At the opposite extreme, computing products and consumer electronics have been in high demand as UK consumers bunker down and spend extended periods of time on remote work and indoor leisure activities. As a result, this industry will see digital ad spending grow by 14.3% this year, up from 13.2% in 2019.
Other industries that we track, meanwhile, will prove to be resilient in the face of the economic downturn. While we expect rates of digital ad spending growth to decline slightly across the board, all these categories will nonetheless post positive growth in 2020, with retail and financial services both growing by nearly double digits.
All this will produce a slight rebalancing of the world order as it pertains to digital ad spend. Retail will continue to lead the pack and account for a fifth of total digital ad spend in 2020. Computing products and consumer electronics will see a significant bump in spend, elevating its share to 10.6% and positioning it in the middle of the pack. And travel and automotive will slip down the rankings, with travel in particular seeing a significant decline and holding onto just 6.8% of the total digital ad market.
A large proportion of digital ad spend will come from the “other” category, which contains industries that are sizable but not yet broken out individually in our UK forecasts (like healthcare and pharma, real estate, education, and business and industrial).