UK spend on digital advertising defied the cost-of-living crisis in 2022 to post another year of double digit growth.

IAB's new Digital Adspend report, produced with PwC, revealed 2022 spend at £26.1 billion. That's 11 percent up on 2021 and 56 percent up on 2020.

It wasn't a great year for mobile. For the first time since records began, the rate of growth in desktop spend (+14 percent) outstripped mobile (+8 percent). The report cited Apple’s IDFA changes for the slowdown. However, mobile still has the largest share of spend at 58 percent.

Other report highlights include:

• Search spend grew 13 percent year-on-year to £13.1 billion
• Display spend grew by six percent to £10.4 billion
• Video spend grew by nine percent, largely driven by investment in outstream formats
• Retail-specific spend hit £176.4 million. The report asserts that this area will grow fast as advertisers increasingly harness retailers’ first-party data
• Podcast spend grew by 32 percent to £76.3m – a three-fold increase since IAB UK first started measuring the market in 2020

Jon Mew, CEO at IAB UK, said: “The latest Digital Adspend results highlight two things: resilience and opportunity. Not only was 2022 challenging for our industry, as it was for the entire UK economy, it also followed a year of stratospheric, pandemic-induced growth in 2021. In this context, it’s testament to the resilience of digital advertising that the market has maintained double digit growth in 2022 - and astounding that it has grown by 56% since the pandemic began."