Strategic Intelligence: Advertising Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

While the advertising sector will not feel a direct impact from tariffs on imported goods, a deteriorating macroeconomic environment will cause ad spending to decline. A March 2025 study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that 41% of US advertisers expecting budget cuts due to tariffs plan to cut from social media, while 24% plan cuts to the linear TV and gaming channels. Tariffs has been added to the thematic screen of the advertising sector scorecard with a 15% weighting. The biggest players in the ad sector, including Amazon, ByteDance, Google, and Meta, all score poorly on tariffs due to the expected negative impact

On both sides of the Atlantic, Apple, Alphabet, and Meta face concerted regulatory efforts to end their dominant position in the digital advertising market. The European Commission has started to enforce the Digital Markets Act (DMA) this year, focusing on Apple and Alphabet’s dominance in app stores and Meta’s use of personal data for advertising. The latest lawsuit from the US Department of Justice (DoJ) takes aim at Alphabet’s lucrative adtech business, with potential remedies including breaking up the company. Antitrust is a key theme in the thematic screen of the advertising sector scorecard, with a weighting of 15%. All Big Tech companies have negative scores for this theme.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the advertising sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition, and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• The analyst developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• Our thematic engine tags over 180 million data items across six alternative data sets - patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news - to themes. The vast datasets within our thematic engine help our analysts to produce sector scorecards that identify the companies best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats.