Total advertising spending in Ireland this year will increase 3.8% to €1.434bn after the market experienced growth of 3.7% (€1.382bn) in 2022, marketing communications agency Core has said.
Core expects growth in advertising across most media in 2023, although it has forecast a 10.4% drop in print media spend and warned that a potential downturn in the UK, could affect spending in Ireland.
"We estimate approximately 20% of marketing budgets in Ireland are set in the UK. Northern Ireland, like in the Republic, recorded lower than originally anticipated spends in 2022," said Colm Sherwin, chief digital and investment office at Core.
"Expenditure grew just 1.6% to £203.7million (€238.9m). Core forecasts a slightly better performance in 2023 with growth of 2.9% to £209.6 million (€245.8m).
"The key watch out in Northern Ireland is the continued political impasse and the potential impact this has on government media spending, a key category in NI.”
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After growing 2.6% to €810.1m in 2022, the online advertising market is forecast to growth a further 6.1% to €859.9m in 2023, far short of average annual growth of 17% since 2017.
Core projects advertising investment in social will account for 41.6% of all online advertising, ahead of search (37%), display (16.9%) and classifieds (4.5%), and while Google and Meta will dominate, the company said TikTok would continue to rise and to watch out for the potential launch of an Amazon.ie site.
Online video is the second-largest segment of the Irish advertising market, growing 10% to €365.2m, again with Meta accounting for 75% of all spend on video last year, and Core forecasts growth of 16.4% to €425m in 2023.
Television spend rose 1% to €263m and is expected to increased by another 1% to €265.5m this year while radio and digital audio advertising, after increasing 7.8% to €152.7m in 2022, will grow 1.7% to €155.2m in 2023.
Podcasts saw significant growth of 22.3% last year, with spend rising to €12.6m, and spend on digital audio generally should increase 16.6% to €14.8m in the coming months.
Print and digital media held steady at €82.4m in 2022 despite a decline of 5% to €31.4m in spend in digital news media, but Core has forecast growth of 4% to €32.7m in 2023, while investment in print will fall 10.4% to €73.8m.
Conversely, investment in out-of-home advertising rose 24.1% to €70.5m, with retail and alcohol the biggest-spending categories and spend on zero-alcohol variants up 31% year-on-year.
In 2023, advertising investment across the OOH sector is expected to increase by 8% to €76.2m, which will once again remain lower than the €90.7m recorded in 2019.
Digital OOH formats accounted for 39% of the total OOH investment last year in the ROI and approximately 34% of the total OOH spend in Northern Ireland.
With the lifting of restrictions on cinemas, cinema advertising grew 62.2% to €3.52m, but admissions remain below 2019 levels. Core has forecast that cinema spend will rise 15% to €4.1m this year.
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