2024 Annual
Marketing Report
Maximizing ROI in a
fragmented world
Discover how global marketers are allocating budgets, measuring success and what these trends mean for your own impact planning.
What’s shaping the year ahead
Nielsen surveyed marketers around the world to understand where they’re spending, what their goals are and what’s getting in the way of maximizing their ROI. By analyzing these plans and priorities, we’ve developed recommendations to sharpen your own ROI strategies for 2024 and beyond.
Our research revealed four key global themes:
Spending optimism
is up
Ad spend estimates are up and earmarked for ‘effective’ channels, especially across CTV, retail media networks, social and search. But channel-level performance doesn’t always help you achieve campaign goals.
Tactics and KPIs
are misaligned
Marketers’ top KPIs are long-term ROI and full-funnel ROI. However, a global shift toward performance marketing, coupled with other media buying trends, won’t deliver on these priorities.
Digital dominance
may hurt returns
ROI starts with reach, and not all digital channels deliver winning, on-target rates. Leaning too heavily into just a few channels can mean you miss out on reaching new audiences essential for long-term growth.
Measurement
confidence is high,
but incomplete
Global marketers are very confident in their martech’s ability to measure holistic ROI. However, barely one-third measure their traditional and digital marketing efforts together. Audiences don’t consume media in silos, and neither should measurement.
Marketing’s great balancing act
Despite inflation, slowed consumer spending and supply chain uncertainties, marketers feel better about budgets this year. But they won’t spread that money evenly across the buyer journey, and a siloed view of performance may hurt marketers’ ability to deliver on full ROI potential.
72%
of global marketers expect bigger ad budgets
this year, up from 64% in 2023
2/3
of media budgets are going toward digital
channels—with CTV, search and retail media
driving the biggest increases
38%
of global marketers evaluate holistic ROI by
measuring traditional and digital marketing
efforts together
Data source: 2024 Nielsen Global Marketer Survey
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