Oli Yeates · 7 August 2026

UK advertisers spent £11.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 up 9.3% on 2025

UK advertising hit £11.7bn in Q1 2026, up 9.3%. The digital breakdown strand by strand, plus our projection for where the remaining £39bn goes before New Year.

UK advertisers spent £11.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Three months. Up 9.3% year on year, and ahead of forecast.

That's the easy bit, because it already happened. The more useful question is what happens to the roughly £39 billion still to be spent before New Year.

Some context first. The whole of 2025 came in at £46.7 billion, a figure that has roughly doubled since the pandemic. For 2026, AA/WARC expects 8.2% growth to £50.5 billion, which means the UK will cross £50 billion in annual ad spend for the first time ever. Momentum is forecast to carry into 2027 at 5.9%, reaching £53.5 billion. We think 2026 lands a bit higher than that, and I'll show the working later on.

Twice a year I make everyone at Clicky sit through these numbers. Not because the spreadsheet is thrilling, but because where the money actually goes tells you more about the state of our industry than a hundred hot takes on LinkedIn.

The Q1 figures landed at the end of July, and they're the freshest official data we have: Q2 numbers aren't due until October. Here's the breakdown, with digital split into its strands, our projection for how the rest of the year plays out, and what it means for budgets.

Worth knowing: AA/WARC rebuilt its category breakdown in April 2026 to better reflect how media is actually traded now, so some strands aren't directly comparable with older reports. Q1 is the first quarter reported fully on the new basis.

Digital, strand by strand

Digital takes roughly four in every five UK ad pounds, so "digital is growing" tells you nothing useful. The strands are where the story is.

Search: £4.6 billion, up 9.8%

Still the biggest single destination for UK ad money, and still growing at nearly 10% despite everything written about the death of search. Worth pausing on that. AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT have not dented what advertisers spend on search; if anything the auction keeps tightening. What is changing is what "search" includes, with AI-placed ads starting to blur the category edges. Our view: search budgets aren't going anywhere, but the skill set behind them is changing fast.

Social media: up 17.7%

Nearly twice the growth rate of search. This is where Meta's rising prices show up in national statistics: some of that 17.7% is genuinely more activity, and some is the same activity costing more. Meta's own Q2 results showed average ad prices up 12% year on year, so treat social's growth as part volume, part inflation.

Retail media: up 17.9%

The fastest-growing major strand, and the one most UK marketers still haven't properly planned for. Amazon dominates, but Tesco, Boots, Sainsbury's and the other retail networks are all building out their offers. IAB UK figures had online retail media at £1.5 billion in the first half of 2025, and it has grown every year for six years. If you sell through retailers and haven't looked at their media offer, your competitors have.

Online video and addressable TV: up 15.5%

Addressable TV grew 15.5% in Q1, and AA/WARC expects TV VOD to be 2026's fastest-growing format at 13.8% for the full year, helped by a World Cup summer. The line between "TV" and "online video" has effectively dissolved: it's all streams, increasingly bought programmatically. Note total TV was flat at 0.8%, so the growth is entirely in the addressable, on-demand end.

Online audio: up 22.1%

The biggest percentage riser in Q1. It's growing off a small base (IAB UK measured digital audio at around £160 million in H1 2025), but streaming audio and podcast advertising keep compounding. A genuinely underpriced channel for brand-building if your audience skews to podcast listeners.

Digital out of home: up 17.6%

OOH overall grew 15%, with digital screens doing the heavy lifting. Programmatic DOOH is making outdoor behave more like an online channel: audience-based, flexible, measurable. One to watch for local and retail brands.

Online display: the quiet middle

Display sits inside several of the strands above under the new breakdown, but the April forecast had online display growing 8.4% across 2026. Solid rather than spectacular, and increasingly automated through tools like PMax and Advantage+.

Online classifieds: up 0.5%

Effectively flat, and the clearest loser in digital. Classified marketplaces keep ceding ground to social commerce and retail media.

And the rest

Direct mail grew 7.9%, a genuine surprise and possibly a beneficiary of crowded digital inboxes. Radio rose 4.2%, digital magazine brands 2.9%. Total TV at 0.8% held steady only because addressable growth offset linear decline.

Where the rest of 2026 lands

Q1 is one quarter of a year that hasn't finished. So what happens next? Here's our read, with the working shown so you can disagree with it.

AA/WARC's official forecast is £50.5 billion for the full year, up 8.2%. But Q1 came in at 9.3%, which is 1.7 percentage points ahead of the April forecast. If that pace simply holds for the remaining nine months, the year lands nearer £51 billion. Q1 accounted for roughly 23% of the annual total, in line with the same quarter last year, so seasonality looks normal and Q4 remains the monster it always is.

That leaves around £38.8 billion still to be spent between now and New Year on the official forecast, or closer to £39.4 billion on Q1's actual pace. Either way, three quarters of the year's money is still in play.

Three things are pushing it up:

A World Cup summer. AA/WARC already expects TV VOD to be the year's fastest-growing format at 13.8%, and that forecast was made before the tournament delivered its audiences. Q2 and Q3 video numbers should be strong.

Q4 retail media. Retail media grew 17.9% in a quiet quarter. Its peak trading period is Christmas, so the strand's biggest numbers are still ahead. We'd expect it to close the year as the fastest-growing major channel.

Price inflation in social. Meta's Q2 results showed average ad prices up 12% year on year with impressions up 14%. Social's 17.7% Q1 growth is partly this. Rising auction prices mechanically inflate the spend figures whether or not anyone runs a single extra campaign.

And two things that could pull it down:

Search's category is getting blurry. Search grew 9.8% on a £4.6 billion base, but ChatGPT ads only reached UK self-serve advertisers this summer and AI-placed ads sit awkwardly across the existing definitions. Some of what gets counted as search in 2027 may not look much like search.

A soft economic backdrop. Growth this strong against flat consumer confidence is not something to take for granted. AA/WARC's forecast already assumes momentum cools to 5.9% in 2027.

Our projection, stated as ours rather than AA/WARC's: £51 billion for 2026, with retail media, online audio and addressable video leading growth, and Q4 setting a record for a single quarter of UK ad spend. We'll find out in October whether we're right.

What this means for your 2026 budget

Three things we're taking into client planning conversations.

First, the growth is in channels that behave like performance media but build brands: retail media, addressable TV, DOOH, audio. The old brand-versus-performance budget split is looking dated.

Second, double-digit growth in social and retail media partly reflects price inflation, not just opportunity. Rising markets punish lazy buying. Creative quality and clean data are what stop you simply paying more for the same result.

Third, search's 9.8% growth against a £4.6 billion base is the number that should recalibrate the AI panic. The money says search is very much alive. The work is making sure you're visible in both the classic results and the AI answers now sitting above them.

If you want help working out where your budget should sit against these numbers, that's rather literally what we do. Get in touch >>

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