Total European digital ad spend grew by 10.5 percent in 2025 to reach €131.1 billion, according to IAB Europe’s latest edition of its AdEx Benchmark Study, and as has consistently been the case in recent years, video is one of the primary drivers of growth. In fact, IAB Europe’s latest data shows that video now accounts for more than half of all display investment in Europe for the first time, a significant milestone for video advertising. Meanwhile total video investment, at €34 billion, accounts for just over a quarter of European digital ad spend.
A quick note on definitions here: while some definitions of display advertising specifically exclude video, IAB Europe uses the term to cover banner, video, and native formats across the open web. (For context, the AdEx report splits media into social, display, search, classifieds & directories, and retail media — video isn’t its own category, but sits across these formats.) So in essence, these newest AdEx figures tell us that total open web video spending is now greater than all the combined investment in other open web formats.
This marks a significant shift just over the past year. In the previous AdEx study, video display sat at €12.4 billion, still a significant way behind traditional display formats at €18.8 billion.
Social climbing
Display, however, wasn’t even the fastest-growing video segment. Social video investment was up by 25.7 percent year-on-year, outpacing overall video spend growth of 19.6 percent. As audience enthusiasm for social video holds strong, advertisers are continuing to lean in. The AdEx report says this growth demonstrates the shift towards short-form, video-led, and platform-based ad formats.
It’s interesting to compare these figures to retail media’s 2025 growth. Retail media spend was up by 16.7 percent — not a slow rise by any means, but still less rapid than social video, despite the fact that we’re seeing a lot more technological development on the retail media front. That may be in part a function of retail media still finding its feet, particularly in terms of off-site retail data activations. But it also hints that despite all the excitement and enthusiasm around the targeting and measurement opportunities enabled by retail media, engagement is still the trump card on the sell-side — which social video has in spades.
However Daniel Knapp, the report’s author and IAB Europe’s chief economist, said he expects these worlds to become increasingly entangled. “Two milestones in this year’s data show where the market is heading: video now accounts for more than half of all display investment in Europe for the first time, while retail media has passed 10 percent of total digital ad spend,” he said. “Commerce and content are converging, measurability is deciding where the next euro goes.”
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