Why Advertising Growth Is Slowing Despite a Huge Year for Media

The first half of 2026 delivered the Olympics, a resurgent NBA Finals, the FIFA World Cup, and continued growth across streaming and digital media. Yet advertising spend grew just 4% year over year—well below the roughly 10% growth Guideline has historically seen in comparable event-heavy years.

In this episode of Media Monitor, Kelly Sweeney and Sean Wright break down what Guideline’s data says about the first half of 2026, where advertising dollars are moving, which categories are gaining or cutting spend, and why major tentpole events haven’t been enough to produce a stronger market.

They examine continued weakness among automakers, growth from AI and SaaS advertisers, social media’s strong first half, CTV’s continued gains, the shift of World Cup dollars from linear television toward streaming, and the surprising resilience of out-of-home advertising.

Sean also looks ahead to the second half of 2026, including the effects of softer consumer spending, inflationary pressure, political advertising, and the early testing of AI search as a new advertising channel.

Plus: why advertisers may be able to use AI to move faster, while consumer behavior still moves at the “speed of human.”

What You’ll Hear

•  Why U.S. advertising grew only about 4% in the first half of 2026
•  How major tentpole events contributed roughly 1.2–1.3 percentage points of market growth 
•  Why automaker advertising remains under pressure 
•  How AI and SaaS companies are supporting software ad growth 
•  Why social advertising grew roughly 14%
•  What’s driving CTV and streaming growth 
•  How World Cup ad spending has shifted dramatically from linear TV toward streaming 
•  Why out-of-home continues to gain despite weakness across other traditional formats 
•  How consumer spending pressure could affect advertising in the second half 
•  Why AI-search advertising still appears to be in a test-and-learn phase 
•  Why faster advertising technology cannot make consumers make decisions faster 

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome and Banter

00:20 Lighting Nerd Out

01:51 Film Lighting Origins

03:40 Family Pool Drama

04:15 Elle TV Recommendation

05:49 First Half Ad Market

08:27 Upfronts Quiet Signal

09:27 Category Winners Losers

12:08 Media Mix Shifts

15:02 Out of Home Surge

17:02 Second Half Outlook

19:36 AI Search Ad Tests

22:28 Speed of Human Wrap

23:35 Closing and Subscribe

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. Hi, John. How's it going?

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Great, Kelly. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:20

You know, I'm really good. And I have to comment, your lighting is perfect today.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Do you like my backlight? I've got a key and a fill all going at once.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Well, it's funny because I have a feeling that you've got a little system over there, like that you're you're carefully curating. Am I right?

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Trying to. Part of it was also commentary early on in our pod that people really hated how dark I was on the YouTube videos on our YouTube clips, was just like in darkness. And so I felt like I had to rectify that. But rather than just like casually taking a lamp and like taking the lampshade off and just having a light bulb, I went all in and I bought like uh probably less so movie. These would probably be used more for like commercials, but they're actual panel lights that you would see on commercial sets.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

This that's like my dream. I am in a so I get this from my dad. He installed dimmers on every light switch in our entire house because depending on time of day, the like you just you kind of need different lighting, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:25

You do. You do.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

And I have now this is who I am. I need to make the adjustments. I can't sit down to dinner until it's the right.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

That's fair. That's fair. I was gonna say, you know, a classic Venn diagram. It turns out that we both have a passion for lighting, but for very different reasons. It's like we both arrived at the end, but for like completely different uh entry points. Um, when I was in grad school, I was thinking of going getting my MFA in film. And so I did these like various work, you know, uh workshops where you kind of like were a key grip, then a best boy. And it turns out that like from a movie perspective, the thing that I love the most is lighting it. I love lighting a scene. I love replicating how you can see lights in particular films, and like in a really good film, right? The the lighting itself takes on its own character and energy. Yes. And so like I've gotten really into lighting just by um, and I have a few friends in the industry. So like the one thing I will talk to them about is like lighting because it is a legitimate interest of mine. And I saw from those workshops like how much lighting can make or break a scene. And it was wild to me. Like, not that the acting isn't like paramount and not that like audio isn't important, but there's something about the lighting itself that creates that mood. And none of this like post-production filters and work, etc. I mean core back to basics, how are you lighting the scene? Obviously, the post-production also makes it kind of look have a certain look and feel, et cetera. But like the core of it is that you got to light it in a certain way onset, and then you could always do stuff after. But that's I've taken this whole thing of like the keys, the fills, the backlit, making yourself pop off the background, etc. Um, super into it. I would this is a huge deviation. I'm sure we've lost a pop of our podcast.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

