• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 5, 2022

A year ago, the Big 3 holding company forecasters described the elements fueling sustained growth in the advertising economy by using the metaphor of "planets" realigning. A year later they've all downgraded their expectations for 2022 due to a variety of factors including global and U.S. economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, secular shifts among several media and technology categories.

At the same time, they are describing their downgrades as more of a "normalization" of ad spending patterns that have adjusted from the hyper expansion of 2021, which compared with 2020's mini ad recession, and characterize the near-term outlook as resilient.

That said, nine 2022 global ad revisions since MediaPost's agency consensus (also including Dentsu's periodic forecasts) shows the ebb and flow of 2022 ad market expectations from a high of +10.3% at the start of this year, to its low of +7.6% this week.

Interestingly, the longer term view has remained relatively constant, with both 2023's and 2024's global ad outlook updates hovering within a percentage point gap throughout.