Madison and Wall: AI to push global ad revenue to $1.3 trillion in 2026

Madison and Wall projects global ad revenue hits $1.3 trillion by end of 2026, an 11 percent year-over-year jump the consultancy calls "unusually rapid" and attributes directly to AI. Advertisers are using AI to cut creative and operational costs and redirect the savings into working media, while handing more buying to algorithmic and agentic tools. The report expects spend inside Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ to spike from $60 billion this year to $158 billion by 2030 - roughly 27 percent of the US ad market. The same roundup carries a consumer-side counterweight: McDonald's is walking back its kiosk-and-app push because customers defected to less kiosk-heavy chains like Chick-fil-A, with global chief people officer Tiffanie Boyd announcing new hospitality training and dropping the requirement that staff ask about the McDonald's app.

The crux

AI is inflating the top line of the ad market at the same moment it concentrates spend inside two walled-garden automation engines, while the consumer-facing cost of relentless efficiency is showing up as backlash against kiosks and in-school tech.

Sell-side read

A $1.3 trillion market is bullish for inventory owners, but the $158 billion funneling into Performance Max and Advantage+ is exactly where open-web publisher yield erodes, as programmatic and direct budgets get re-routed into platform automation.

Watch

whether the "unusually rapid" growth translates into open-web CPMs or gets captured almost entirely by Google and Meta.