UK TV advertising outpaces other platforms


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Editor

| 22 October 2015





Advertising Association and Warc research has revealed that advertising spend on UK TV spots grew at over three times the rate of desktop Internet during the first half of 2015.


In all, the AA/Warc UK Expenditure Report found that TV spot has had a strong start to 2015, with 11.5% year-on-year growth in ad spend recorded during the first quarter and 2.9% in the second. What made this more impressive, noted AA/Warc, was that the latter figure compares with a quarter in which the football World Cup was held last year.

As a result, advertising expenditure for TV spot rose 7.1% to £2.4 billion over the first six months of 2015, compared with 2.1% for desktop Internet ad spend over the same period, with ad revenues amounting to £2.8 billion. Desktop spend rose 3.0% over the first three months of 2015, but slowed to just 1.3% in the second quarter.

On what AA/Warc called a 'pure play' basis — that is excluding revenues such as broadcaster video-on-demand (VOD) from Internet, desktop ad spend grew just half a percent in the first six months of 2015. Within this, desktop display ad spend rose 1.1% year-on-year in H1 2015, with spend four times less than that for spot.

As a consequence, AA/Warc has revised its TV spot ad spend forecasts upwards to 6.7% for the year, while TV ad revenue as a whole – inclusive of spot, sponsorship, VOD, advertiser-funded programming and product placement – is expected to come in 7.1% higher than in 2014. Such a total would represent TV's strongest performance since 2010, with ad-spend surpassing £5 billion for the first time.

"TV advertising's continued strong performance reflects both the wealth of independent evidence proving its effectiveness and advertisers' own experience of seeing it work," said Matt Hill, research and planning director at Thinkbox, the trade association for commercial broadcasters in the UK. "Looking at where the growth has come from, there has been increased investment in all major marketing categories, with the highest growth coming from both online companies and longer standing FMCG brands looking to harness the brand building power of TV," he added.