Social Rocket
The largest US advertisers are spending less on advertising relative to revenue, while consumer goods brands are increasing their advertising intensity. This is shown by the 14. October 2026 WARC study "The cost of being seen"](https://www.warc.com/en/article/global-ad-trends-the-cost-of-being-seen-66b0d576f948430a9b6713132fe7276b), published on [. For social media planners, a second observation is especially relevant: according to WARC, the entire increase in the aggregate advertising ratio in the USA and UK between 2023 and 2025 came from social media.
The decisive metric: advertising spend divided by revenue
WARC evaluated 25 large US companies. Together, their ratio of advertising spend to revenue fell from 6,1 percent 2019 to 5,5 percent 2025. This does not mean they are spending less money on advertising: their spending rose overall by 56 percent during this period, while revenue rose by 73 percent.
For Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Netflix, this advertising ratio fell from 13,0 to 7,4 percent. These companies operate their own platforms on which other businesses buy attention. Their ratio of self-promotion to revenue therefore cannot be equated with that of a consumer goods brand.
Why social media grows faster than the self-promotion of large platforms
For the period 2023 to 2025, WARC describes an increase in the overall advertising ratio in the United Kingdom from 2,9 to 3,3 percent and in the USA from 2,1 to 2,2 percent. According to WARC, social media accounted for the entire measured increase in both countries. This is not a statement about the social share of any German advertising budget.
At the same time, the analysis points to small businesses and cross-border e-commerce retailers whose platform budgets are growing significantly faster than the advertising of many large corporations. However, rising demand for social ads does not mean falling click prices for every brand, nor automatically better return on ad spend.
Consumer goods brands and retail media are the exception
At Coca-Cola, Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, Nike, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, their combined advertising ratio grew from 11,6 percent 2023 to 12,5 percent 2025. Between 2019 and 2025, their advertising spend rose by 36 percent and their revenue by 29 percent.
One possible explanation is not only more aggressive marketing: budgets previously booked under trade or shopper measures are increasingly moving to retail media and thus into advertising spend. Our analysis of the competition for brand budgets in retail media shows why comparability and attribution remain an open challenge in such networks.
What German marketing teams should really compare
An advertising ratio is a financial metric, not a success metric for individual campaigns. Marketers should track separately how much budget flows into paid social, creator partnerships and retailer networks, and what additional results arise from them. The debate over incrementality at Target Roundel illustrates the gap between attributed sales and proven additional business.
The balance between short-term performance and brand building is equally important: the CMO Outlook 2026 describes the pressure to value current sales more highly than longer-term brand effects.
For 2026, WARC expects 11,9 percent growth in global advertising spend to 1,34 trillion US dollars. This global forecast must be kept separate from the historical metrics of the 25 US companies. The coverage by Marketing Dive provides supplementary industry reactions. The practical conclusion: not all advertising budgets grow equally – and "a smaller percentage of revenue" does not mean "less advertising".