Powering Growth: how digital advertising fuels the UK economy

James Chandler (0:00)

Hello, James here, and welcome back to The IAB UK Podcast. Can you believe it, we're on season 20 already, and we've got lots planned for you this autumn and winter.

We've got, of course, lots of IAB UK members, we've got experts, we've got academics, we've got subject matter experts, we've got journalists, we've got a whole host of people covering the length and breadth of digital advertising. And where better to start than a brand new report that we're launching this week. To follow up to a big report that we launched some years ago called the Digital Dividend, which sized digital advertising and its impact on the UK economy. Its follow up is called Powering Growth, and we've produced it in partnership once again with Public First. And who better to come and talk to you about it than our very own head of Policy & Public Affairs, Sinead Coogan Jobes. And she's joined by Neil Ross, whose partner at Public First. And they're going to talk us through all the findings, what it means for growth in the UK, how they're going to talk to government about it, and how it breaks down into various regions within the UK. Here's Sinead and Neil.

SPEAKER_2 (1:07)

Welcome to The IAB UK Podcast.

James Chandler (1:11)

Neil, Sinead, thank you very much for coming on The IAB UK Podcast. Tell us about this new report that's launching, but perhaps for the uninitiated, take us back in time a little bit to the digital dividend, which some people will be familiar with, but others might not.

Sinead Coogan Jobes (1:24)

Yeah, so we did the digital dividend back in 2023, and we actually worked with Public First on that as well. And that was really a snapshot in time. So we were trying to quantify what the value of the digital advertising sector was to the UK.

So beyond just the sector itself, what it was bringing in, in GVA, in jobs, how it was helping businesses to grow.

So it was really good to have those numbers, and it showed that the industry is doing a lot, and it was a great kind of first step in the door to show government that economic value. But the reason why we've done this report four years on is we wanted to update some of those numbers, but we also wanted to look to the future, because the big conversations that are happening in the minute are about how we stimulate growth in the UK, and how we kind of drive the key industries of the future, which we believe digital advertising is one. So we wanted to see what could be done if the UK government actually does support this industry. And the numbers that we've got are amazing. I mean, it shows that the digital advertising sector is growing tenfold compared to the UK economy, and it's brought in growth that is the size of Liverpool to the UK. Goodness, what is it? So that is amazing, and I don't think that we should kind of lose sight of how impressive that is, and how much the industry has innovated in those four years. But one of the things we're trying to do with this report is to show what could and could be lost if we don't foster that growth and nurture it. And the way we often talk about it with policymakers is that growth, we call it fragile growth. That's not to say it's like a house of cars that's going to fall down, but there are a lot of interdependencies that allow digital advertising to thrive and grow. That includes the fact that the UK is seen as a great place to invest, to try new technologies, skills that we've got here are amazing compared to some other parts of the world. So how do we make sure that we keep all those interdependencies working well together? And that's what we wanted to project with this report.

James Chandler (3:23)

Did you have a sense of what you might find? Often with some of these reports, you sort of go in almost knowing the things that you want to see and it's about going to prove those things. Anything you kind of went in that surprised you or that you weren't expecting in the results?

Neil Ross (3:38)

I think the scale of the growth is really encouraging.

And the UK has got some really strong strengths, particularly in digital and services industry. So that made us kind of think the numbers are probably going to go up by a bit. But I think the jump has been really impressive. But we've also looked at some of the IAB figures from across Europe. And in some ways, you can see that the UK is really pulling ahead of other European countries. The UK's digital advertising sector, we think, is about twice the size of German's, they are some other countries as well. So this is becoming a really central strength of ours. And that kind of tells you why the government put in its industrial strategy and the creative sector plan. This has got to be an industry that we kind of row behind and that will drive significant growth going forward.