Economic gridlock in the U.S. and a persistent financial crisis in the Eurozone have led GroupM to revise its worldwide advertising spending forecast for 2014 downward to 4.6 percent from the 5.1 percent hike predicted earlier this year.
The revised forecast was made in GroupM’s biannual worldwide report, “This Year, Next Year,” which also predicted that 2013 worldwide advertising spending in measured media will hit $508 billion, a 3.3 percent increase over 2012 spending of $492 billion.
The 74-country forecast predicted that global ad spending in 2014 will increase 4.6 percent compared to 2013, representing $531 billion. The report was prepared by GroupM Futures Director Adam Smith and was released today at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York.
For the U.S. market, the report said advertising investment in measured media grew 
1.8 percent in 2013 to $156.3 billion, up from $153.5 billion the previous year. For 2014, the revised forecast predicted a 2.9 percent increase to $161 billion.
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GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our stakeholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.
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