• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, October 29, 2019

The organisations have ramped up their 2019 prediction by 0.4% to suggest that UK advertising marketing will grow 5% this year. It is the result, the research says, of "stellar" growth in online advertising. 

As ever with forecasts, we have the usual questions over how long can newspapers and magazines last with seemingly endless downturns in their fortunes, but this time we also have a new question. With all this new money coming into advertising, how is it going to be measured?

Let's cover the winners and losers first. There are charts accompanying the Mediatel story on the figures, but the standouts for massive growth that may not have been fully forecast are digital out-of-home and cinema. In fact, the latter grew by nearly 50% year-on-year in Q2, up 44% more than expected.

Search -- as ever -- is at the top of the list in terms of overall value, with better-than-expected growth exceeding 12% year-on-year.

When it comes to print, however, it's a proverbial game of two halves. Nationals are up both overall and in digital ad spend. The same applies to local papers on digital ad spend, but sadly, as one could have predicted, overall spend is down, as it is for magazines for both overall and online. So nationals will smile at the research, the rest of print will not be so pleased.

Which brings us to digital ad spend seeing, what the researcher call "stellar" growth of 12% for search and 11 for display between Q2 2018 and Q2 2019.

As ever, the overall ad spend figure going up, this time to a prediction of 5% growth in 2019, is being fuelled mostly by these channels.

This raises a fundamental question. How do advertisers know the campaigns are working for them? The IAB UK ran the "don't be a clickhead" campaign not so long ago, pointing out that there is a lot more to digital advertising success than clicks.

The point is that you get a lot of exposure and you're seen in the right places and that can have a huge branding uplift, putting your name in the minds of people who will remember you when it is time to convert.

The only problem is, research from On Device today suggests that only a quarter of campaigns are ever measured for brand impact. When they are, it is usually carried out by the media buyer itself, rather than an independent body, with the purpose of what the researchers call justifying ad spend.

The researchers suggest that brands looking for brand lift, through independent research, see a 20% improvement in brand awareness compared to those that conduct no research.

So we have a mismatch here. The IAB UK, and the media-buying niche of the digital advertising industry, are telling brands there is a lot more to display than clicks. And yet, slightly under a quarter of campaigns are invested for brand uplift, and even then, usually by a media agency looking to back up planning and buying decisions. This, of course, is not to blame agencies because it could well be the case that advertisers are not paying for brand-lift research.

It means that as a new money continues to flow into digital advertising, when it comes to brand uplift, we're still a little ways off from finding what advertisers get in return beyond clicks.