India Ad Market Poised to Grow 9.2% in 2025, Driven by AI, Retail Media

India is set to remain one of the fastest-growing major advertising markets in the world this year, with advertisement revenue projected to reach $20.7 billion, marking a 9.2% year-on-year growth, according to the latest global end-of-year forecast released by WPP Media.

The India outlook sits within a broader global upswing, with worldwide advertising revenue excluding US political advertising now forecast to grow 8.8% this year to $1.14 trillion, materially higher than the 6% growth expected in mid-2025. Growth is expected to continue into 2026 at 7.1%, pointing to sustained momentum across both developed and emerging markets.

Among the world’s top 15 advertising markets, India now ranks ninth by revenue size, ahead of Australia and just below Canada. Only Brazil is projected to post faster growth among large markets, at 16.1%.

The US, the world’s biggest advertising market at $431.2 billion, is forecast to grow 12.5%, while China is seen expanding 6.8% and the UK 8%.

The stronger outlook reflects two key shifts that reshaped advertiser behavior over the second half of the year: a more manageable outcome on trade tariffs than initially feared, and a sharp acceleration in AI-led investment across marketing, content and data systems.

“In June, we were reacting to more recent tariff announcements,” said Kate Scott-Dawkins, president of global business intelligence at WPP Media and the report’s lead author. “The summer gave us a chance to see how those played out, to see how resilient consumer spending was after those announcements in markets around the world.”

Marketers softened tariff risks by advancing imports ahead of implementation, managing inventory more tightly and absorbing parts of the cost increase rather than cutting back sharply on advertising. However, WPP Media cautioned that some tariff effects have only been deferred and could become more visible in 2026.

Retail Media and Digital to Drive India Growth

The global forecast reflects structural shifts that directly favour India’s fast-digitizing ad economy. Retail media, which allows shopping platforms and physical retailers to sell advertising using first-party customer data, is now projected to generate $178.2 billion in global revenue in 2025, overtaking total television advertising for the first time.

This transition has direct implications for India, where e-commerce, quick-commerce and digital payments platforms are rapidly converting transaction data into high-margin ad inventory. The shift is expected to intensify competition for performance-driven budgets across marketplaces, food delivery apps, fintech platforms and large retailer ecosystems.

Globally, content-driven advertising remains the largest category, valued at $663.5 billion, accounting for 58% of total ad revenue. Gaming is the fastest-growing content advertising channel, expanding 29.5% to $8.5 billion, even as it still represents a small fraction of overall spend.

Newspaper advertising is projected to stabilize globally at $31.4 billion in 2025 before resuming its decline, while digital out-of-home advertising is forecast to approach parity with traditional outdoor formats by the end of the decade. For India’s print-heavy ad market, the data signals a narrowing window before digital platforms fully dominate incremental growth.

AI Reshapes Media Buying and Content Economics

Artificial intelligence now sits at the centre of advertising’s next structural reset. WPP Media said AI is reshaping content creation, media planning, measurement and consumer engagement. Companies are using AI to squeeze greater efficiency out of marketing and product development, and are redirecting part of those gains into incremental ad spending.

At the same time, a new class of AI-native firms in software, cloud infrastructure and enterprise services is emerging as advertisers in its own right, further fuelling demand for high-performance digital inventory.

The report introduced “Intelligence” as a new category to replace the legacy “search” label, reflecting the rise of AI-led answer engines and predictive discovery tools that are reshaping how consumers find information and products. New forecast categories now also include gaming, financial-services media networks and travel media networks, underscoring the widening base of advertising sellers.

India Poised to Gain from Global Reallocation

For India’s advertising ecosystem, the revised global outlook strengthens the case that growth will continue to flow disproportionately toward data-rich digital platforms, particularly in retail, video, creator-driven media and performance advertising. As global marketer confidence firms up, competition for Indian digital inventory, first-party data and influencer-led commerce is expected to intensify.

The global forecast also points to a period of “creative destruction” in which streaming video erodes linear television, retail media pulls budgets away from traditional digital formats, and creator-driven content displaces conventional professionally produced media.

For Indian agencies, brands and publishers, the message is twofold: the global ad pool is expanding faster than expected, but the rules of competition are shifting in favour of AI-enabled, data-led and commerce-linked platforms.