Europe's digital advertising market grew 10.5 percent in 2025 to reach 131.1 billion euros, according to IAB Europe's AdEx Benchmark 2025 Report, released on July 7, 2026, at a dedicated event in London. The twentieth edition of the annual study found that every one of the 30 national markets it tracks recorded growth over the prior year, even as the pace of expansion slowed from the 16 percent surge recorded in 2024.

The report, compiled by IAB Europe in collaboration with national advertising associations across the continent, positions video-led formats and retail media as the two defining growth stories of the year. Video advertising crossed a threshold it had never reached before: for the first time, it now accounts for more than half of all display investment in Europe. Retail media crossed a comparable milestone, passing 10 percent of total digital ad spend for the first time since IAB Europe began tracking the category.

A market still growing, but more slowly than the year before

The headline number sits inside a longer trend line. According to the report, Europe's digital advertising market rose from 102.2 billion euros in 2023 to 118.6 billion euros in 2024, a jump of 16.0 percent, before reaching 131.1 billion euros in 2025. That 10.5 percent increase added 12.5 billion euros to the market in a single year. It also marks a deceleration: growth in 2025 came in below the prior year's pace, though it remained close to the market's pre-pandemic long-run average, which the report calculates at roughly 10 to 13 percent across most years between 2012 and 2019.

Excluding Turkey, whose currency instability skews aggregate figures, growth across the rest of Europe stood at 9.7 percent. Once IAB Europe adjusted the headline figure for inflation in Turkey and Ukraine using a new methodology introduced this year, growth fell further still, to 9.4 percent. That inflation-adjusted figure strips out what the report calls an artefact: roughly 1.1 percentage points of the 10.5 percent headline growth rate reflects price increases in high-inflation markets rather than genuine expansion in advertising activity.

Dr. Daniel Knapp, Chief Economist at IAB Europe, framed the year's performance against a difficult macroeconomic backdrop. The market added 12.5 billion euros in 2025, growing 10.5 percent at constant currency to reach 131.1 billion euros, a result he said arrived despite sluggish GDP growth, trade policy uncertainty and cautious consumers across the continent. That combination, he argued, points to something structural: digital advertising, in his words, is "decoupling from the macro cycle." He characterized the shift in blunt commercial terms, describing digital advertising as functioning as "sales infrastructure, shelf space and shopfront at once," adding that businesses now fund it the way they fund distribution rather than the way they historically funded media.

Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe, struck a similarly measured tone in her opening remarks accompanying the report. Although growth in 2025 was more measured than the rebound recorded the year before, she wrote that the direction of travel remains clear, with advertiser investment continuing to move toward channels and formats that reflect changing consumer behaviour, rising demand for measurable outcomes, and the ongoing convergence of media, commerce and technology. Every one of the 30 markets covered in the report grew during the year, an outcome she described as remarkably broad-based.

Why the report matters

The AdEx Benchmark study is IAB Europe's flagship measurement product and the industry's most cited source for aggregate European digital ad spend. Since 2006, the organisation has published the report using data submitted by national IAB associations, supplemented by public filings and third-party data where national figures are unavailable. This year's edition draws on submissions from 30 markets, five of which (Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal and Romania) have no national association submission and are instead fully modelled by IAB Europe using regional growth rates, company filings and historical trajectories.

For marketing professionals, the report functions as a calibration tool: budget planners benchmark national performance against continental trends, agencies use it to support channel-shift recommendations, and platform vendors contextualise their own growth claims against an independent, harmonised baseline. PPC Land's earlier coverage of the 2024 edition of the AdEx Benchmark Report documented the market's first crossing of the 100 billion euro threshold, a milestone the current 131.1 billion euro figure builds upon one year later.

Video crosses the halfway mark in display for the first time

Video advertising grew 19.6 percent in 2025 to reach 34.0 billion euros, and the report states that this is the first year in which video has accounted for more than half of all display investment across Europe. That threshold has been building for some time. According to the report's own long-run chart of digital outperformance against traditional media, the gap between digital and non-digital media growth rates widened to 17.0 percentage points in 2025, up from 13.7 percentage points in 2024, a shift the report attributes partly to continued advertiser migration toward digital video in both social and non-social environments.

Within video specifically, growth was not evenly distributed by sub-format. Subscription video-on-demand advertising, the category covering platforms such as Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime Video, grew 59.6 percent in 2025. That figure looks modest only in comparison with the 222.4 percent growth SVOD advertising posted in 2024, when the category was expanding from a far smaller base. Broadcast video-on-demand grew 14.5 percent, down from 29.5 percent the year before, while advertising video-on-demand, the free ad-supported category that includes platforms like YouTube, grew 9.6 percent, decelerating from 16.9 percent in 2024. Total video advertising growth across all sub-formats came in at 13 percent for the year, against 23 percent in 2024.

Ten European markets now see video account for more than half of their total display advertising, excluding social. Slovenia leads that group at 89.4 percent, followed by Turkey at 72.7 percent and Ukraine at 68.3 percent. Video's overall share of Europe's non-social display market reached 48.2 percent in 2025, just short of the continental crossover point, though the combined view of display and social video, which the report treats separately in one chart, shows video and standard formats splitting the market evenly at 50 percent each.

Programmatic buying continued to absorb a growing share of that video growth. Programmatic display and video spending, excluding social, rose 10.9 percent to 15.771 billion euros in 2025, against non-programmatic growth of just 1.5 percent. Within programmatic specifically, video spending grew 19.8 percent to 9.832 billion euros, while programmatic display spending outside video fell 1.2 percent to 5.939 billion euros, indicating that budget continues to migrate from static display formats toward video within the programmatic channel itself.

Social advertising, measured separately from display in the report's taxonomy, grew 19.2 percent to reach 35.5 billion euros. Social video was the fastest-growing individual format tracked anywhere in this year's report, expanding 25.7 percent to 18.602 billion euros and now representing 52 percent of total social ad revenue. Standard, non-video social formats grew a more modest 12.9 percent to 16.908 billion euros. IAB Europe's own combined view of display video and social video together shows the two categories growing 19.6 percent as a unit to 33.960 billion euros, a figure adjusted to 17.8 percent once inflation in Turkey and Ukraine is factored in.

Retail media passes a tenth of total digital spend

Retail media, the category covering advertising sold on retailer and e-commerce platforms, grew 16.7 percent in 2025 to reach 13.314 billion euros. According to the report, this marks the first time retail media has crossed 10 percent of total European digital ad spend. The category splits into retail search, which reached 10.002 billion euros after growing 19.1 percent, and retail display, which grew a slower 9.8 percent to 3.312 billion euros. Notably, this retail media measurement excludes in-store retail media, off-site retail media, and non-retail advertising revenue such as SVOD ad revenue from retailers, meaning the true scale of retail commerce advertising in Europe likely runs higher than the AdEx figure alone would suggest.

The retail search component grew close to three times faster than standard, non-retail search advertising. Total search advertising revenue, combining both categories, rose 8.8 percent to 56.155 billion euros in 2025, with standard search growing 6.8 percent to 46.153 billion euros while retail search's 19.1 percent growth pulled its share of total search spend up to 17.8 percent, from 16.3 percent the year before.

The category's expansion in this year's AdEx report follows a pattern already visible in IAB Europe's October 2025 retail media landscape update, which found retail media reaching 13.7 billion euros in 2024 with 21.1 percent growth under a broader measurement scope than the one used in the AdEx report itself. The two figures are not directly comparable, since IAB Europe publishes retail media data through more than one methodology depending on the study, but both point toward a category that has moved past its experimental phase into a core line item within digital budgets.

Classifieds, display and paid search trail the pack

Display advertising, defined in the report to include banners, native formats, integrated content, newsletter ads and affiliate marketing but to exclude video, audio and social, grew 12.5 percent overall for the year. Within that figure, however, non-video display spending actually fell 0.8 percent to 15.461 billion euros, a contraction that stands out against nearly every other format tracked in the report. Digital audio, the smallest major format category, grew 13.9 percent to 1.230 billion euros, split between podcast advertising, which grew 16.7 percent to 539 million euros, and other audio formats including streaming and internet radio, which grew 11.8 percent to 691 million euros.

