IAB UK and Mediasense put first-half digital adspend at £21.2bn, up 13 per cent, with retail media up 32 per cent and streaming taking a third of video spend.
UK advertisers spent £21.2bn on digital advertising in the first half of 2026, up 13 per cent on a year earlier, according to the IAB UK’s Digital Adspend study with Mediasense, published on Tuesday. That is more in six months than the £16.5bn spent in the whole of 2020, and the growth is being driven by video and retail media rather than the search ads that still make up the biggest share.
Search remains the largest format at £9.1bn, 43 per cent of the total, growing 10 per cent. Video grew faster, up 18 per cent to £5.1bn, and around a third of that, roughly £1.7bn, went on streaming and connected TV, which the IAB calls TV+. Retail media, the ads sold by retailers on their own sites and apps, was the fastest riser of all, up 32 per cent to £2bn, as Decision Marketing reported.
Almost all of it is now bought by machine. Programmatic accounted for £17.2bn, or 81 per cent of digital spend, up from 78 per cent a year earlier. Mediasense expects the market to grow 12 per cent across 2026 and to reach £50bn in 2027.
Elizabeth Lane, head of insight at IAB UK, said the comparison with 2020 “really brings home the scale of change”, but that “this isn’t only a story about digital getting bigger. Where that money is going is changing too.”
The same survey asked the industry what worries it. Economic uncertainty was named by 70 per cent of respondents, AI and automation by 37 per cent and measurement by 30 per cent.
The headline figure is growth, but the story is the shape. Retail media growing three times as fast as search is the clearest sign yet that the money is following shoppers to the places they actually buy, which is why McDonald’s and every large retailer now want an ad business of their own. And streaming taking a third of video spend shows how far TV money has already moved online.
It also puts last week’s forecasts in context. The IAB’s economic study claimed digital advertising is worth £175bn to the UK economy, and these are the spend figures underneath that claim. For how 81 per cent of it gets bought, see our programmatic explainer.
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