Social Media Will Take $394.6bn of Ad Spend This Year, WARC Forecasts, With the UK Past £50bn

WARC's global ad spend forecast, released on 8 October and reported by PPC Land on 11 October, has total advertising up 11.9% to $1,343.0bn in 2026. Social media is the fastest-growing channel, up 21.3% to $394.6bn, which by our arithmetic is about 29% of the global total. Search is forecast at $295.7bn, up 14.2%, and retail media at $202.1bn, up 14.3%.

Concentration is the other headline. Alphabet, Amazon and Meta together are set to take 59.7% of global ad spend outside China, $659.6bn, according to the forecast. WARC puts UK per-capita ad spend at $935 for 2026.

The UK picture

• Marketing Week reported on 30 July that the AA/WARC forecast has UK ad spend growing 8.2% to £50.5bn in 2026 and 5.9% to £53.5bn in 2027.
• In the first quarter of 2026 the UK ad market grew 9.3% year on year to £11.7bn; search was £4.6bn, up 9.8%, and social media investment rose 17.7%.
• The AA/WARC forecast has social media growing 16.5% this year.
• PPC Land, citing the AA/WARC report, says UK ad spend grew 6.4% to £46.7bn in 2025, with two-thirds going to Google, Meta and Amazon.

The money is moving to formats that are short, vertical and many: a brief for one hero film now usually arrives as a brief for a family of cut-downs. That changes how a shoot day is built, with the vertical master first and the alternates composed from the same set-up. Our guide to shooting paid social video ads in a studio works through that, and budgeting a studio shoot covers what it costs.