Classifieds and directories, the category covering job postings, real estate listings and similar structured advertising, grew 6.5 percent to reach a total the report does not state as a standalone euro figure in the sections reviewed, though its growth rate places it as the slowest-expanding of the five headline formats tracked. The report describes this category as being in what it calls structural transformation, reflected in an unusually wide range of national growth rates: Turkey posted 67.1 percent growth in the category while five markets, including Finland at negative 10.0 percent and Denmark at negative 5.9 percent, saw outright contraction.

Paid search, excluding the retail search component discussed above, grew 6.8 percent for standard search specifically, while the combined search category including retail search grew 8.8 percent overall. Fourteen markets recorded double-digit search growth, led by Croatia at 64.2 percent and Turkey at 40.0 percent, both figures reflecting currency and inflation dynamics specific to those markets rather than comparable underlying demand growth.

Geography: broad growth, concentrated value

All 30 markets covered by the report posted growth in 2025, a result IAB Europe's leadership called remarkably broad-based. Sixteen of those thirty markets grew at double-digit rates in nominal terms; once the report's new inflation-adjustment methodology is applied to Turkey and Ukraine, that number of double-digit performers narrows to fourteen, since a portion of Turkey's and Ukraine's headline growth reflects currency depreciation rather than expanding advertiser demand.

Turkey led the continent in nominal growth at 37.0 percent, though its inflation-adjusted growth rate falls to just 1.6 percent once the report's IAS 29 tier method, adapted from the international accounting standard used to classify hyperinflationary economies, is applied. Ukraine's nominal growth of 22.0 percent similarly compresses to 8.2 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis. Serbia, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary and the Czech Republic rounded out the ten fastest-growing markets in nominal terms, and the report notes that all ten of the fastest-growing markets sit within Central, Eastern or South-Eastern Europe. In aggregate, that regional bloc grew by more than 20 percent, roughly twice the pace of Europe's more mature Western markets.

Despite that growth differential, absolute market value remains heavily concentrated. The United Kingdom, Germany and France together account for 62 percent of total European digital ad spend, with the UK alone representing 46.933 billion euros, more than double Germany's 21.583 billion euros and well ahead of France's 12.701 billion euros. Extending the concentration measure further, the top five markets account for 70 percent of total spend, the top ten for 88 percent, and the top fifteen for 95 percent, leaving the remaining fifteen markets in the study to divide just 5 percent of total European digital advertising investment among themselves.

The report also situates Europe against the United States for the first time in this level of comparative detail. The US digital advertising market reached 260.5 billion euros in 2025, according to figures IAB Europe sourced from IAB US and converted at a constant exchange rate of 1.131 US dollars per euro, growing 13.9 percent year over year. That places the European market at slightly over half the size of its American counterpart, and confirms that the US grew faster in percentage terms in 2025 than Europe did, widening rather than narrowing the absolute gap between the two markets.

A new lens on inflation, and a caution about coverage gaps

For the first time in the report's twenty-year history, IAB Europe introduced an inflation-adjusted view of market growth, developed using consumer price index data from the World Bank cross-checked against the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook database. The methodology classifies markets into two tiers: Tier 1, hyperinflationary markets with cumulative three-year inflation of 100 percent or more, which applies only to Turkey in this year's data at 229.1 percent cumulative inflation; and Tier 2, high-inflation markets with either annual inflation above 10 percent or cumulative three-year inflation above 30 percent, a threshold Ukraine meets at 35.4 percent cumulative inflation. All other markets are treated as standard and receive no inflation adjustment, since the report's own documentation notes that consumer price indices only function as valid deflators for advertising figures where inflation is large relative to the divergence between consumer prices and media prices specifically.

