Market Data 
- People who run businesses hate uncertainty. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now.
- When people who run businesses need to cut costs, they often cut their ad spending first.
- Combine those two points and you can see why ad veteran Brian Wieser has cut his industry growth forecast for 2025.
Are tariffs coming? Going? Here to stay?
Is the US going to invade Greenland? Or Panama? Canada?
What’s going to happen to jobs? What about the stock market?
I don’t know how this version of the Trump administration is going to pan out. You don’t, either.
More important for the ad business: People who make and sell things also don’t know, which means they’re likely to be more cautious when it comes to spending. Which means they may be looking to cut back on advertising.
And that explains why Brian Wieser, a longtime ad industry executive, has lowered his spending forecast for 2025. A few months ago, Wieser’s Madison and Wall firm had thought the US ad business would grow by 4.5% this year. Now they’ve knocked that number down to 3.6%.
After Trump’s election last year, Wieser expected the ad business to encounter bumps for a bunch of reasons, including “an increased reliance on the idiosyncratic preferences of the president rather than the more predictable institutionally-driven policy-making processes businesses have historically relied upon in the United States.”
But looking back, Wieser says, he underestimated how much uncertainty Trump 2.0 would bring: “nearly three months into the year, what we can see is a certainty of additional negative factors, including volatility around trade policies and a more extreme threat to supply chains and corporate decision-making than we previously expected.”
You can debate whether business owners and managers should be surprised by Trump’s agenda and implementation. But one basic truism about advertising is that it’s the easiest thing for companies to cut when things aren’t going well — or when they’re worried things won’t go well.
And some ad sellers I’ve talked to have reported similar sentiments from some of their clients, ranging from CPG companies to automakers. If you don’t know how much your product is going to cost — or whether you’ll be able to import it into the US at all — or what consumers’ buying power is going to be like, maybe you cut back on some of your ad spending until you have a better sense of things.
It’s worth noting that Wieser says his forecast is based on years of studying the ad business, and the economic indicators and decisions he’s already seen out of Trump. But it is a forecast — not a reflection of what ad buyers and sellers are doing right now.
Still, as I’ve noted in the past, shifts in the ad business have made it much easier for skittish buyers to tap the brakes. The move to digital ads also means ad buys can happen in real time, instead of weeks or months in advance. That can super-charge ad buying when things are booming — see the weird pandemic spike of 2021-22 — and it can accelerate declines in the other direction.
“Decision making is now incredibly short-term oriented,” Wieser tells me.
So we’re not seeing an actual ad slump, yet — every ad forecast I’ve seen still predicts growth for this year. But if things change, they could change quite fast.
