How the internet is driving UK advertising market to be the fastest growing in Europe
The UK has the fastest growing major advertising market in Europe, according to a new report.
Adspend totalled £20.1bn in 2015, up 7.5 per cent on 2014. This was the biggest year-on-year growth on record since 2010.
According to the Advertising Association/Warc Expenditure Report, spending on the internet made up £8.6bn of this, up 17.3 per cent.
Mobile advertising accounted for 78 per cent of the internet total and was itself up 61.1 per cent to £2.6bn.
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Tim Lefroy, chief executive of the Advertising Association, said: “The UK is the fastest growing major advertising market in Europe, and its most successful exporter. It's a tribute to our creativity and technical innovation.”
According to the report, the UK is “comfortably the largest internet advertising market in Europe”, ranking third globally behind the US and China.
TV adspend, meanwhile, was up 7.3 per cent to £5.3bn. And cinema adspend hit a new high of £238m, up 20.8 per cent, driven by the latest James Bond film, Spectre, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which was released at the end of the year.
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It was a bad year, though, for print advertising.
Spending on national newspapers was down 11 per cent to £1.22bn. Of this £220m came from digital advertising, up 2.5 per cent.
Spend on regional newspaper advertising, meanwhile, fell 6.2 per cent to £1.18bn, with digital spending up 14.8 per cent to £199m.
Magazine adspend was down 5.2 per cent in print to £942m, with digital spending up 6.1 per cent to £283m.