructure. 2026 is when we prove the category exists. 2027 is when we prove it scales.

What makes me confident is that the asset underneath can’t be copied. Transactions are the new cookie, except this one doesn’t break and can’t be deprecated. You can clone a product, but you can’t clone 25 years of consumer trust and the transactions that come with it.

Join Us in Cannes for a Live Version of Madison & Wall’s Forecast: TUESDAY June 23 9:30am CEDT. Please also RSVP in advance for this event, as space will be limited.

Also during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity:

• TUESDAY June 23 10:30am CEDT we will join Horizon Media’s Bob Lord for a discussion event “The Transparency Paradox Debate” moderated by Mediaocean’s Bill Wise and founder of the Advertising Economic Forum, Tom Triscari

• WEDNESDAY June 24 1pm CEDT we will join Tom and Criteo’s Todd Parson for a discussion on “Measurement Models & Redefining Efficiency.”

Once again, this year’s annual Chocolate Marathon will take place in Paris on Sunday June 28 starting at 10:00am. Please contact us if you are interested in joining this free event (email brian@madisonandwall.com)

For more information about what, exactly, a chocolate marathon is (there is no running, but lots of chocolate), go to https://chocolatemarathon.com/

Relatedly, our annual chocolate industry overview was published last month, and it’s available here.

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week! Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian interviews Viral Nation’s Joe Gagliese.

Weekly Work:

OpenAI’s U.K. Ads Rollout Shows Why Europe May Be Harder Than the U.S.

Agentic CTV is Emerging in Europe and Reflects the Global Shift in TV Buying

Accenture Song’s Whalar Acquisition: Investment In Creator-Focused Agency Services Reflects Elevated Growth Opportunity

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending June 12: Chewy, Campbell Company, Cracker Barrel, J.M. Smucker and More

More Context:

Despite the headlines around CTV and streaming ad revenue growth, the total TV ad revenue pool is roughly flat to slightly declining. This is true even in markets where the TV landscape looks different from the U.S. European markets often have more concentrated broadcasters, stronger sales houses, and less severe cord-cutting than the U.S. But those structural differences have not changed the broader budget pattern. Streaming is taking share from linear, but it is not meaningfully expanding the overall TV pie.

While this leads to cost pressures among service providers such as agencies and technology partners, most advertisers are not ready to let software freely move money between TV, social, search, retail media, and other channels. Budgets are still organized by teams, objectives, agencies, contracts, and internal approval processes. Those barriers will not disappear quickly, but AI can still make it easier to translate campaign goals into platform settings, and this is where agentic buying is most likely to gain traction first. Not as a replacement for media strategy, but as a layer that reduces friction in execution. Current “agentic” announcements can be understood largely as tools for simplifying interfaces and workflows.

Equally important, in a region facing significant cost pressures because of relatively weaker economic conditions, relatively higher labor costs and the relative low risks for global marketers – all in comparison to the United States – testing these capabilities in Europe can be very sensible. This does not mean Europe will necessarily move faster in an agentic world. Many European TV markets are still relationship-driven and concentrated around major broadcasters who are typically conservative. But where there are fewer constraints than the U.S. and a greater incentive to drive costs out of the business, Europe may offer more room for new cost-focused buying models to develop.

For more information about what, exactly, a chocolate marathon is (there is no running, but lots of chocolate), go to https://chocolatemarathon.com/

Relatedly, our annual chocolate industry overview was published last month, and it’s available here.

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week! Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian and Olivia interview Dept’s Dimi Albers .

Weekly Work:

CPG Is Still Growing, But the Category Is Playing Defense

In-Housing: How Big Is It And How Are Agencies Impacted?

Location Data Is Becoming a Scale Advantage

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending June 5: HP, Kraft-Heinz, Lululemon, Petco and More

More Context:

As regular readers know, for our corporate subscriber and advisory clients we track closely what CEOs and CFOs of public companies say about their marketing and advertising activity at investor conferences and during earnings calls. We aggregate and re-publish the most relevant comments for at least two major reasons:

• At most companies, marketing only represents a small share of an expense base, and so doesn’t warrant very much attention or, often, marketing expertise at the top of many of these companies. Consequently, anything related to marketing that resonates with CEOs or CFOs is likely outsized in its importance, however it is received. These comments can have a further consequence of impacting the priorities of marketers, agencies and media owners alike.

