Advertising spend is increasing across the UK with the total spend in 2025 increasing by 6.4% in the year. And the rate of growth is not expected to slow according to the Advertising Association and Warc in the quarterly expenditure report. At this rate the total spend by UK advertisers should reach £52.6 billion in 2027.
The bulk of the increase is coming from digital media including social media (up 21%), addressable TV (37% higher), retail media (+17.5%) and online radio (+14.9%) in the year. Direct mail by contrast managed only a 0.3% increase in 2025 compared to 2024 and recorded a drop of 3.3% in the last three months of the year. The report predicts that direct mail expenditure will fall 1.3% for the year.
Other print channels are faring poorly with the exception of out of home displays. And increasing share of this is digital, through display screens and such like. While the sector as a whole grew 2.3% during the year, the rate of growth for digital displays increased 3.0%. This year the overall spend on out of home will be 3.1% while digital’s share will grow 4.5%.
Advertising in newspapers and magazines continues to drop on all counts, during 2025, the final quarter compared to the previous equivalent and expected spend over the course of this year.
The report, which has been reshaped to simply reporting and to modernise some of the data inputs, shows that search, social media and online formats account for almost two thirds of UK advertising spend in 2025, Its rate of growth is pushing towards three quarters of advertising revenues heading for non print media.
The AA/Warc team aim to track this more closely with a working group focused on how to measure investment on the influencer channel and on the emerging advertising opportunities that come from the take up of LLMs and other forms of generative AI. It also wants to capture advertising spend by the long tail of SME businesses in the UK that have until now fallen below the radar.
