UK advertisers set to spend record £9.5bn this Christmas

The first two weeks of November have already seen the release of most major UK retailers’ Christmas campaigns – John Lewis dropped its highly anticipated spot this morning. Campaigns so far have featured big celebrity names, including Micheal Bublé for Asda, Ryan Reynolds for M&S and Graham Norton for Waitrose.

Christmas is the time when the retailers’ TV spots takes center stage in their media plans, with each premiering during prime-time telly. This is reflected in ad spend, with Warc predicting over £1.5bn will be spent on TV advertising during the festive period.

While the TVC ads are still at the heart of British Christmas tradition, the retailers are out-spending on digital, with an estimated every four out of five pounds spent online in 2023.

The research from Warc shows a year-on-year growth for festive spend on the broadcasters’ video-on-demand services, with a 20.2% increase, plus a 10.3% uplift on out-of-home and a 9.1% increase in online display investment. Search is forecasted to receive the largest cash injection at £3.5m, up 6.6% on the same period in 2022.

Spend with national news outlets is expected to be down 2.4%, along with radio, which is down 0.3%, and magazines, which are down 1.4%. Cinema, meanwhile, is likely to be up 11.5% on last year.

Can Christmas rescue ITV’s ad revenue?

UK broadcaster ITV will be hoping this bumper Christmas will help boost its final quarter ad revenues after its third-quarter results painted a troubling picture.

Despite total revenue at ITV for the nine months to September 30 being up 1% to £3bn from 2022’s £2.9bn, its total ad revenues were down 7% to £1.5bn from £1.6bn in 2022. For the full year, ITV expects its total ad revenue to be down 8% versus 2022.

This will have a knock-on effect on ITV’s content spend for 2024, with ITV committing to £10m less than in 2023, around £1.3bn.

There was good news for ITV’s ambition to grow its digital ad revenues, those being up 25% year-on-year at £283m from £227m. The results also showed positive results for its streamer ITVX, which has so far delivered 27% growth in total streaming hours and 23% growth in digital revenue.

Commenting on the earnings, ITV chief executive Carolyn McCall said: “ITV continues to make good strategic progress despite the challenging macro environment, which is impacting the advertising market and also the demand for content from free-to-air broadcasters in the UK and internationally.”