• Directional commentary or sentiment around spending trends does provide a solid indication of the breadth of the advertising industries (mostly) up or down trends, and so helps to provide another lens on the industry’s drivers of growth.

During this past week marketers including FiveBelow, HP, Lululemon, Petco and PVH conveyed that spending increased to some notable degree, while Victoria’s Secret conveyed some cuts. But it was equally interesting that there were multiple mentions of brand-related goals, such as Lululemon’s need to “drive brand heat” and FiveBelow’s focus on awareness of its brand. Although marketers are often criticized for having a short-term orientation, at the top of these companies there can still be an appreciation of the need to focus efforts on activities that will help drive growth on a longer-term basis as well.

For more information about what, exactly, a chocolate marathon is (there is no running, but lots of chocolate), go to https://chocolatemarathon.com/

Relatedly, our annual chocolate industry overview was published last week, and it’s available here.

Also, Save the Date! Madison & Wall is hosting a webinar to focus on our latest advertising agency industry update on Tuesday June 2, 11am-12pm eastern time. Register to tune into it here.

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week! Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian and Olivia interview Conscious Minds’ Blake Heal .

Weekly Work:

Ad Tech 1Q26 Review: The Next Growth Story is Simplification

AI Venture Funding: Another Tailwind for Advertising Growth

Digital Endemic Advertisers Are Still Growing, But Becoming Less Advertising-Intensive

Kantar Group: Slight Decline In Underlying Business, Soft Market For “Non-Working” Activities

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending May 29: Abercrombie & Fitch, Best Buy, Kohl’s, RBC and More

More Context:

In our ongoing effort to explain why there is still so much money flowing through the advertising economy. The list of contributing factors to above-trend growth we have identified so far includes:

• Creative destruction

• Competitive intensity

• Brands maximizing working media

• Cross-border advertising

• Lowering the bar for small businesses

• Fraud concentrating on ad platforms

• Potential double-counting of advertising dollars

As we wrote in an in-depth report this last week, to that list we could add one more: AI companies themselves. As these mostly venture-funded upstarts use their capital to buy attention, they add an estimated 1% to overall U.S. ad revenue growth. The capital raised by AI companies which converts into advertising spending may not be permanent at today’s intensity, especially given our expectations for AI-related Capex, but while the capital is flowing, it is clearly helping to support some of the incremental demand that media owners are benefiting from.

For more information about what, exactly, a chocolate marathon is (there is no running, but lots of chocolate), go to https://chocolatemarathon.com/

Relatedly, our annual chocolate industry overview was published this week, and it’s available here

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week! Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian and Olivia interview Adweek’s Alison Weissbrott .

Weekly Work:

Publicis + LiveRamp: Big Positive For Publicis, Big Impact for Rest of Agency, Ad Tech and MarTech Sectors

Publicis and LiveRamp: Additional Considerations On Combination

Political Spending is a 2026 Tailwind, But Competing Drivers Will Keep Growth Moderate

SpaceX’s S-1 Shows X’s Ad Business is Still Searching for a Recovery

Walmart Confirms Commerce Media’s Continued Momentum

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending May 22: Deckers, E.L.F., Ralph Lauren, Target and More

More Context:

Easily the most significant news for the advertising industry last week was the announcement of Publicis’ agreement to buy LiveRamp. Although there are many angles from which to look at the transaction, because of the degree to which the transaction will likely tilt the field in Publicis’ favor, the future competitive reactions may be the most interesting.

The approaches we might see from Publicis’ competitors could include:

• Lower priced core media agency services, which could occur by adding scale through consolidation or by reducing profit margins

• Guarantees of cheaper media

• Investing more through acquisition or preferred partnerships into other “non-working” capabilities to support provision of lower-cost end-to-end services

• Investing more aggressively in different commercial models. For example, most agencies frequently refer to the importance of driving performance-based compensation, but for mostly good reasons, no large agency we are aware of has been willing to take the risk (or incent their clients to take the risk) of shifting 100% of client compensation in this direction. Another example would be to more aggressively bundle and price creative services with media

Arguably focusing on “better” quality media agency services won’t help much competitively on a stand-alone basis, as it’s difficult to objectively prove “better” and because there are many more smaller scale independent media agencies who can equally well make similar claims already.

