WPP Media – This Year, Next Year Midyear 2026

Despite an eventful start to the year, advertising is growing. This unexpected resilience is largely down to what our new analysis describes as the 21st century’s “Gold Rush”: artificial intelligence.

Amid a challenging backdrop, including conflict in the Middle East, elevated oil prices, persistent geopolitical fragmentation, and negative consumer financial sentiment, every major technology company is racing to achieve greater intelligence (and monetizable interfaces) via an investment cycle of historic proportions.

Global advertising growth by region

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The report finds that AI investment — and the advertising it generates, both from AI-native companies and from traditional advertisers deploying AI to improve efficiency across their businesses — is therefore providing a powerful countervailing force to external economic headwinds. In the U.S., where the AI rush is most concentrated, ad revenue growth is expected to reach 11.9%, also an upgrade from our prior estimate.

With that context established, the report surfaces three themes shaping this June’s forecast.

The three themes

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The big picture

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Media Channel Forecast

The report also explores the wider economic backdrop for 2026, plus media channel revenue forecasts, and data covering the top 10 global ad markets and growth by channel through 2031.

Social remains the largest single channel in our forecast and the largest contributor to Content-driven advertising segment growth. However, its year-over-year growth will decelerate to single digits from 2027, and three converging headwinds may force a re-evaluation of established models: time spent with social platforms is expected to plateau or decline; age-related access restrictions are taking effect worldwide; and AI chatbots are emerging as competing platforms upon which consumers spend more time.

Commerce, led by retail media, is increasingly the foundation upon which the industry is being built. But the channel will face new challenges as commerce behavior shifts to generative search and social. Messages directed at humans to influence human behavior may not be sufficient for an era in which a meaningful share of commercially relevant decisions are made by non-human systems, like AI agents.

Meanwhile, traditional search and generative search will account for 21.8% of total advertising revenue in 2026. Global content-driven advertising is projected to earn $720.2 billion in 2026, yet its share of total advertising revenue is set to fall by 2031 — shaped by AI-driven transformations in how content is both created and consumed.

Generative search: fastest channel to $100 billion?

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Ultimately, the kind of brand recognition that will matter most in an increasingly AI-mediated world — the salience that determines whether a brand is named in a chatbot response, recommended by an agent, or recalled in a moment of decision — is unlikely to be built primarily inside two-second social clips or a chatbot conversation. It will be built where it has always been built: in environments that command engagement, deliver context, and earn trust. That includes streaming TV, live sports, premium publishing, OOH, cinema and potentially new content surfaces: connected vehicles, AR, ambient displays, and physical robots.

For advertisers, this means the stakes around media decision-making are rising, not falling. Content is changing. The economics are changing. The case for thoughtful, human-led media decisions has never been stronger.

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