The Impact Of COVID-19 On Marketing And Advertising

Quarter 1 – 2021:

The entire UK advertising marketing is expected to be the 2nd highest for growth in the year 2021.

Advertising spends among UK businesses is set to experience the 2nd highest growth rate of all of the markets in the world in 2021 according to Dentsu’s Ad Spend Report. They anticipate that there will be a very healthy recovery among the UK advertising market and they forecast it should experience a 10.4% year-on-year increase by the end of the year. The only other region that is ahead of that kind of growth is India.

While the United States is expected to continue to dominate the overall share of the world’s advertising spends at 37.9%, the UK is expected to come in 4th with a very modest 5.1% of the market.

The ability to understand and predict the newer consumer behaviours and the ability to differentiate which ones are temporary and permanent will be key for advertisers in the coming year. After all, much has changed and consumer behaviour has changed along with it. That being said, many brands expect that search, social, and video will continue to be the most significant drivers of digital growth in the industry despite everything being relatively uncertain.

The top Advertising Agencies Make Modest Predictions For The Overall Growth Of The Global Advertising Market

At the end of the previous year, Forbes put together a bunch of predictions from some of the top agencies in the business including Magna, GroupM, and Zenith.

From these predictions, there seemed to be an agreement that digital ad spend was going to increase at a much higher tick than some of the traditional methods of advertising. One of the areas that are expected to make a big comeback in the space is cinema advertising. This is especially true given a lot of markets are looking to lift restrictions as the vaccination rate continues to trend upwards. With Tokyo set to host the Olympics, sports advertising is likely to experience a major boon, as well.

Magna anticipates that the global advertising spend is going to rise as much as 7.6% in the year 2021. This would put the advertising spend at $612 billion globally. Digital media is expected to see as much as 10.4% of this. Also, they predict that India is going to be the leader in advertising spend growth throughout the entire world rising by as much as 26.9% year over year.

Zenith on the other hand predicts that the world advertising spend will reach as much as $624 billion. This is still less than the total number recorded in the year 2019. They expect that the United States will experience a small boost in advertising spend from its recent election which is still much smaller compared to other growth regions like the Middle East and even Latin America at 11%.

GroupM happens to be the most optimistic about the global advertising spend increasing in 2021. They forecast that it will jump to as much as $651 billion with the largest amount of that stemming from Latin America at a whopping 24.4% growth. According to what they’ve analysed, digital media is expected to experience the biggest increase at 14.1% which comes out to $396.8 billion which is much higher than Magna anticipates.

Projected Advertising Spend In The UK Revised Down For 2021

There was data from the latest Advertising Association Expenditure Report that predicted that advertising spend recovery would be far slower than it was originally reported. They originally anticipated that the growth would sit around 16.6% but that has since been pushed down to 14.4% which is a fairly significant decrease.

The overall advertising spends for the year 2020 is expected to fall as much as 14.5% on the last year which totals £21.5 billion. This is a number that would represent a loss of £3.6 billion compared to the previous year. That being said, the final quarter is expected to experience a 10.5% decrease in advertising spend compared to the same period experienced the year prior.