• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, January 30, 2025

Publishers can take at least some solace from Winterberry Group’s new report, Outlook for Advertising, Marketing and Data: Transformation Accelerates.  

Total media expenditures will grow by 6.1% YoY to $585 billion in 2025, Winterberry projects. And there will be shifts to largely digital, data-centric channels fueled by investments in ad tech, analytics and AI.  

The online ad spend will see 12.3% growth YoY, including a 16.7% hike in video investment, 15.8% in CTV, 13.3% in social, 12.2% in search and 9.7% in display. 

But legacy print media will take a hit as part of a 5.5% downturn in offline spending. That’s the bad news for publishers.  

Lacking the political boost seen in 2024, print newspapers will experience a 13% falloff, magazines a 7.3% drop and terrestrial radio 5.1%. Linear TV will plummet by 19.3%. 

Last year, ad spending grew by 11%. Take out political advertising for the 2024 election and that falls to 8.7%, which is still higher than the growth forecast for this year.

The message? You better have your digital house in order. 

“There are significant business drivers here—fueled by data and tech investments,” says Bruce Biegel, senior managing partner, Winterberry Group, and author of the report. 

Biegel continues, “We see both connected commerce—the melding together of search, social, display, and retail ad networks with consumer and B2B transactions—and investments in the ad tech stack driven by data insights and generative AI—as being central to these transformative shifts in media spend.”