The report is also notably transparent about the limits of its own measurement coverage, publishing what it describes as a search long tail disclosure. In several markets, IAB Europe's data notes, national measurement captures spend by association members and agency-transacted budgets but not the self-serve long tail of advertisers, spend that tends to concentrate in search and, in some markets, social. Where a market's search share of total digital ad spend falls below half the European average share of 42.8 percent without a structural explanation, the report flags that market for a coverage review rather than adjusting the figure upward. Belgium, Romania, Turkey, Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia all carry this flag in the current edition. Slovakia's flag comes with a specific documented cause: its national data source covers only the country's largest advertisers, with long-tail spending from small and medium businesses excluded at the explicit request of IAB Slovakia, a decision the report states understates both search and social spending for that market as a result.

The AI question, deferred to next year

Both Knapp and Feehan touched on artificial intelligence in their contributions to the report, though neither treated it as a defining theme of this year's edition. Knapp described AI's effect on advertising in 2025 as concentrated on the supply side of the market, producing cheaper creative production, better campaign optimisation, and increased automation, with productivity gains that disproportionately benefit smaller advertisers, in his assessment. He was careful to separate that supply-side effect from what he called AI's second-order effects on search behaviour, agentic buying, and channel budget allocation, changes he said are only beginning to surface and will define next year's edition of the report.

Feehan's opening remarks struck a similar note of measured anticipation rather than declaration. She wrote that as AI begins to influence how advertising is planned, activated, measured and optimised, the industry must ensure that innovation is matched by trust, transparency and accountability, adding that continued growth will depend on the ecosystem's ability to work together to build a digital advertising market that is effective, responsible and sustainable.

What comes next

IAB Europe has not published a date for the next edition of the AdEx Benchmark Report, though the twenty-year publishing cadence of the study suggests a release timed to mid-2027 covering full-year 2026 data. In the interim, IAB Europe's national member associations continue to publish country-specific detail throughout the year, several of which PPC Land has previously covered in depth, including Poland's and Ukraine's respective national digital advertising reports published in June 2026. Those national studies, produced independently of the pan-European AdEx methodology, sometimes diverge from the harmonised European figures, a gap the AdEx report itself acknowledges arises from differing scope, category boundaries and net-versus-gross reporting conventions across the 30 national markets it aggregates.

Timeline

  • 2006: IAB Europe begins publishing the AdEx Benchmark Report series.
  • 2023: Europe's digital advertising market reaches 102.2 billion euros in constant 2025 euro terms.
  • 2024: The market grows 16.0 percent to reach 118.6 billion euros in constant 2025 euro terms, restated from the 118.9 billion euro figure originally reported for that year.
  • July 7, 2026: IAB Europe releases the AdEx Benchmark 2025 Report at a dedicated event in London, reporting 10.5 percent growth to 131.1 billion euros for the 2025 calendar year.

Summary

Who: IAB Europe, the Brussels-based trade association representing the European digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, working with national IAB associations across 30 markets, authored the report. Dr. Daniel Knapp, IAB Europe's Chief Economist, and Townsend Feehan, the organisation's CEO, provided the report's central commentary.

What: The twentieth edition of the AdEx Benchmark Report found that Europe's digital advertising market grew 10.5 percent in 2025 to reach 131.1 billion euros, with video advertising crossing 50 percent of total display investment and retail media crossing 10 percent of total digital ad spend for the first time in the study's history.

When: The report was released on July 7, 2026, at a dedicated event in London, covering full calendar-year 2025 data compared against a restated 2024 baseline.

Where: The study covers 30 European national markets, from the United Kingdom and Germany to smaller markets including Estonia, Latvia and Slovenia, with five markets fully modelled due to the absence of a national association submission.

Why: The report matters to the marketing community because it functions as the industry's most widely cited harmonised benchmark for European digital ad spend, used by planners, agencies and platform vendors to calibrate budget decisions against continental trends; this edition's introduction of inflation-adjusted growth figures and explicit search-coverage disclosures also marks a methodological shift toward greater transparency about what the underlying national data can and cannot show.