U.S. Ad Recovery Continues To Soar, Surges 52% In April

by Joe Mandese , May 20, 2021

In the second month to report an explicit year-over-year comparison impacted by the COVID-19 ad recession, the U.S. advertising marketplace surged 52% over April 2020, another strong indicator that the ad recovery is sustainable.

The month, however, still has not caught up with April 2019, which was the best April since Standard Media Index has tracked the U.S. advertising via a market composite index, the U.S. Ad Market Tracker.

The April 2021 index is 7.4% lower than April 2019.

April 2021, interestingly, also is the first post-recession month to show stronger gains for smaller ad categories than the biggest ones, an indication that the recovery is gaining momentum across a broader range of advertisers.

While the top 10 ad categories' ad spending jumped 44% year-over-year in April, all other ad categories surged 69.1%.

In terms of the media mix, the national TV advertising marketplace continues to rebound, but digital is driving most of the aggregate U.S. ad market recovery.

National TV ad spending increased 14.7% over April 2020, but is still down 32.1% vs. April 2019.

The U.S. digital advertising marketplace is up 82.7% vs. April 2020, and up 31.7% vs. April 2019.

ad spending, advertising, covid-19, digital, research, television

2 comments about "U.S. Ad Recovery Continues To Soar, Surges 52% In April".

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John Grono from GAP Research, May 21, 2021 at 3:24 a.m.
I wonder how many people read this chart as the April market this year is way higher than last year.   52% up is WAYYYY bigger than 35% down.   Party like there is no tomorrow!

But hold on.

Let's say that April 2020 was 100 widgets.   (The actual number doesn't matter, so that's why I chose 100).

If April 2020 was -35% then April 2019 must have been 154 widgets (100/154 = 65% ... or -35%.)

Now April 2021 was +52% on April 2020, meaning April 2021 was 152 widgets.   It's NEARLY caught up to 2 years ago with the 154 widgets of 2020.   Put another way, it's around 1.3% lower than two years ago.

Yep, it's a great improvement but not as much as the graph would seem to (unintentionally) impute.
Reply

Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., May 21, 2021 at 12:39 p.m.

@John Grono: Which is why we put a chart in below it showing April 2019-2021. And why we have the dynamic U.S. Ad Market Tracker database for anyone to click through and anayze themselves.