• Nick Field, Director at Livingstone


• 08.11.2018 11:15 am
undisclosed

Concerns about ad safety and the quality of digital inventory have clearly had an impact on the mix of adspend in 2018.  News brands and magazines seem to have benefitted from a ‘flight to quality’, significantly reducing the decline in spend on these channels to an average of 7% (compared to 13% in H1-17). Given the uncertainty created by Brexit and challenges facing the UK consumer, growth in adspend significantly above expectations, and well ahead of inflation is certainly positive for media owners.

Whilst the year-on-year growth in internet advertising has continued to increase reaching 14.8% (up from 13.8% in H1-17) within this the growth of mobile has slowly markedly falling 8% compared to H1-17.  In the context of concerns around the quality this is unsurprising, as mobile is the platform most exposed to programmatic inventory of this kind.

The impact of GDPR is clearly demonstrated by the accelerating decline in direct mail spending. It looks likely that the one-time effect of GDPR on marketing databases and mailing lists has taken tens of millions of pounds of expenditure out of the direct mail channel in 2018.