UK advertisers spent £21.2bn on digital in the first six months of 2026, more than in the whole of 2020, according to IAB UK and mediasense. When that much money is chasing the same screens, the cost of being seen tends to creep up, and that is when buying wider and buying late starts to pay.
What’s happened
On 29 September IAB UK and mediasense published their half-year Digital Adspend study. According to IAB UK, advertisers spent £21.2bn on digital in the first half of 2026, up 13% on a year earlier and almost £5bn more than the £16.5bn spent in the whole of 2020. Search took £9.1bn, or 43% of the total, after growing 10%; video rose 18% to £5.1bn, with a third of that now going to streaming TV; and retail media was the fastest riser, up 32% to £2.0bn. Programmatic, the automated buying of ad space, accounted for 81% of all digital spend, up from 78% a year earlier, and mediasense expects growth of around 12% for 2026 as a whole.
Why it matters to smaller advertisers
The total makes the headline, but what matters is how the money is spent. More than four-fifths of it now goes through automated systems, and most search and social advertising is priced by auction. In an auction, nobody sends you a new rate card when more money turns up. You simply pay a little more for each click or view, week after week, and it rarely appears as a line you can challenge. For a claims firm that lives on search enquiries, an auction house chasing consignments, or a promoter selling tickets against a fight date, that quiet creep matters more than the national total. It tends to bite hardest before Christmas, when the big retail budgets arrive.
The study only measures digital, so it says nothing directly about newspapers, magazines, radio or posters. What we can say from buying those media every week is that they behave the opposite way. A page that has not sold by deadline or an airtime break that is still empty on Thursday is worth nothing to the media owner on Friday, so the price comes down as the clock runs out. Digital auctions get dearer as they get busier; late space gets cheaper as it gets closer.
There is a useful point in the video figures too. A third of the £5.1bn spent on video now goes to streaming TV, and IAB UK notes that connected TV is becoming easier to plan and buy alongside other digital formats. It can be bought region by region, which suits a regional saleroom or a fight night in one city far better than a national campaign would. The study also asked about pressures: 70% of respondents put economic uncertainty in their top three challenges and 30% highlighted measurement. If nearly a third of the industry finds digital hard to measure, it is worth asking what your own spend is actually delivering.
This is the work we do for clients. We treat digital and traditional media as one budget, not two. We look at what each enquiry, consignment or ticket sale is costing you in search and social today, then go to the newspaper, radio, TV and poster sales houses to find out what is unsold this week and negotiate it late. The next pound then goes wherever it buys the most response, not simply back into the busiest auction.
What we’d do
First, pull your own numbers before you set the Q4 budget. Compare what you paid per enquiry or per sale in search and social last quarter with the same quarter a year ago. If the cost has risen faster than the response, cap the spend at the point where it still pays and hold back the rest.
Second, price the alternative. Take that held-back money and ask what it would buy in late-space press, radio or out-of-home aimed at the same customer. You cannot know whether digital is good value until you have a real quote to set beside it.
Third, if your only video is on social, test streaming TV on a small scale in one region, with one clear measure of response such as calls, catalogue requests or ticket sales. Judge it on results, then decide whether it earns a place on the plan.
How VCM can help
We plan digital and traditional media as one budget and negotiate the traditional part late, so your money goes where it buys the most response. Have a look at how we approach digital advertising, then get in touch on 0333 577 1848 or at James@vcmweb.co.uk. Send us what you are spending online this quarter and we will talk your plan through and tell you what the alternatives should cost right now, no obligation.
