While the U.S. advertising market decreased for a tenth consecutive month in April, it was the smallest year-over-year decline since September 2022 The U.S. Ad Market Tracker, a monthly index from Standard Media Index, fell 1.5% in April, compared to one year ago.
“The data signals that the erosion in demand from the nation's biggest advertisers and agencies may be nearing bottom, especially among the largest advertising categories,” MediaPost says in its coverage of the new numbers.
Analyzing the data by ad category size, demand from the top 10 categories dipped 1.2% in April, while all the other categories decreased 2.0%.
Digital media's share of the U.S. ad pie continued to climb, up four percentage points to 60% in April compared to 56% for the same month a year ago.
The U.S. Ad Market Tracker is a composite monthly index from SMI designed to provide a real-world measure of U.S. ad spending, based on actual invoiced media buys from the major agencies and their clients. As such, it is mostly representative of spending by big national advertisers. That part of the U.S. ad economy appears to be in a recession that began in July 2022, MediaPost says.