Interestingly, because LiveRamp primarily operates in the U.S., the competitive impact outside of the United States will be limited in the near term. The signals of Publicis’ intentions will provide more time for other agency groups to adapt their competitive offerings elsewhere, although all agency groups will be constrained by differences in data privacy and data usage policies elsewhere. Nonetheless, Publicis’ should still be able to expand the LiveRamp business around the world in one form or another much faster than LiveRamp might have been able to independently.

For more information about what, exactly, a chocolate marathon is (there is no running, but lots of chocolate), go to https://chocolatemarathon.com/

Relatedly, our annual chocolate industry overview was published this week, and it’s available here

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week as we always do – but this time, with special guest WPP Media’s Kate Scott-Dawkins! Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian and Olivia interview Crispin’s CEO Magie Malek .

Weekly Work:

Another Tailwind for Headline Advertising Growth: The Same Dollar Can Show Up More Than Once

Total U.S. TV Ad Revenue, Cord Cutting, Consumer Video Spending Analyzed + Versant 1Q26 Results

Europe Sees Ongoing Pressure in TV Advertising

Fox: Sports, Tubi, and Fox News Drive Strong Underlying Ad Growth

iHeartMedia, Viant, BuzzFeed: Growth Depends On Where You Sit in the Market

Dentsu, Globant, Hakuhodo 1Q26 Results + Dentsu in 10 Charts

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending May 15: EA, Hims & Hers, StubHub, Viking Holdings, Wix, Yeti and More

More Context:

Most major companies have now reported 1Q26 results, and the picture is clear: the advertising economy is still growing at a very strong pace. It will likely exceed our already-high expectations for the quarter.

One key factor we continue to monitor is the way advertising dollars move through multi-step transaction chains, along with non-cash arrangements such as barter. It’s not new - we have been watching, accounting for, and adjusting for this issue for years in the major places where it shows up most clearly, including DSP owners, retail media networks, and large platforms with both owned inventory and technology businesses.

What is changing is the breadth of the issue. More companies are now combining media, data, technology, and managed services into a single advertising offer. As those partnerships spread across more of the ecosystem, the same underlying advertiser dollar can touch more companies before the campaign is delivered. Depending on how each company accounts for its role, parts of the same campaign or media exchange can appear in more than one company’s reported revenue.

Our industry-level growth already accounts for most of this impact. But as these business models spread beyond the largest and most obvious categories, it is becoming harder to isolate every instance. That means this transaction type is likely providing a modest boost to headline results.

The effect in total on our models is likely modest today, especially after the adjustments we already make. But it is one more reason advertising revenue can grow faster than the underlying base rate of consumption. It is also another reason market sizing requires constant analysis and cleanup rather than simply rolling up headline company results.

The chocolate industry is one such category, and not coincidentally, ties into our annual Chocolate Marathon in Paris (this year on Sunday June 28, just after the end of the Cannes Lions. Contact us at brian@madisonandwall.com for details if you would like to join us. It’s not a running marathon, but a day-long group walk across Paris visiting a large number of some of the world’s best chocolateries).

The Chocolate Industry Continues To Post Robust Top-Line Growth Rates

For a sense of the scale of the global chocolate business, manufacturer Mondelez recently published data from Euromonitor indicating the industry’s revenue amounted to $147 billion during 2025. If, after deducting for retailers’ gross margins, manufacturers received more than $100 billion of that figure and allocated 5% of their revenue to advertising (Hershey’s company-wide advertising expense to revenue ratio amounted to 5.2% last year and at Mondelez the figure was 4.3% for reference), we can estimate that the category would have been responsible for around $5 billion in annual spending on media owners, or about half a percentage point of the world’s total.

But how fast did the industry grow in 2025 at a packaged goods manufacturer level (rather than at the level of the pure retailer or the level of stand-alone producers of the raw ingredient commodities, none of which will be as significant for advertising)?

