Surprise Surprise, Consumer Sentiment Is In the Dumpster

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For advertising to impact buying decisions, people need to feel confident about spending money. Given the price of goods and the daily chaos emanating from The White House today, confident is not how people are feeling at this moment in time.

Consumer sentiment plunged 11% this month to a preliminary reading of 50.8, the second-lowest reading on record going back to 1952. April’s reading was lower than anything seen during the Great Recession.

Souring sentiment translates into less consumer spending, and consumer spending accounts for about 70% of the US economy. This spells trouble for the American economy and when the economy is ailing, the ad industry is one of the first sectors to feel the pain.

Uncertainty leads businesses to slash marketing budgets, directly impacting ad agencies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau recently found that 94% of US advertisers are concerned about the impact of tariffs, and 45% plan to cut ad budgets as a result.

“What is absolutely certain is that if we want to avoid a crisis, we will need greater certainty and clarity,” said Publicis chief executive Arthur Sadoun.

Speaking of certainty and clarity, Lorie Logan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said last week, “History teaches that when higher inflation expectations become entrenched, the road back to price stability is longer, the labor market is weaker and the economic scars are deeper.”

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said the U.S. is “more likely than not” headed toward a recession, potentially resulting in 2 million job losses and household income declines of $5,000 or more per family. He compared President Trump’s tariff policies to those of 1930, which worsened the Great Depression, and warned that markets could drop further.

“There’s nothing complicated about this,” Summers said. It is “introductory economics” that the imposition of a huge tax hike on the middle class, clouded with uncertainty, damages businesses and forces the economy downwards.

To complicate matters for today’s advertising workers, the industry is in the midst of a seismic operational shift. Agency holding companies, in particular, are looking to a combination of AI and offshoring for relief. “The industry isn’t simply adjusting to a weak economy. It’s actively reinventing itself,” writes Kashfin Huda on LinkedIn.

Zoe Scaman, founder of Bodacious, also wrote about these changes:

Publicis has hired 25,000 engineers specifically to build AI capabilities. WPP is investing heavily in Stability AI and Infosum. The looming Omnicom-IPG merger is, at its core, a strategic move to combine resources for more substantial AI investments and capabilities. These holding companies are restructuring for a future where growth in revenue no longer means growth in jobs.

In the best of times, working in the advertising industry is a difficult proposition, and these are not the best of times.