APAC to surpass North America as top ad market in 2014

China is set to overtake Japan to become the world’s second-largest ad market in 2013, according to Emarketer and Starcom Mediavest Group’s Global Media Intelligence report.

The report also predicted that China will become the second-largest digital ad market the following year, behind the US. As a result, Asia-Pacific is expected to outdo North America in total ad spend by 2014, owing largely to the rapid rise in digital ad spend.

Global ad spend will increase from $538.8bn in 2012 to $676.2bn in 2016, despite the ongoing global economic crisis, and global mobile ad spend will jump from $6.6bn to $25.3bn over the next four years.

Much of the growth will come from Asia-Pacific, where more than one billion people will use the web at least once per month this year, nearly 47% of the global total. By 2016, this is expected to reach almost 1.4 billion.

Asia-Pacific, currently the global leader in mobile advertising, will be home to approximately 2.15 billion mobile phone users in 2012 and mobile ad spend will reach $2.6bn. However, North America’s mobile market is expanding twice as fast as Asia-Pacific and is quickly catching up with the region, with a predicted total of $12.4bn in mobile ad spend by 2016.