By Sheila Dang

(Reuters) – The worldwide advertising market will see higher growth than expected this year as brands rely more on search engine and media companies like Alphabet (NASDAQ) Inc’s Google, and Meta Platforms Inc in order to reach customers during the pandemic. According to two ad sector forecasts that were released Monday.

Although the year was marred by supply chain problems that prevented products reaching shelves worldwide and a privacy crackdown by Apple Inc (NASDAQ) that many fear would disrupt mobile advertising, marketers have maintained their online advertising despite this, according to Jonathan Barnard of Zenith’s director of global Intelligence, who published a forecast for ad spending on Monday.

Brian Wieser is the global head of business intelligence for GroupM, an agency that helps businesses start up during pandemics.

GroupM projected that the global ad spend would increase by 22.5% over 2021, and Zenith predicted a rise of 15.6%. These estimates are both revised higher than previous ones.

The reports predict that global advertising spending will increase by around 9% in 2022.

This growth is a blessing for Alphabet and Meta, major digital ad sellers, and they now represent more than half the advertising spend outside China. GroupM stated that this represents a significant increase over what was closer to 40% for 2019.

The investigation also involves Alphabet, Meta and Meta from the former Facebook (NASDAQ:) company. They are currently both facing antitrust investigations in Europe as well as the United States.

Retailers like Walmart (NYSE) have been successful because of the need to reach customers directly. Target To rapidly build their own ad-sales businesses and allow brands to leverage their shoppers data to increase their reach, Kroger (NYSE;) was selected. Zenith predicts that advertising like this will increase 47% by 2024 to $77 billion.

Barnard noted that although retail media networks in China have been in existence for more than 10 years, its growth in other markets is remarkable.

He said, “In the past five years it has grown explosively from nowhere else outside of China.”