You had like a pop of red as you said that, and I don't know what exactly happened, but uh so I it sounds like you're highly technical. I'm more vibes. Yeah, I just of course when I see it.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

It feels perfect metaphor for this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

When when I I I know that it's right when I see it, and I'm like adjusting the dimmer. I'm like, oh, right there. That's where we stop. So great. I'm glad we're aligned on this.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Yeah. So yet another thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

I gotta tell you, Sean, I've got bad news. I am officially out of the family pool, as I alluded to last week. It was bound to happen. But my four-year-old nephew is forming alliances across the remaining family members. And it's, I mean, I can't wait to give you the update next week because he is just he's wheeling and dealing, future salesman.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

It seems like Games of Thrones, Game of Thrones esque like put the king in his chair at four years old and try to like puppet, puppet be king. And it seems like this kid's not having it. He is leading and charging the way.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

But as World Cup comes to, you know, its finish, TV is changing in my home, and I have to do one quick plug because I got to control the television last night.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

And what what did we end up on?

SPEAKER_01 4:31

It's so bad, but it's so good. We watched L.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

L. You know what? I've I I honestly I've I've read a lot of disappointing reviews because they say they really moved off of like what made the original movies special and almost like ignored the whole character development of L in in legally planned.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

I disagree. And I'm I'm gonna just say if you want to go back to the 90s, 90s Seattle in particular, because that's where it's set. I'm just I'm gonna give one little plug for it. The the this this actress is Reese Witherspoon. It's perfect. So that's all I'll say on that.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Noted.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

But I'm glad you actually knew what I was talking about. For a second, I thought I was gonna say. Oh, yeah. No.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

No, no, no. This is the the content universe is okay. It's like sports, that's not sports. Yeah, sports is is the rough go. But if you want to talk content, entertainment, streaming, I'm there. I'm there for it.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Well, challenge me if you'd have different feelings about L, but that's where I'm standing. I'm I'm just loving it, eating it up. And I guess we we've we've bored people with our with our opening long enough.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

We've already we're well below our average completion rate at this point.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Well, let's so let's get into it. Let's we've got we're we're going into the numbers this week. And um, we've got, we're gonna skip headlines because we've already talked too much about our own personal lighting and television preferences. So let's go into the numbers. We're at a point where we can talk about the first half of 2026, what the trends were, what the numbers are saying, and we'll do a little bit of a look into where we think that earnings are gonna land for Q2 in terms of you know pacing and categories and and types of media. So, Sean, I would love to hear, you know, how things are going. What are the headlines telling us about the first half?

SPEAKER_00 6:28

For sure. So I think uh a few interesting points is is first and foremost, I think some of the numbers I'm about to drop will surprise folks, knowing that we had the Olympics, a resurgent NBA finals, which we've covered on prior pods, uh, and now kind of coming into I'm gonna really mix sports here, the home stretch of the FIFA, FIFA World Cup. And so between those things, you would think that the the market is on fire, doing the best it's ever done. In the reality, though, is for the first half, we're really only seeing growth of about 4% year over year, which is paltry. And kind of I think we had talked about this on a much earlier pod of like we were out in market kind of saying, hey, we think this is going to be an actual like not great year, despite all of these conversations around 10 poles, US midterm elections, and kind of the the second half, uh, there's a lot of weakness that we see pacing in our data. There's a lot of weakness in terms of consumer spend, and we're seeing it kind of bubble up. Now, to give you some context, right, that 4%, if we benchmarked it against prior years, where you have the World Cup, the Olympics, all of those things in midterms, but midterms obviously not for first half, typically you'd expect growth rates to be about 10%, at least in terms of what we can see in terms of our historical data. So it is 4% with kind of the best you could possibly get from these 10 poles. When you actually strip out all of the kind of uh top line growth off of these things, that's like a one-time incremental. Um, the total market only grew about you know 2.8%. So just kind of a shade under three. So 10 poles alone contributed kind of 1.2, 1.3% of growth, percentage point growth to the whole market. Um, and so it's not looking good from a from a pacing perspective.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

