Advertising market 2025. Poland, Europe and the World

illustration: Gemini AI

The currently forecast 8.8% growth by WPP Media at the end of 2025 is considerably more than the previously assumed 7.7%. The updated forecast assumes that global advertising revenues will increase by 8.8% in 2025 to 1.14 trillion dollars, and in 2026 by another 7.1% (excluding political advertising in the USA).

- The "This Year Next Year 2025" report offers a fresh look at how global trends in culture, commerce, politics, and technology shape the industry and what this means for marketers in the coming months and years - comments Izabela Albrychiewicz, CEO of WPP Media CEE. - This year`s data shows "creative destruction" in action: streaming video cannibalizes linear TV, retail media take over budgets from traditional digital channels, AI-powered "answer engines" begin to transform search behaviors, and content created by creators continues to displace professionally produced media. AI is one of the biggest drivers of change here, we observe how it transforms content creation, media planning, measurement, and consumer interactions.


The "This Year Next Year" report introduces a division of the entire advertising market into 4 areas this year:

• Content (social media, linear TV, streaming, audio, newspapers, magazines, gaming),
• Commerce (retail media, travel services media, financial services media networks),
• Intelligence (search, soon also AI search),
• Location (DOOH, OOH, cinema).

Global conclusions from the report

Advertising revenues will increase by 8.8% in 2025 to 1.14 trillion dollars, and in 2026 the forecast growth will amount to 7.1% (in both cases excluding political advertising in the USA), while the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will reach 6.3%.

• Commerce will reach 178.2 billion dollars in global advertising revenues, surpassing total TV advertising revenues for the first time (of course, individual markets may have different dynamics).
• Global content-based advertising will reach 663.5 billion dollars in 2025 (+7.9% y/y), and in 2026 it will grow to 698.8 billion dollars (+5.3%).
• Newspaper advertising falls symbolically to 31.4 billion dollars in 2025 (-0.3%), showing short-term stabilization, while for 2026 a decrease of 3.2% to 30.4 billion dollars is forecast.
• Gaming is the fastest-growing content-based advertising channel: 8.5 billion dollars in 2025 (+29.5%) and 10.7 billion dollars in 2026 (+25.6%), although the absolute share is only 0.7% of total advertising revenues in 2025, growing to 0.9% in 2026.
• By 2030, digital out-of-home advertising (DOOH) will account for 43.9% of total OOH revenues (31.4 billion dollars), approaching parity with traditional formats.
• Television will reach 167.5 billion dollars in 2025 (+0.7%) and 171.1 billion dollars in 2026 (+2.1%), and the share of streaming in total TV revenues will increase from 26.2% in 2025 to 29.5% in 2026.
• Social and digital platforms are the main engine of growth for content-based advertising: 413 billion dollars in 2025 (+12.8%) and 445.4 billion dollars in 2026 (+7.8%).
• Audio advertising will remain at an almost unchanged level: 27.5 billion dollars in 2025 (-0.1%) and 27.6 billion dollars in 2026 (+0.3%).
• Intelligence (search) will reach 244.9 billion dollars, +10.2% year-on-year and 21.4% share in total advertising revenues; in 2026 growth will remain at the level of 10.3%.
• Commerce will account for 15.6% of global advertising revenues in 2025, reaching 178.2 billion dollars.
• Total OOH advertising will reach 54.7 billion dollars in 2025, which means an increase of 6.3% year-on-year.
• Cinema advertising will grow by 5.5% to 2.2 billion dollars in 2025.
• The largest 3 markets contributed significantly to global growth: advertising revenues in the USA will increase in 2025 by 12.5% (excluding political advertising), to 431.2 billion dollars; China will record an increase of 6.8% to 216.0 billion dollars, and the UK - an increase of 8.0% to 58.4 billion dollars.

Advertising market in Europe

The European advertising market also records solid increases - WPP Media predicts that in 2025 it will increase by 5.8% to 257.6 billion dollars, and in 2026 there will be further growth of 5.5%. In the years 2025-2030, the fastest-growing channels will include: gaming (18.4% CAGR, compound annual growth rate), retail media (12.2% CAGR), and streaming (14.8% CAGR).

The penetration of digital pure-play advertising shows significant variability in Europe: 24 out of 30 markets rank below the regional average amounting to 67.2% of total advertising revenues. This discrepancy results largely from the stronger presence of traditional media, especially television and press, in some regions, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

Rank	Country	Advertising revenues (bn USD)	Growth dynamics (2025)
1.	United Kingdom	62.53	7.0%
2.	Germany	42.23	3.6%
3.	France	34.81	4.9%
10.	Poland	5.45	8.9%

The market is strongly concentrated, as Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and TikTok combined have an estimated 77.0% of total digital advertising revenues in Europe in 2025. Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and Ireland are predicted as the fastest-growing advertising markets in Europe, Poland is also among the "top students".

Advertising market in Poland

For Poland, the growth of the entire market estimated by WPP Media in 2025 is expected to amount to 8.9%. The value of the Polish advertising market assumed at the end of 2025 is 18.56 billion PLN. Forecasts for 2026 speak of growth at the level of 6.9% - with this assumption, the market will reach a value of 19.85 billion PLN at the end of 2026.

• Television has another decent year behind it, whose growth in 2025 is estimated at 4.5%, which of course means that it loses shares in the entire market (which grows faster), but its market share falls relatively slowly (to 31.9% compared to 33.2% a year earlier). The value of this medium at the end of 2025 is expected to amount to 5.91 billion PLN, and forecasts for 2026 speak of growth at the level of 3.8% (to 6.14 billion PLN).
• The OOH channel, driven primarily by the development of DOOH, gains 8.3% in 2025, reaching a value of 881.9 million PLN (which gives it a market share at the level of 4.8%). The forecast for 2026 assumes another 8.1% growth, to 935.5 million PLN.
• Audio advertising grew in our country in 2025 by 5.8%, to 919.4 million PLN (market share 5%), in 2026 it is supposed to be 4.9% growth (to 964.8 million PLN).
• The cinema market will grow in 2025 by 9.6%, and in 2026 by another 8.2%, while for dailies and magazines 2025 was "stable", with symbolic decreases.

- This was a year of two faces. Although in the first half of the year the specter of tariffs, trade wars, and deglobalization pressure as well as speculations about the "AI bubble" hung over the market, reality turned out to be different, more positive, which results from the better than expected reaction of markets to tariffs, as well as from the fact that AI increases business efficiency and creates new companies already starting to spend quite a lot on advertising - summarizes Izabela Albrychiewicz, CEO of WPP Media CEE. - And hence the year-end report raises global forecasts. As for Poland, the advertising market is growing three times faster than GDP, so there is something to be happy about, besides, general economic forecasts have also been improving recently, so we can look into the future quite optimistically.

In 2025, the eyes of the entire industry were directed at artificial intelligence, a huge part of industry discussions concentrated precisely around AI, and I am sure that it will be similar in 2026. What is important, the advertising industry had a certain advantage here over a large part of the rest of the economy because it integrated machine learning with its activity even before the appearance of generative AI.