Looking at a composite of significant publicly listed companies or segments from within the industry, we can see that organic growth accelerated meaningfully in 2025. Collectively Hershey’s North America Confectionary business, Lindt & Sprüngli, the chocolate segment at Mondelez, and the chocolate business at Nestlé represented $39 billion in revenue last year. Within this group we can quantify a simple weighted average of 9% organic growth during 2025, up from 5% growth in 2024 and similar high-single/low-double digit rates in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Source: Madison and Wall analysis of company reports

Among the group, Nestle, Mondelez and Lindt fared best last year with organic growth ranging from 8-12%. Hershey continues to lag as it has over the past few years. One explanation for the gap in growth may be the combination of Hershey’s skew towards North American mass market chocolate vs. others who may sell in the mass market, but with much less exposure to the US where chocolate is not consumed as a staple in the way it is in many European markets. Illustrating the point, Lindt’s North American business (which is skewed towards the Lindt and Ghiradelli brands with Russell Stover representing a small share) grew at an 8.9% organic pace in 2025, rebounding from 2024’s 3.6% level. By contrast, the growth rates from Nestle and Mondelez primarily reflect revenues generated in other markets for their mass market offerings.

1Q26 trends have generally produced similarly robust top-line growth rates among the manufacturers who report results on a quarterly basis: for that period, Hershey’s North America Confectionary business grew by 8% organically, for the best pace of expansion recorded since early 2024. Mondelez’ chocolate business was also “solid” rising by 5.5%, although this was below any pace of observed growth since the early pandemic era of 2020. Meanwhile, Nestle’s confectionary business persisted at a high single digit organic growth level in what appears to be a 5+ year trend of generally high single digit growth.

What’s Driving This Growth?

Looking at some of the industry’s underlying trends, growth has been led by pricing increases rather than volume gains in recent years, catalyzed by significant increases in the price of chocolate’s main ingredient, cocoa, attributable to a mix of changes in climate, plant disease and government policies in west Africa (Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, which are the industry’s biggest producers).

For a sense of scale, after many years of relative stability with prices generally under USD$3,000 per ton, the price of the raw, dry beans rose and peaked above USD$11,000 per ton at the end of 2024. Put differently, before accounting for costs to roast, transport and blend the cocoa (let alone final manufacturing, packaging, distribution, marketing and retailing), $11,000 per ton equates to approximately $0.61 of raw ingredient costs for every 50 grams (i.e. the size of a typical mass market candy bar) while $3000 per ton range equates to closer to $0.16 per bar. Other ingredients typically include sugar and milk products along with nuts or other “inclusions,” but cacao commonly accounts for 30-70% of a chocolate bar’s weight.

Source: Factset

Profits Are Generally Weak At The Present Time

In response to rising input costs, manufacturers took various steps to mitigate the effect on their own profitability by reducing the cocoa content in their products or by developing different sizes and mixes of goods in their SKUs (i.e. “price-pack-architecture”).

Indeed, despite higher consumer prices, chocolate-related profitability is generally down. For example, Hershey’s North America confectionery business posted an operating margin of 26% in 2025, below levels more typically above 30%, while Nestle’s confectionery segment was just under 12% in 2025 despite usually running several percentage points higher. Interestingly, Lindt managed to increase its global operating income margin to 16.4% during 2025 (from 16.2% in 2024) and also increase its margin in North America to 13.7% during 2025 (from 13.0% in 2024 and much lower levels in prior years) which the company attributed to reduced personnel costs and supply chain improvements.

Based on the latest data provided by the companies who reported during 1Q26, it appears that manufacturers will continue to sustain high prices for their goods, although it’s worth noting that manufacturers are undoubtedly working through inventory purchased at recent highs. But will prices eventually fall to reflect lower commodity costs? Our guess is probably not, even if profitability returns to higher levels.

Long-Term Growth Trends Look Favorable

Through this period of rising prices, consumers have demonstrated a favorable degree of elasticity of demand for chocolate. Spending is clearly up despite higher prices and other trends, such as the rising availability of GLP-1 drugs. This means that manufacturers will be able to look for other ways to essentially grow into the product’s demand. It could occur by increasing marketing to encourage consumption shifts or new use cases (towards those ends, on its 1Q26 earnings call in April, Hershey CFO conveyed expectations for a pick up in media spending through the second quarter and second half), investing in product innovation (new offerings such as “Dubai” chocolate or ruby chocolate), by raising the quality of their products (with different sources of cocoa beans or greater volumes of the same in each product) or by increasing the sizes of individual products.

