Noted analyst Brian Wieser of the strategic advisory and consulting firm Madison and Wall estimates that U.S. advertising for internet-focused platforms grew approximately 14% in the latest quarter — or closer to 15%, excluding political.

Those platforms in the calculation include digital advertising from search, social networks, commerce media and other non-TV-focused platforms.

“This outcome represents a significantly better result than we expected coming into the quarter — we forecast closer to 8% growth excluding political advertising — and an acceleration from 4Q24’s level excluding when we exclude our estimates for political advertising,” Wieser writes. “We estimate that ex-political growth was more like 11% during that quarter, or 14% in total, making for a superficially similar growth rate in both periods.”

Television, meanwhile, was more aligned with expectations. Madison and Wall estimates that national TV sellers, including CTV-focused properties, grew about 1%. “However, the increasingly better way to look at the health of television (given the overlapping sales efforts of national and local properties in digital environments) is to include local broadcast station groups excluding political advertising. On this basis, the medium was down by -1%, or slightly better than 4Q24’s -3% level.”

In determining how to interpret the numbers, Wieser says digital advertising’s outperformance was “significant.” But how much was due to a “pull-forward” of demand ahead of President Trump’s tariffs, and how much was due to “the persistence of secular trends” that have caused digital advertising to outperform is an open question.

“It’s difficult to say, although the clues embedded in the most recent GDP and retail sales data do strongly suggest that there was a significant amount of consumer demand pulled forward,” Wieser writes, “and to the extent that marketers wanted to capitalize on that demand, it’s entirely plausible that spending would have been executed in digital environments where very short term demands could have been capitalized on by marketers and the entities that work with them (and who want to be able to claim ‘performance,’ even if that performance would have occurred anyways).”