On the rebound
The IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) partnership with PwC has been fruitful recently. Last week they told us that UK mobile ad spend doubled to £83 million last year, and today we got a report on the overall UK online advertising market.
The headline figure is that ad spend online in the UK topped £4 billion for the first time. This puts the mobile figure into perspective, and represents a quarter of the overall UK advertising market, which in turn grew by over seven percent.
The online advertising market grew by 12.8 percent, but there were some conspicuous growth drivers within that figure. Uppermost appears to have been display advertising on social networks, which nearly tripled, driving an overall 27.5 percent growth in online display advertising, which now represents almost a quarter of the online advertising market.
Search advertising remained the largest category, but it only grew by eight percent. Classified advertising grew by almost ten percent, after experiencing a dip the year before, to £751 million.
"The power of online to build brands is clearly reflected in the spectacular growth of display, thanks to the popularity of social media and video formats," said Guy Phillipson, CEO of the IAB. "And with mobile advertising finally coming of age, marketers are enjoying an incredible array of digital opportunities."
Anna Bartz, strategy manager at PwC, said: "All formats - display, search and classifieds - contributed, although display showed the strongest recovery. This was driven by video, social media and mobile, channels which build a strong foundation for 2011."
