• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 13, 2021

The ad industry's global and U.S. ad growth consensus improved dramatically for this year, as Dentsu became the third of the major agency holding companies to significantly upgrade its outlooks.

The consensus, an ongoing compilation of forecasts and revisions from the Big 4 forecasters -- Dentsu, WPP's GroupM, IPG Mediabrands' Magna, and Publicis Media's Zenith units -- improved to an 11.7% expansion in global ad spending vs. +10.6% when GroupM and Magna published their most recent updates in June.

The U.S. consensus for 2021 improved to an expansion of 12.2% from 9.7% in June.

The consensus is expected to further improve when Zenith issues its revised update shortly, but the trend is already clear that the ad marketplace has now fully recovered from the global and U.S. ad recessions of 2020 that were caused by shutdowns and ad category disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The pandemic-induced decline in global advertising spend during 2020 has proved less severe than anticipated. While 2020 remains the weakest performing year since the global financial crisis, the decline in growth during 2020 has improved since the January 2021 forecast from -8.8% to -7.2%," Dentsu writes in the introduction to its new forecast report.

While Tokyo-based ad conglomerate cautions that "all forecasts continue to be dependent on a number of factors and are subject to change," it nonetheless upgraded its worldwide, U.S. outlooks, as well as those for other national markets for both 2021, as well as 2022.