• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 20, 2021

The U.S. ad economy continues to recover from the COVID-19 ad recession, expanding 43.3% in July and marking the fifth consecutive month of year-over-year growth, according to a MediaPost analysis of data from Standard Media Index's U.S. Ad Market Tracker.

Relative to the pre-pandemic month of July 2019, the U.S. ad economy is up 15%.

Significantly, smaller ad categories are outpacing the top 10 in growth relative to both last year, as well as July 2019 (see chart below).

The data indicates that smaller advertisers are relatively more elastic in their response to economic and advertising recessions relative to bigger ad categories.