A. Guttmann
Research Lead covering media
Marketing worldwide – statistics & facts
Brands and agencies across the globe seem ready to find a trillion reasons to invest in marketing. Advertising and marketing revenues continuously rose throughout the first half of the decade, expanding by nearly a third between 2021 and 2025. The engine behind that growth was overwhelmingly digital: in 2025, digital and alternative media spending surged while traditional channels barely moved. That imbalance helped push global marketing spending past the symbolic one-trillion-dollar threshold.
Tighter wallets, shifting bets
Even as overall spending climbed, the slice of corporate revenue earmarked for marketing told a different story. After peaking above 12 percent in 2016, CMOs' share of company budgets drifted downward for years before showing the first signs of a modest rebound in 2026. Where marketers chose to spend those tighter budgets is revealing: a 2025 survey showed online video, influencer partnerships, and social media leading planned investment increases for the coming year, while print and TV continued to lose ground. On the operational side, automation kept gaining traction, with email marketing and social media management remaining the most commonly automated tasks.
Where marketers meet their audiences
Social media remains the backbone of most marketing playbooks. Facebook continues to dominate in sheer adoption, with the vast majority of marketers worldwide reporting active use of the platform, followed closely by Instagram and LinkedIn. Picking a single most important platform splits opinions more narrowly, though Facebook still edges ahead. The payoff is tangible: marketers consistently rank increased exposure and traffic as the top benefits of social media marketing.
AI's promise and its growing pains
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is quickly moving from experiment to everyday tool. Marketers are deploying it most heavily in data analysis and market research, areas where speed and pattern recognition offer clear advantages. Scaling up, however, is proving difficult. Data quality gaps, fragmented systems, and brand safety worries top the list of obstacles slowing broader adoption. Still, the mood is more hopeful than cautious: as of early 2026, a majority of marketers expressed optimism about where the profession is headed, a sign that the industry views AI as a catalyst rather than a threat.
The marketing industry is spending more than ever, yet doing so with leaner budgets and sharper priorities, funneling resources into digital channels, social platforms, and AI-driven workflows. How quickly organizations overcome data and integration hurdles will likely determine who turns that trillion-dollar momentum into lasting competitive advantage.