We’ll do further in-person research to explore how the premium end of the market in Paris is managing itself during our Chocolate Marathon in June. Please join us!

https://chocolatemarathon.com/

Additional details will follow in the coming weeks alongside our upcoming annual chocolate industry overview.

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week. Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian and Olivia interview MediaPlus’ Tamara Alesi.

Weekly Work:

Paramount, Pinterest, IAC Results: Digital Growth Helps, But Legacy Media Still Under Pressure

MNTN’s 1Q26 Shows Strong Growth in Limited Space + JC Decaux’s Solid OOH Results

Disney, NYT, Instacart, Criteo, Taboola, Clear Channel: A Healthy But Uneven Ad Market

Warner Bros. Discovery, Snap, AppLovin, DoubleVerify, Magnite: CTV, Social, and In-App Grow While Linear and Open Web Lag

Nexstar, Gray Media, Unity, Lamar, Teads, BCE, S4: Legacy Media, Agencies and Open Web Lag the Industry in 1Q26

The Trade Desk, PubMatic, OutFront, News Corp, Yelp: Open Internet and Publishing Under Pressure, While OOH Holds Up

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending May 8: AB Inbev, KraftHeinz, Logitech, Paypal, Pfizer, Shopify and More

AMC Networks, E.W. Scripps, Ziff Davis: Legacy Media Remains Under Pressure

More Context:

Dozens of the world’s largest sellers of advertising reported 1Q26 results this past week.

Although we continue to hear companies citing macro-economic factors as a source of weakness, the reality is that the overall advertising industry likely posted one of its fastest growth rates ever during 1Q26, and commentary about the current quarter suggests that whatever the right number is, it won’t be a lot worse in 2Q26. In other words, anywhere there’s not double-digit growth is a loss of market share, at least at an industry-wide level.

More specifically, results from the past week provide additional confirmation that the largest digital platforms are continuing to grow rapidly. Certain sub-sectors of traditional media such as out-of-home are faring very well, too. However, where we also see ongoing pressures – that we argue are secular and NOT cyclical – impacting publishing and television-based media owners. The open web, and by extension, ad tech, is experiencing mixed results, perhaps reflected best by The Trade Desk’s quarterly results, which we wrote about at more length this past week.

For individual companies in sub-sectors experiencing ongoing softness, it shouldn’t necessarily be all doom and gloom in this context. Growth can still occur, but it needs to take place through market share gains, a broader media footprint or through new sources of revenue from outside of advertising.

Additional details will follow in the coming weeks alongside our upcoming annual chocolate industry overview.

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week. Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian and Olivia interview Kepler’s Remy Stiles.

Weekly Work:

The Ad Tech Stack is Getting Simpler, and Cheaper

One Note to Rule Them All: Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft + More Report 1Q26 Results, as Ad Growth Remains Strong

Reddit, Roku, Sinclair, and Apple Show the Ad Market is Still Rewarding Scale, Performance, and Automation

Spotify Results Highlight Audio’s Core Issues: Strong Reach, Weak Monetization. Consolidation Alone Won’t Fix It

SiriusXM, USA Today Results: Audio Steady Growth While Publishing Declines Accelerate

Omnicom + WPP 1Q26 Results: Organic Net Revenue Growth Likely Soft At Omnicom, Weak As Expected at WPP

Stagwell 1Q26, Publicis Annual Updates

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending May 1: Chipotle, Colgate, Estee Lauder, Verizon, Visa, Wayfair and More

More Context:

The ad tech ecosystem is entering a phase where the goal is not just growth, but also simplification, i.e., fewer steps, lower costs, and increasing pressure on fees. That shift is more than just supply path optimization and is starting to show up more clearly in how platforms are being built and positioned.

Index Exchange’s recently announced Bedrock partnership fits directly into this trend. Running DSP-like functionality inside an SSP’s infrastructure may reduce compute costs and make it easier to execute campaigns. It also represents an attempt to claim ownership of the decision-making layer of the transaction.

