• by Joe Mandese , 3 hours ago

For the first time in half a dozen years, IPG Mediabrands' Magna unit is not releasing a third quarter update to its quarterly advertising forecasts, raising questions about the future of Interpublic's ad forecasting legacy as it prepares to merge with Omnicom next month.

Interpublic has publicly reported annual, semi-annual and more recently quarterly U.S. and global ad forecasting updates since it pioneered the practice in 1948.

Over the years, other big agency holding companies followed suit, first Publicis's Zenith media (which discontinued releasing them in December 2024), then WPP's GroupM (now WPP Media) and Aegis Media/Dentsu.

Omnicom historically has not released industry forecasts, nor have Havas, Stagwell or major independents like Horizon Media, but several non-agency holding company players have been making the push to be ad industry sources for advertising spending forecasts, including Informa Group's WARC (World Advertising Research Center), syndicated ad spending researcher Guideline, and Madison and Wall, the consultancy and Substack newsletter publisher founded by former Interpublic and WPP forecaster Brian Wieser.

As part of a push to expand his research and publishing to include more international coverage, Wieser recently recruited long-time Magna analyst Luke Stillman.

MediaPost, meanwhile, has obtained what appears to be Guideline's first publicly-released forecast for U.S. ad spending, projecting 2025 will rise 4.6% to $113 billion. The Guideline forecast also breaks out the growth and/or decline in U.S. ad spending for major media categories (see below).

An IPG Mediabrands spokesperson confirmed no third quarter forecast will be released and Interpublic and Omnicom are still sorting out what the combined entity will do.

Founded as part of an endowment made by the widow of McCann-Erickson Founder Alfred Erickson, the agency named Bob Coen its first and longest-running director of forecasting -- a role that spanned more than six decades -- until he was succeeded by Wieser, a former Wall Street securities analyst. Wheh Wieser left Magna, the agency named Vincent Letang to succeed him.

During his reign, Coen maintained an ad spending database going back to 1776 and was the go-to source the U.S. government and other industries used to benchmark the ad industry's contribution to the American and worldwide economies.