Ad revenue should stabilize for media companies in 2025

The advertising market has positive momentum going into 2025 — especially for media companies with sports rights and tentpole live programming.

Sports and live events such as awards shows reigned supreme in conversations with media executives who weighed in on their expectations for the advertising market in the year ahead. The end of the uncertainty surrounding the election has helped the outlook improve, too, they said.

And despite consumers fleeing the traditional TV bundles, with more ad dollars going toward streaming, executives emphasized that traditional TV is still important in discussions with advertisers, especially when it comes to sports.

Overall, executives said they expect stability in the market and are hoping to move past the slowdown in ad spending in recent years.

“Normalization is the right way to say it with the advertising market,” said Mark Marshall, NBCUniversal’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships. “With the election settled, a lot of companies feel the uncertainty over that has gone away.”

He added that the company has seen more so-called scatter market budgets come in during the fourth quarter, which is what the industry calls the buying and selling of ads closer to their airdate versus ads that are bought further out.

“Our first quarter is looking really strong. I think that any election year is challenging for anyone in the fourth quarter because a lot of marketers end up sitting on their hands since the airwaves and digital are crowded,” said Dan Porter, CEO of sports media company Overtime. “I think that’s true for us and it’s true for everyone.”

Yet despite the uptick in ad revenue following the election and the forecast stability, Natalie Bastian, global chief marketing officer at Teads, said she expects a lot of the same trends.

Bastian noted that 2024 included major moments like the Summer Olympics and presidential election, which strengthened TV ad revenue. She expects the same budgets to carry over into the new year, however.

“What we’ve heard in general from some of our closest partners … media budgets aren’t growing, and so there’s just more selection into where [advertisers are] spending their money,” said Bastian. This makes sports and live programming that much more important to media companies.

Overall, the global advertising industry is expected to surpass $1 trillion in total revenue for the first time this year, excluding U.S. political advertising, and will grow 7.7% in 2025 to reach $1.1 trillion, according to a recent report from GroupM, WPP’s media investment group. Advertising on digital platforms — which includes retail media as a segment — is what’s driving that increase.

TV, considered “the most effective form of…