By Andy Oakes, Publisher, New Digital Age and CEO of Bluestripe
Easter has always carried a certain duality — darkness before dawn, hardship before renewal. It feels like an apt metaphor for where the adtech and digital media market finds itself as we reach the end of Q1 2026.
Let’s not pretend the past few months have been easy. They haven’t. The industry was already navigating a thicket of challenges — margin pressure, the long tail of post-pandemic correction, the endless complexity of privacy regulation and the slow-burning upheaval of AI — when the war in the Middle East escalated sharply, adding yet another headwind to an already difficult trading environment.
The economic consequences of a crisis don’t land in ad budgets immediately. They travel through oil prices, supply chains, corporate margins and consumer wallets — and that journey is rarely linear. For UK advertisers and their media partners, that journey has been felt acutely. Consumer confidence has remained lacklustre, and the geopolitical turbulence has only deepened the sense of uncertainty that has made planning cycles feel, at times, almost futile.
The first layer of impact is psychological. Advertising, at its core, is a function of consumer confidence. When uncertainty rises, discretionary spending tends to recede, and marketing investment follows. Travel and tourism were among the first categories to flinch, and news platforms found themselves in a paradox: audience attention spiked during the conflict, but the context became increasingly sensitive, with advertisers remaining selective about where their messages appeared. High-traffic environments stopped being automatically monetisable — a particular sting for UK publishers already battling for their share of a concentrated market.
Add energy prices, supply chain pressure and softening consumer confidence and the variables multiply faster than any media plan can account for.
And yet. Here is where we should pause — because the picture, when you look at it properly, is considerably more nuanced than the headlines suggest.
Campaigns are being adjusted, not cancelled. Messaging is being recalibrated, not abandoned. And critically, the nature of where ad budgets now sit — in online channels that can be adjusted in real time — means a wait-and-see posture is easier to hold than it has ever been. This is not paralysis; this is the market demonstrating one of its most underappreciated qualities: agility.
The numbers, too, tell a more hopeful story. The UK’s digital advertising market exceeded £40bn in 2025, rising 10% year-on-year, and is now forecast to grow a further 10.3% in 2026 to reach £44.7bn. IAB UK CEO Jon Mew put it plainly: “Digital advertising has continued to show resilience in a challenging environment.”
Beneath the geopolitical noise, structural momentum is genuine. Retail media grew 18% to £3.8bn as advertisers prioritised closed-loop measurement and first-party data environments. Video outpaced the overall market, rising 20% year-on-year to £9.3bn. Programmatic trading now accounts for 78% of digital display spend — a milestone that speaks to how far the infrastructure of this industry has matured. UK publishers such as The Guardian, News UK and Reach are investing in first-party data platforms and contextual targeting engines, building brand-safe environments that attract advertisers seeking transparency. Tesco, Boots and Sainsbury’s are doing the same through retail media networks that are fast becoming serious advertising ecosystems.
History also offers reassurance. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the market collapsed by high double digits in the first year. But then a new normal emerged. In the second year, ad spend started to climb again, particularly on performance channels. Lives went on. Brands wanted to inform consumers that they were still there, still available. A state of war doesn’t suddenly stop the advertising machine or consumer markets.
Easter is a good moment to take stock. The first quarter has been hard, and there will be more turbulence ahead. But this is an industry that has survived dot-com crashes, a global financial crisis, a pandemic, and the endless slow-motion disruption of privacy change. It adapts. It endures. The UK market, in particular, has shown it can grow even when everything around it suggests it shouldn’t.
The dawn, as it always does, will follow.
