British ad industry growing fast

The great and the good of the advertising world converged on London last week for a five-day long brain storming session. Sponsored by Google, ITV, Microsoft, Sky (SKY), Yahoo, Facebook and others, around 30,000 ad men and women booked into seminars, workshops and events during Europe's third Advertising Week.

Clearly, the British ad industry is in good health. New figures compiled by Thinkbox back that up. According to data supplied to it by the UK commercial TV broadcasters, sales of TV advertising grew for a fifth consecutive year in 2014, up by 6% to a record £4.91 billion.

The figure represents all the money invested by advertisers in commercial TV, including sponsorship and product placement. And it's expected to grow for a sixth year in 2015 - marketing information service Warc predicts TV ad revenue to grow by 5.5% next year.

Warc also predicts the UK will have the fourth largest advertising market in 2015 in terms of spend, or 5.5% of the global ad market. That could be worth some £19.6 billion, up from £16.3 billion in 2011, and represents much more rapid growth than in the US and the rest of Europe.

At Advertising Week Europe (AWE), Tracy Halliwell, AWE Advisory Council member and director of business tourism and major events at London & Partners, said: "London is the leading European hub for advertising and the creative industries and AWE underlines the impact the city's dynamism and energy can have on the creative game-changers who are driving forward revolutionary new ideas to fuel the industry's growth and continuous transformation."

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