Online ad spend grew to €27.3 billion in Europe in 2013

"At the 8th edition of its annual Interact conference IAB Europe today announced that online advertising grew 11.9% to a market value of €27.3bn in 2013.
The AdEx Benchmark research - the definitive guide to the state of the European online advertising market - revealed that online advertising enjoyed another year of sustained growth across Europe. Most markets have shown a significant and now more uniform level of growth than in previous years. Whilst developing markets continue to grow their share of total media spend, the more mature markets have benefited from innovation in online advertising technology and advances in monetizing mobile, enabling them to also further extend their growth curve. Changing consumer patterns have made mobile monetization more urgent and Western European markets in particular are responding to this challenge generating the majority of their growth from mobile. A robust macroeconomic framework has increased advertiser confidence and stimulated budget shifts to online.
Mobile has taken double-digit display market share for the first time, accounting for 11.5% with a growth rate of 128.5% compared with 2012.
Online video advertising also showed strong growth, increasing by 45.4% in 2013, to nearly €1.19bn. This is the first time in Europe that online video has crossed the €1billion mark.
Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe, noted the importance of the digital ecosystem to European growth. “These results confirm the increasing value contributed by digital advertising to Europe’s economy. Technology innovation is driving growth and it’s important that we continue to foster our European digital businesses to enable a strong European presence on the world stage.”
Mobile, video and big data continue to provide rich new ways to engage consumers and at Interact today we will explore the success stories and illustrate the power of digital services in enabling business growth.
The IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark study splits the online ad market into 3 broad segments: Display, Search and Classifieds and Directories. Growth in these online advertising formats has been underpinned by shifting uses in devices and changing consumption patterns.
In 2013, the Display Ad market experienced the highest growth across the categories at 14.9%, with a total value of €9.2bn.
Search showed growth of 13.0% - and a market value of €13.4 billion. Strong growth was recorded in many markets across Europe with Russia again being the out-perfomer at 34.4% search growth. Factors for growth included investment in search across different devices, boosting the mobile search figures, as consumers continue to increase their time spent online on the go and the continued investment from small to medium sized business in the medium.
The 2013 Classifieds and Directories market was relatively stable at €4.6bn showing growth of 3.6%. Central and Eastern European markets continued to benefit from the migration of spend from print classifieds to online and the switch to classifieds normally noted in more difficult economic circumstances. Scandinavian markets maintained their strong position in this category €256m in Sweden and €252m in Norway although with their level of maturity in the category comes a lesser level of growth. Market consolidation has brought scale and efficiency to this formerly fragmented sector.
Daniel Knapp, Director of Advertising Research at IHS Technology and author of the research, said, “The underlying dynamics of growth in online advertising have changed in 2013. Mobile, and cross-device consumption has so far been a challenge facing marketers, with underdeveloped ecosystems and fragmented measurement approaches hampering investment. Yet our study shows that mobile has now become a significant part of online ad spend. Advancements in advertising targeting technology, standardisation of formats and improvements in measurement have allowed important progress in bridging the consumption/ad spend divide in mobile. It is now imperative that market participants further evolve their data strategies and connect advertising experiences across different devices from mobile to desktop for sustainable market growth.”
The top 10 list of markets are as follows. Top Individual market growth was registered by Russia 26.8% and Turkey with 24.3%.
Top 10 Rankings
1. UK - €7.4bn
2. Germany – €4.7bn
3. France - €3.5bn
4. Russia – €1.8bn
5. Italy- €1.7bn
6. Netherlands - €1.3bn
7. Sweden - €0.9bn
8. Spain – €0.9bn
9. Norway - €0.7bn
10. Denmark - €0.6bn"
Source:  Press release from IAB Europe, 20th May 2014