UK advertisers spent £11.7 billion on media in the first three months of 2026, up 9.3 per cent on the same quarter a year earlier. Of that, £4.6 billion went to search. One channel took very nearly two pounds in every five.
The figures come from the Advertising Association and WARC, whose quarterly Expenditure Report was published on 30 July. The headline growth ran 1.7 percentage points ahead of the forecast the same organisations made in April, which makes this an upgrade rather than a confirmation.
Where the Growth Actually Is
The breakdown by channel is more useful than the total, because the growth is nothing like evenly spread.
The fastest riser was online radio at 22.1 per cent. Behind it came retail media at 17.9 per cent, social media at 17.7 per cent, digital out of home at 17.6 per cent, out of home overall at 15.0 per cent and addressable television at 15.5 per cent.
Further down the table, direct mail grew 7.9 per cent, radio 4.2 per cent, digital magazine brands 2.9 per cent and online classifieds 0.5 per cent.
Then there is total television, which grew 0.8 per cent. In a quarter when the market as a whole grew 9.3 per cent, a channel growing under one per cent is losing share at speed, and doing so while its own addressable segment grows 15.5 per cent.
Search Is Still the Market
It is easy to read a list of double-digit growth rates and conclude that the emerging channels are where the money now is. The £4.6 billion figure corrects that.
Search grew 9.8 per cent, which is barely above the market average and well below retail media or social. But it is growing that rate from a base large enough to represent the single biggest share of all UK advertising investment. In absolute pounds, a 9.8 per cent rise on £4.6 billion adds more spending than a 22.1 per cent rise on online radio does.
For a business allocating a marketing budget, that ordering matters more than the growth league table. Percentage growth tells you where competitors are moving. Absolute size tells you where the auction you are bidding into is most crowded, and search remains by a distance the most crowded.
Television Is the Outlier
The split within television is the most interesting line in the release. Addressable television, meaning advertising targeted to specific households rather than broadcast to everyone watching, grew 15.5 per cent. Total television grew 0.8 per cent.
Those two numbers describe the same medium being bought in two different ways, with one working and the other not. Advertisers have not stopped valuing the format. They have stopped paying for the part of it they cannot target.
That has a practical read-across beyond television. The channels growing fastest in this quarter share a characteristic: retail media, social, addressable TV and digital out of home all permit measurement and targeting at a level that traditional buying does not. Advertisers are not simply moving to digital. They are moving to accountable.
The Gap Between the Ad Market and the Firms in It
There is a tension worth naming between this release and the rest of the current UK data.
Advertising investment grew 9.3 per cent in the first quarter. Over a broadly comparable period, the Federation of Small Businesses recorded that 55 per cent of small firms saw revenues fall, against 22 per cent seeing them rise, with confidence at the weakest level its index has recorded.
Both are accurate. They can coexist because the ad market’s growth is concentrated in formats bought at scale. Retail media is dominated by large retailers selling access to their own customer data. Search and social growth is driven substantially by advertisers with the budget to bid continuously. A record advertising market is not evidence that the average British business is spending more on marketing, and it should not be read as such.
The Advertising Association’s own framing does note that advertisers “large and small” are finding value across the ecosystem. The channel mix suggests the value is easier to access at the larger end.
What a Smaller Advertiser Should Take From the Mix
Three things follow for a business with a budget that is not measured in millions.
The first is that cost inflation in the crowded channels is real. When search grows 9.8 per cent and social 17.7 per cent, much of that increase is more bidders competing for a supply of impressions that does not expand at the same rate. A flat budget in those auctions buys less than it did a year ago, which will show up as rising cost per click rather than as a line item anyone flagged.
The second is that the slower-growing channels are slower-growing partly because larger advertisers have moved on. Radio at 4.2 per cent, direct mail at 7.9 per cent and total television at 0.8 per cent are the places where competitive pressure is lightest. For a regional or category-specific business, that can mean better rates than the equivalent reach costs online.
The third is out of home, which grew 15.0 per cent overall and 17.6 per cent in its digital form. That is a channel that has become measurable and, consequently, contested. Its growth is worth reading as a warning about pricing rather than as an invitation.
The Forecast
AA/WARC now expects UK advertising investment to grow 8.2 per cent across 2026, reaching £50.5 billion, and a further 5.9 per cent in 2027 to £53.5 billion.
A full-year forecast of 8.2 per cent against first-quarter growth of 9.3 per cent implies the rest of the year is expected to run slightly slower than the start of it. That is a mild deceleration rather than a turn, and it sits reasonably alongside an economy where the Bank of England is arguing about raising rates rather than cutting them.
Why Retail Media Keeps Taking Share
Retail media, at 17.9 per cent growth, deserves separating out because it is the channel most likely to change how a supplier business budgets over the next two years.
The format is straightforward. A retailer sells advertising space against its own customers, on its own website, app and increasingly in its physical stores, using purchase data it already holds. For the retailer it is high-margin revenue built on an asset it owns anyway. For the advertiser it offers something search and social historically could not: a direct line between an impression and a basket.
The consequence for suppliers is less comfortable. A brand selling through a large retailer now faces a second commercial negotiation alongside the trading one, and the two are not always kept separate. Budget spent on a retailer’s media network is budget that improves visibility inside that retailer specifically, which strengthens the relationship and simultaneously deepens the dependence.
Firms in that position should at minimum account for retail media as a cost of distribution rather than as marketing. It behaves like one. It is negotiated with the customer, it is difficult to withdraw without consequence, and its returns accrue substantially within a single channel to market.
The growth rate suggests that reframing is overdue for a lot of suppliers. A category growing at nearly 18 per cent a year is not a pilot line in a budget.
A Note on the Numbers
One methodological point matters for anyone comparing these figures with older ones. The dataset follows a new breakdown of the figures introduced in April 2026 after consultation with industry stakeholders, and the report is drawn from a survey of media owners and the bodies representing them.
That means year-on-year comparisons in this release are internally consistent, but a reader holding a 2024 or 2025 report should not assume the channel definitions are identical. Retail media in particular has been carved out of categories where it previously sat, which flatters its apparent growth against older baselines.
The direction is not in doubt. The precision of any single channel comparison across the methodology change is.
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