Advertisers in the UK are now spending more on video ads than display ads for the first time ever, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Digital Adspend report. The latest figures put video ad spend at £699 million for the first half of 2016, while display advertising lagged behind at £685 million.
If current growth trends keep up, the narrow lead video has gained over display can be expected to widen quickly. Back in 2014 display spending was more than double that of video, but strong growth in video has seen it quickly make up the difference; the H1 figures for 2017 represent a 46 percent year-on-year spending rise for video, but a less than 2 percent rise for display.
Video’s strong performance can be put down to a couple of factors. Mobile spending generally has risen sharply in recent years, now accounting for 43 percent of all digital advertising compared to 22 percent in 2014, and mobile makes up 70 percent of all video spending. Advertisers have also been buying heavily in new video formats – spend on outstream/social in-feed nearly doubled in the last year making it now the most popular format, overtaking pre-and post-roll ads.
The IAB’s CEO Jon Mew says these spending changes show advertisers adapting to trends in how audiences consume content. “The time people spend watching online video has grown tremendously over the last few years, so it’s little wonder that video is now the fastest-growing ad format as advertisers look to tap into the changing way people consume content,” he said in a press release.
Other notable findings from the report are that digital ad spend as a whole reached over £5.5 billion for the first half of 2017, a increase of 13.8 percent from the previous year, and that ad spend on social media sites grew 42 percent to over £1 billion.