That's that's really interesting. So we're less than half of what we would have expected from a growth perspective.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yeah, for sure. And I think, I think like, so these are the hard numbers. I think what's interesting is, you know, we're not going to do headlines, but I saw an interesting article um uh out of uh I believe it was Variety, where the upfronts are wrapping up and no one's talking about them, which is usually it's a good signal that if it's not, it means that there isn't things to brag about, which also then means flat to the prior year, possibly even down to the prior year. And again, given the fact that there has been no, you know, we're in July at this point. At this point, Fox is usually the first to close. They would be out in market calling and saying we've done these things. Amazon said they closed, but didn't really give any detail. Whereas the last couple of years, Amazon was out screaming at the top of their lungs about the $2 billion they secured in video spend, all these things. Same with, you know, at this point, NBC would close. And then like later on, you'd see Disney and a few others kind of in July. That's not atypical, but we haven't heard from any of them. So I think between our numbers and the lack of conversation, I think we are in a pretty soft market.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Yeah. Wow. So within, you know, that overall pacing, let's drill in. What are we seeing from a category perspective? What are the different industries or verticals that are up or down and how are they contributing?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Yeah. So I think uh, you know, we we've covered this before. We talked about, but auto continues to kind of really hurt. And again, even with 10 poles, we're seeing it decline. Uh, specifically automakers. Yeah, there's a lot of different pieces of the auto category. So the automakers continue to kind of uh cut ad spend. We expect that to continue. It's all about kind of like economics, consumer behavior for that one. Electronics is looking a little soft for the first half, but we think that that's actually kind of a preview of a future episode, probably gonna do well in the second half, almost exclusively tied to Grand Theft Auto. Um, honestly, from what we've heard anecdotally of like how much marketing is gonna go behind that game, it being kind of the truly kind of the first A tier game to be launched in a couple of years, and from rumors, the first billion dollar game to be launched in terms of like all-in effort and sales target. So it is bananas. So that's Grand Theft Auto for electronics.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

And from wait, so just remind me for a second, because I I'm like thinking back. Did that game launch in the 90s?

SPEAKER_00 10:43

The original Grand Grand Theft Auto, like auto, not even like two? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think uh 99, 98, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

That's crazy. I it was just, you know, it was making me think of like, you know, those that game when it came out and the fact that it's still around, still going, and about to be a billion-dollar game is it insane.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

That's that's the rumors. I mean, based on the trailer, I can't, I can see it. I am personally looking forward to it in a way I haven't looked at releases in the case. Oh my god, absolutely. I am I'm hesitating to do the pre-order, but you get some cool swag. So I don't know. I might might have to do it.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

There we go.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

All right, though, tied to electronics, software leaves and bounce growth this year, mostly tied to companies that are AI or uh kind of your standard SaaS B2B type companies that are now saying we also have AI is almost all of the advertising in that space. Uh, but that's what's growing on the software piece. So it's it's it's doing well, it's driving a lot of the growth in the market. Um, and so kind of healthy, healthy overall there. Um, insurance is also one I would call out that had a few rough years in terms of declines, uh, but has now kind of popped back to positive. So um, you know, overall, a lot of that was kind of what helped help boost the market. But I would also highlight that like even within those growth areas, you're not seeing as much growth from them as you would would hope or expect.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Got it. So now shifting gears a little bit, let's talk about the the types of media and you know who's driving that growth from you know the perspective of what's going on in connected TV, what's going on linear, what's going on digital. How are those moving?