The news of the partnership was an example of how platforms are being refined in ways that gradually move them closer to a more consolidated, AI-driven model, even if that means overlapping with other historical areas of the transaction stack. This is why it’s probably too simplistic to frame this as a clean “DSP vs. SSP” shift with a single winner. It looks more like a crowded, multi-directional push toward a simpler end state.

More broadly, incumbents tend to have advantages in infrastructure and distribution that don’t shift quickly. That suggests any real changes in control across the stack are more likely to play out gradually, although AI is accelerating the pace of these conversations. The most likely outcome for now is a gradual blurring of roles, some pressure on fees, and ongoing experimentation with where different functions sit. In the long run, we could be heading towards a landscape which is compressed, simplified, and where roles overlap, fees are lower, and control is still up for grabs.

Weekly Work:

Apple’s Leadership Change Has Limited Implications for Advertising (For Now)

Ad Revenue Growth Remains Strong; Creative Destruction is Still a Key Driver

Agency Forecast Update and Industry Overview

Comcast & Rogers: Sports is Carrying TV Advertising While the Core Remains Weak

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary For Week Ending April 24: AmEx, Capital One, Constellation Brands, Keurig Dr. Pepper and More

More Context:

As we have written previously, the advertising agency business has often been underestimated, including by many of its practitioners. By contrast, we remain relatively optimistic about the likelihood that agencies can continue to grow so long as marketers continue to collectively increase their advertising spending and agencies continue investing in their capacity to service those marketers.

With this in mind, we have updated agency industry expectations to reflect new data and recent performance trends, largely based on a new analysis and data set we have established covering 17 publicly listed agency groups and hundreds of independent privately held companies, too.

We believe that excluding spending on political advertising, US agencies grew around 1.5% during 2025 in the United States. This compares to a growth rate of approximately 2.0% during 2024 and growth that ranged between 4 and 6% during the pre-pandemic period of 2011-2019. Although we think that fears of decline for the industry are overblown, it’s hard to imagine growth returning to the levels we saw last decade, even as spending on advertising – on paid media in particular – is much more intense and growing faster. Arguably the biggest driver of this softness is the intense focus on limiting “non-working” spend (to agencies, data and other service providers) in favor of “working” spend (mostly to paid media). We do not expect these pressures to abate any time soon, resulting in a similar low single digit growth rate of around 2% annually for the next several years.

An more complete overview of last week’s report can be found in Ad Age’s coverage here. The full report is available to Madison & Wall advisory clients and corporate subscribers. In the coming weeks we will be hosting a webinar to review details in the report.

Weekly Work:

New IMF Forecasts Show Limited Economic Impact From the War. Advertisers Are Acting Accordingly

Publicis Posts Solid Growth For 1Q26; Underlying Like-for-Like Client Gains Illustrate Agency Durability As AI Proliferates

Havas’ 1Q26 Results Reinforces View Of Agency Resilience In Face of AI + A Closer Look in Charts

Snap Resets Costs, Viant Buys Measurement: Competing on AI and Data Signals

Netflix: Advertising Momentum Continues to Build In Support of Steady Growth

MediaForEurope Results: Repackaging TV For Growth in a Market That Isn’t Growing

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary: CarMax, Constellation, JP Morgan Chase, Levi’s, PepsiCo, Schwab and More

More Context:

As MediaforEurope reported its most recent earnings results this past week, the company continus to consolidate operations across Europe to build a “European Ad Sales Powerhouse,” with a more convenient way for global and regional marketers to access television. Compared to RTL’s strategy of selling individually in each market, a unified offering is likely to be more attractive to small and mid-sized businesses that might want to experiment with television.

Aspects of this unified international build-out include building a full ad tech stack with a “single customer data platform and a unified targeting and data activation approach,” all, of course “empowered by artificial intelligence.”

Efforts such as these are increasingly essential. Because the overall television budget pie is eroding, albeit slowly, almost every TV broadcaster around the world is searching for additional budgets. In the U.S., platforms like MNTN and Vibe are trying to leverage this opportunity, primarily targeting smaller first-time television advertisers with simplified tools, and most network owners have initiatives in place to generate revenue from a broader set of smaller marketers. MFE’s self-service offering is targeting a similar group of small clients.

