Silver lining
It's well known that ad spend takes a kicking in a recession and this one was certainly no exception. The silver lining, however, is that online ad spend in the UK actually grew in the first half of this year.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) does a bi-annual audit of online ad spend together with accountants PWC and some other market researcher. It has concluded that the Internet has now overtaken TV as the UK's biggest single advertising medium.
Apparently, the UK is the world leader when it comes to the proportion of total ad spend committed to the Internet, with 23.5 percent of all ad dosh manifesting itself online in the first half of this year. The total of £1,752.1 million represents growth of 4.6 percent, which we think is a year-on-year figure.
Paid-for search took up three fifths of that spend, which is great news for Google. The remaining fifths were divided between classified ads and online display, with classified increasing its share of the pie at the expense of display.
The biggest online spenders are the tech sector (19.1 percent), telcos (13.3 percent), finance (13.2 percent) and entertainment/media (11.8 percent). The entire advertising sector declined by 16.6 percent, so that's an especially good effort by t'Internet.
Eva Berg-Winters, online advertising expert, at PWC, said: "Perhaps surprisingly, a slowing economy has accelerated the migration to digital technology and hence the continuing shift from more traditional forms of advertising to online, which promises return on investment and measurability in a period of instability."
Guy Phillipson, CEO of IAB, added: "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."
