By Luís Daniel Rijo in Display News — Apr 28, 2019

UK advertisers spend £13.44 billion on digital advertising in 2018

IAB UK this week revealed that UK advertisers spent £13.44billion on digital advertising in 2018. The total ad spend is a 15 percent year-on-year increase. IAB UK says it's a demonstration of the continued confidence in digital advertising.

IAB UK

For the first time ever, ad spend on smartphones has exceeded desktop accounting for 51 percent of the total spend, up from 45 percent in 2017. This is a year-on-year increase of £1.65bn.

Commenting on the results, Tim Elkington, Chief Digital Officer, IAB UK, said “seeing mobile now account for over half of all digital ad spend is a significant milestone. In a decade of reporting these figures separately, we’ve seen spend rise from £38m in 2009 to a staggering £6.88bn in 2018.”

Beyond mobile, an additional driver of growth continues to be video, which accounts for 44 percent of the total display market. For the second year running, outstream (which includes social in-feed video) has exceeded pre-roll video, accounting for 57 percent of all video advertising.

The full IAB UK PwC Adspend study includes further splits of the data, including the growth in native formats, trends across devices for social media and search spend, and the drop in the spend on intrusive formats. The report can be only downloaded by IAB UK members.

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