Stepping back, broader trends have been unchanged and are unfavorable for sellers of professionally-produced, video-based ad inventory. Television in Europe has been weak, but overall advertising demand has not. The difference is illustrated when comparing growth for Meta and Google, both of which have maintained double-digit growth in EMEA against the region’s biggest sellers of TV advertising.

With that noted, efforts to gain shares within TV become increasingly important for individual sellers of advertising, as does an ongoing wiliness to innovate ad products and continually work at finding new marketing solutions for the marketers these sellers have historically relied upon.

Source: Madison & Wall, Company Reports

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week. Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Brian interviews Mile Marker’s Soctt Shamberg.

Weekly Work:

Why A Return to Brand Advertising Won’t Mean a Return to TV

OpenAI’s $100 Billion Ad Ambition: Highly Unlikely, But Not Impossible

WPP “Explores” Sale of PR Agencies: Analysis

Top 30 Independent Agencies Grew 2.5% in 1Q26, With Growth Concentrated in Largest Groups

Corus FY2Q26 Earnings: Linear Ad Declines Continue, No Sign of Stabilization

More Context:

We think there are many factors that have shaped media mixes over the past 20 years. But one of the most important is the shift toward performance.

Performance channels offer clear measurement, attribution, and short-term feedback. That makes them easier to justify internally. Over time, that has steadily pulled budgets away from television and into digital formats.

Source: Madison & Wall

This has led to a common argument: that the shift to performance is driven by measurement gaps and short-term incentives. Intuitively, most marketers agree that brand advertising matters for long-term growth. But it is difficult to prove, and even harder to defend in budgeting discussions.

As a result, advocates for legacy channels like television, print, and audio often frame a cyclical return to brand advertising - corporate detoxing after an over-investment in performance - as a reason why growth in budgets will return to those channels.

We think that’s unlikely. Not only is the shift towards performance likely structural, but even if it were cyclical, marketers would likely invest in brand advertising strategies that look different from their past strategies.

Instead, when brands talk about refocusing on brand building, they aren’t talking about moving dollars back to traditional channels. They are talking about influencer-led, digital-first brand-building strategies. We believe there are several reasons driving this shift towards influencers when it comes to brand advertising, which we explored at length in a note this past week.

Against this backdrop, a shift back toward brand likely does not imply a return to legacy channels. Instead, it points to a different model of brand building, one that is digital-first, influencer-led, and integrated with the same systems that power performance marketing, with legacy channels playing a supporting role.

Join Brian Wieser (CEO) and Luke Stillman (MD) of Madison & Wall, alongside Adobe’s Anvita Sinha (Principal AI Strategist), for a deep dive into the findings. Learn how leading brands are evolving their creative workflows, content strategies, and media operations for an AI-driven future.

Whether you’re a CMO, creative leader, or performance marketer, you’ll gain practical insights into what’s changing, why it matters, and how to prepare for an AI-first world.

Event Details
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Time: Noon – 1:00 PM Eastern / 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM Pacific

Register here: https://event.adobe.com/advertising-value-chain-research

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week. Separately, on Agency Business from Madison & Wall and Fusion Front Media, Olivia and Brian interview BCG’s Janet Balis.

Weekly Work:

US Retail Sales Data Illustrates Economic Resilience Ahead of War

Omnicom + Global HoldCos In 12 Charts

Publicis Expands Sports Marketing Presence; Read-Throughs For Agencies

An Interview With mediasense’s Sam Tomlinson

More Context:

The US Census Bureau released favorable February 2026 retail sales data on Wednesday showing ongoing resilience for retailers, at minimum, in the period immediately preceding the start of the US-Israel war with Iran, and before the subsequent spike in oil prices.

As a reminder our general view that economic growth and advertising spending have been strong despite economic policies, not because of them, as tariff-driven disruptions to supply chains and labor markets along, diminished confidence in the rule of law in the United States and weak confidence among consumers were never likely to offset tax cuts, and instead were always likely to negatively impact operations and investment. As we wrote early in March, the war adds uncertainties which will weigh further on advertiser spending as the conflict drags on.

Nonetheless, despite recently raising growth forecasts for the whole year of 2026, our expectations for the second half of the year remain muted, with nominal growth elevated by what we expect should be higher-than-normal levels of inflation.