Online Spend Overtakes TV in UK
For the first time ever, advertisers in the UK have spent more in the past six months on online advertising than they have on television.
According to the bi-annual online advertising expenditure study from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) – in partnership with Pricewaterhouse Coopers – the internet has now overtaken TV advertising to become the UK’s single biggest advertising medium.
In the first half of 2009, internet advertising weathered the recession and grew by 4.6% to just over £1,75 billion, despite the entire advertising sector contracting by 16.6% during the same period.
The UK remains the world leader in terms of market share for online, with the medium accounting for 23.5% in the first half of 2009. The results signal a significant restructure of marketing budgets as advertisers follow their audiences online and look to the internet for even more measureable and accountable methods.
Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau, said: “Internet advertising has beaten all expectations to achieve growth in the most challenging market conditions. Online display has performed notably well against its peers in TV, print and radio despite more than £1.5 billion being wiped off the advertising industry.”
However it was paid-for search rather than online display that led the swing to digital marketing, accounting for 62.6% of all online advertising expenditure, an increase of 11,8% from the same period in 2008. As the purest form of direct response advertising, search is clearly proving attractive to recession-hit marketers.
Breakdown of online ad spend in the UK, H1 2009
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