Irish advertisers spent an estimated €574m last year on a range of digital advertising solutions according to the latest IAB Ireland PwC Online Adspend report.
This is a 17% increase on the previous years’ figure, according to the report which notes that display advertising grew by 17% in 2018 to €250m while social grew by 18% to €161m with video up by a whopping 34% to €91m. Classified advertising, meanwhile, grew by 10% to €37m.
Search advertising, however, continues to dominate the adspend figures, growing by an estimated 17% in 2018 to €286m.
Reflecting the global growth trend in mobile adspend, mobile advertising in the Irish market reached €376m in 2018, according to the report.
According to Shane Nolan, Chairman of IAB Ireland Board and Director of New Business Sales EMEA, Google: “Ireland’s 2018 digital Adspend of €574m reflects a strong 17% growth rate in our market. IAB Ireland and its members are focused on maintaining this positive momentum and building a sustainable future for the Irish digital advertising industry”.
Suzanne McElligott, CEO IAB Ireland added: “The IAB PwC Online Adspend report is one of our most important projects with the annual announcement of results anticipated by the industry. With the introduction of IAB Brand membership in 2019 we are dedicated to developing outputs to assist advertisers in maximising their digital knowledge and expertise as well as driving cross industry collaboration to the benefit of the Irish digital ecosystem”
“The digital advertising market in Ireland continues to show a robust growth level of 17%, which is driven largely by increased spend on search, particularly mobile search, VoD and social media. The increased use of programmatic trading in the Irish market also supports increased efficiencies of targeting, buying and reporting,” says Nuala Nic Ghearailt, Manager, PwC.
Internationally, IAB has been working with PwC since 1997 to survey the value of Online Adspend in Europe and North America and for the Irish arm of the report 24 leading publishers participated in the study, many of whom represent multiple websites. Other participants include sales houses and advertising networks. Adspend revenue is drawn up on the basis of actual figures provided by the study participants on a confidential basis to PwC. The study results are prepared by PwC based on the figures provided by participants, which have not been verified or audited by PwC. However Google, Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn do not publish their earnings from Irish advertisers. Instead PwC in conjunction with IAB creates an independent estimate of their revenues from Irish advertisers and agencies, by extrapolating from spend data provided directly by a representative sample of their clients. In addition, RTÉ does not submit data to the IAB PwC Adspend Study. Instead, RTÉ’s digital adspend is deduced through a Freedom of Information request as well as discussions with media agencies.
