Latest IAB Europe Report Echoes Ireland's Strong Digital Growth, Driven by Video and Social Media

The European digital advertising market has seen its strongest growth since 2011, with a total year-on-year increase of 16% in 2024, according to the latest IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark Report. This robust performance highlights a significant boom in digital ad spending across the continent.

Key drivers of this growth include:
• Social media, which saw a remarkable 23.9% increase
• Video advertising, including both display video and social video, which grew by 24.5% and 32.8% respectively
• Retail media, which also showed impressive expansion at 22.2%

Video formats are now particularly dominant, accounting for over half (53%) of all spending across display and social media combined.

While search remains the largest area for ad spend, its market share has slightly decreased. However, retail search experienced substantial growth, outperforming standard search and driving the overall search channel. Digital audio also made good progress, exceeding €1 billion in spend, largely due to the growing popularity of podcasts.

Overall, digital advertising now makes up nearly two-thirds (67.2%) of all advertising expenditure in Europe. The UK continues to be the largest market within Europe, with strong growth mirroring the wider European trend, particularly in video ad spend. This indicates a confident and rapidly accelerating digital advertising landscape across Europe, with emerging markets also showing significant digital adoption.

Bringing this closer to home, the Irish digital advertising market also celebrated a significant milestone in 2024, with total digital ad spend surpassing €1 billion for the first time, reaching €1.06 billion. This represents an 11% growth compared to 2023, as reported by the IAB Ireland Adspend Study.

Similar to the European trend, Ireland’s digital display advertising was a primary driver:
• Digital display grew by 13% to €669 million
• Video ad spend increased by 20% year-on-year
• Social media ad spend grew by 16%, reaching €515 million
• Broadcaster/publisher video saw particularly strong growth of 25%

Search advertising in Ireland also saw a 6% increase, reaching €331 million.

These figures show that Ireland’s digital advertising growth patterns are very much in line with, and contributing to, the broader European digital ad market boom.

Sources:
Video and retail media join social media as top drivers of Europe’s ad market | WARC
Irish Digital Advertising Spend grew by 11% in 2024 | IAB Ireland