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Yeah, kind of kind of standard as usual kind of uh pitch here is is like digital continues to be a huge growth engine. Social is really kind of continuing to power up about 14% for the first half. Uh so doing very well there. You know, from a CTV linear perspective, hard to kind of like peer into the details given some of the noise, not necessarily noise, right? But like incremental one-off spend around the Olympics, the World Cup. Um so kind of tough to understand where it's at. But like rough, roughly speaking, we we are thinking there was probably about half of the growth in CTV and linear without uh kind of those 10 poles. Um so can again, like, yes, uh, you know, CTV up 13%, kind of mostly streaming. That's sort of in line with the last couple of years, but you take those numbers, you take away those 10 poles and you're looking more at like six, seven percent.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

So and I'm imagining we're continuing to see that migration from linear to CTV and streaming moving that.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Yeah, for sure. Right? Like even the World Cup, which was interesting, you know, we have the preliminary numbers, and we'll come back when the finals are done. But I would say, like, roughly speaking, for this year, um about 75% of dollars booked were on linear, about 25% were on streaming. Now that doesn't sound crazy given that it's like 6040 for the whole market, but when you actually look at cutter and then the 2008 2018 World Cup, uh it was 95.5. So like a 20-point shift towards CTV in terms of like being able to consume everything you want via streaming on uh Telemundo within Peacock and then Fox in the US at least.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Just curious, given you know the how things accelerate over time, do you think, you know, come four years from now it'll be another 20-point move, or do you think it might be even more?

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Yeah, my my expectation would be like in the next four years, maybe 50-50. Um, I don't know if you've seen these articles that like there are already companies out trying to bid for 2030 rights. Sounds like Netflix might be into the mix. So like if Netflix is in the mix, there goes your another 20 points, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Yeah, but then I mean if you say 50-50, that's a 25 point move. So okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yes, we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

And so anything else to note in terms of you know, types of media or or you know companies, uh things that are standing out to you about what's been happening over the first half?

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Yeah, your favorite, out of home, doing very well. I know, I know uh a lot of shame gets thrown at out of home in the US. It is a growth engine globally, doing very well at the moment in in Canada and the UK. Um, and even Australia is kind of the sole bright spot there. You know, Australia is declining overall 1%, out of home up uh almost 2 or 3%. Here in the US, no different. Um, the whole traditional market, kind of the analog market, is declining 2%. Um out of home, the things that you see driving on the side of the road, your billboards, is up two. So it's like the exact inverse uh and continues to grow. Part of that is digitization. Part of that is like you can't get any more local and any more targeted than a billboard. You know, you know literally exactly where that is. Time and place, geography, I can find it, I know where it is, and it's really helping in terms of local targeting. The real driver here is gambling. Because it is state by state, piece by piece, city by city in some places. People love putting billboards on the legal side of wherever it is legal, just over the border. And so that's actually helping propel a lot of growth.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I mean, and pretty soon, depending on how legislation goes, maybe we'll need billboards telling people what time it is in states.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

It could be. It's very honestly, sometimes that might even help even prior to the legislation. Because where is it, Arizona that has uh or New Mexico? I forget one of them officially does not recognize it.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Parts of Arizona and Hawaii does.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

Yes, like they just don't they just don't recognize it. They're like, we're not doing this. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

No. I'm not interested. So we shall see. Okay, so well that's kind of like you know, bummer news, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

I mean, that's what I do best though. Is like really bring down the vibe of the party.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

I I don't think so. Bring down the vibe with lighting.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Ooh, yeah. Um mine just instantly turns blue when I show up.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

That's that's that's that cold, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Like sadness from you know, inside out. That's just that's my vibe.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Well, so let's take a little bit of a look forward. You know, now that we kind of like talked through first half, what are our predictions or kind of what are we anticipating as we look forward?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Yeah, I would say kind of broadly speaking, nothing in the broader consumer behavior economic trends to me points to a resurgence ads market anytime soon. So I think the second oil shock is starting to flow its way through the economy. We'll probably come back to the pot at some point because I want to talk about more of like a global outlook. Um, because the the oil shock is just impacting so many places in in ways that are pretty profound and in some ways insulating, or at least the US is insulated from some of that based on oil production and all these other things that I think we need to kind of cover in in separate conversation. But there is direct impact here in the US, uh particularly around price inflation. And so consumers are starting to really reel back. I probably saw maybe 10, 15 headlines this week on just the grocery store clawback alone in terms of consumer behavior, that people are are just kind of up and stopping buying groceries. I can speak to ourselves as like there's a particular yogurt that my my children like. Um, and it used to be that we would like buy one and then always have like a second one on hand. We've just simply gone to buying a singular one. And then when if we run out for the week, that's it. Then you just have to wait until the next week to re-up. We don't just have a constant flow of it because it's gotten so crazy expensive.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

