IAB Europe, the leading European association for digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, on Tuesday May 25 announced through the AdEx Benchmark study that despite the pandemic situation, the European digital advertising market has grown by 6,3% to reach 69,900 million euros.
The AdEx Benchmark study helps us understand the development of the digital advertising sector in recent years and it covers 28 markets.
The positive growth figure is back after a challenging year on many levels. Advertising markets are generally hit hard after an economic downturn, this time bucking this historic trend.
In 2020, a total of 7 countries have experienced double-digit year-on-year growth, among them we highlight Turkey as the most dynamic market with growth of 34.8%, Ukraine of 24.5% and Serbia of 19.2%.
In 2020, only three markets have experienced a decrease compared to the previous year in advertising investment: Belgium (-0,4%), Spain (-3,0%) and Belarus (significant fall of -8,3%).
An interesting fact is to see how Germany, despite being among the countries with the highest cases of COVID-19 in Europe, has experienced double-digit growth.
The Display format continues to be a channel with the highest investment in digital advertising for the third consecutive year.
The growing trend in recent years of Social (display), driven in large part by the explosion of e-commerce, this year has seen the highest growth of all channels. This year for the first time it has more market share than the traditional display format (banners, natives, among others)
As we can see in the previous graph, the category Classifieds, Directories & Affiliate has looked slightly stagnant in the last three years.
Mobile – the unstoppable trend
Finally, in the following chart about the relationship between devices (desktop and mobile) and advertising in display format, we can see how mobile dominates following the growing trend of recent years.
