Strategic Intelligence: Advertising Sector Scorecard Q2 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 spending, while 24% plan cuts to linear TV and gaming channels. The biggest players in the ad sector, including Amazon, ByteDance, Google, and Meta, all score poorly on the tariffs theme due to the expected negative impact.

Apple, Alphabet, and Meta face concerted regulatory efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to end their dominant position in the digital advertising market. The European Commission began enforcing 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 analyst’s 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 analyst's 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 has 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.
• First, we identify the top 10 themes transforming a sector across four categories (tech, macro, industry, and ESG). We also rank themes in order of priority by examining activity levels across 200 million alternative data signals, including patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news.
• Second, we research each theme in detail, examining the value chain, key players, and trends. Additionally, we examine the impact of each theme across the 20 industries we cover. Our 200 million signals help identify the leading adopters of a theme in each sector.
• Finally, using our sector scorecards, we rank the companies most likely to succeed in a sector over the next five years.