I know.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

And like, I'm I'm not trying to say anything in terms of uh like where we're at financially, but like, you know, uh, we're making these choices and it's it's uh the economy where it's at now is certainly not great, but it's not the hardship that millions of folks are facing in terms of what we're seeing. And so like if we're making these decisions, you can't even imagine then what other what else is happening. And it's it's you know, both tragic and frustrating. But as a result, it also means that consumer spending is basically just slowing down and slowing to a trickle, which then in turn has a direct impact on advertising in terms of slowing into a trick. So it's like all of these things are pointing to a slowdown. I know people have talked about like the midterms being kind of a resurgent ad spend and really driving a lot, and that is true, but usually that only helps propel the market forward when the market's already cruising at like you know five, six percent growth going into the second half, and it's not. So I would expect kind of more of the slowdown continuing into the second half.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Yeah, I I mean, and then to add insult to injury, we're being told don't buy fresh produce if you want to stay out of the bathroom. So there's there's there's a lot of hits.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

There's a lot.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

But so I guess before we wrap, I did have one thing I wanted to ask you about because and I think we might talk about this in a future episode. But I'm curious how like the like AI search has contributed or is contributing. What are we seeing kind of at a high level in our data? Because that's you know, that's that's new this year, right? Is what I guess what we're suggesting based on the overall decline is it's not or decline or slow and pacing, I should say. This, you know, is that's not picking us up.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

No, and the way we've we've seen the data, we've seen AI search pick up, but broadly speaking, it's just not there from kind of a dollar volume perspective. Now it is growing, it's rapidly growing. We can kind of tackle it at another time, but all of the dollars here make me think that this is from a buying behavior. These are brand tests. They, you know, uh kind of in the industry, you might call them like a test and learn. The idea is like, look, I'm only going to contribute maybe like you tell me how many people I need to reach in order to kind of get to like a critical number where I can measure it. Oh, you tell me I need to reach like five million people. Okay, I think that that means I need a budget of 75,000 bucks. Cool. Here's your 75,000 bucks. Run this campaign for me so I can kind of wait out and see how it looks. We are seeing a lot of that. You know, we don't, to be clear for folks that are, we don't see the individual deals. That's against the rules. We just see the dollars. But like based on the category complexity and the dollars top line we are seeing, to me, it feels like those are probably what the deal sizes are. Is it's very test and learning right now. It's picking up, it's growing. I've also read a few articles this week about how some folks using free accounts are seeing two or three X the amount of ads this week versus even last week. So I think yo, um, ChatGPT in particular is ramping up their advertising capabilities, but it still feels very much like we are in the testing and learning phase and we are not yet committed to seeing companies like rethink their budget strategy, their ideas, et cetera, kind of come to fruition. I think it's just simply a, hey, what is this? Again, it makes sense. Like it is literally a new type of ad channel. So you wouldn't expect people to be like, yes, I need a million dollars on something that I have no idea if it works, or even what my ad might look like.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

The only thing I would say to that is everything we say in relation to AI is that it should make things speed up, right? So I've been kind of keeping uh tabs on we always know when a new type of ad unit enters the market, there's this phase of test and learn. And I was curious to see if that period would be shortened based on AI's inclusion in it, right? Like people being able to use tools to quickly make adjustments and change. And so seems like no.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Here's here's what I would counter to that. Ooh, counter me. Counter. At the end of it, an ad is meant to have a person do something or feel a certain way or act a certain way. Humans will always move at the speed of people. So we could have all of the technology, AI that we want to kind of deliver an ad shorter, faster, quicker, more ads, etc. But at the end of the day, it's up to the person in terms of how they make that decision, what they're considering, etc. So until people get other people get signal about how that ad is working to change, modify, or make people feel a certain way, it's really hard to figure out whether or not it's working.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Moving at the speed of human? Is that what you said?

SPEAKER_00 23:11

The moving at the speed of human.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

I love it.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

TM.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

TM. Well, I'm going to move at the the speed of human and say, I think we've done it. I think we've wrapped this one, and I really appreciate the time, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

That's a wrap. See you uh next week. Have a great weekend.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

See you then.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.