UK spending on digital advertising defied the current cost-of-living crisis in 2022 to post one more year of double-digit growth.
IAB’s new Digital Adspend report showed 2022 spending at £26.1 billion. That’s 11 per cent up in 2021 and 56 per cent up in 2020.
2022 wasn’t a great year for mobile. For the first time since records began, the rate of online growth in desktop spend (+14%) outstripped mobile (+8%). The IAB report cited Apple’s IDFA changes for the mobile slowdown. However, mobile still has the largest share of spending at 58%.
Other highlights in the report are:
- Search spending grew 13% year-on-year to £13.1 billion
- Display spending grew by 6% to £10.4 billion
- Video spending grew by 9%, largely driven by investment in out-stream formats
- Retail-specific spending hit £176.4 million. The report asserts that
Retail will grow fast as advertisers increasingly harness retailers’ first-party data
- Podcast spending grew by 32% to £76.3m – a three-fold increase since IAB UK first started measuring the market in 2020
Jon Mew, CEO at IAB UK, said: “The latest Digital Adspend results highlight two things: resilience and opportunity. Not only was 2022 challenging for our industry, as it was for the entire UK economy, it also followed a year of stratospheric, pandemic-induced growth in 2021.