IPA Bellwether Q4 2025 – Industry reactions

According to the IPA Bellwether Q4 2025 reading, total UK marketing budgets remained unchanged in the final quarter of last year.

With the UK’s economic outlook dimming and political and economic uncertainty throwing shade on growth, we’ve been garnering reaction from some of the UK’s top adtech, creative and marketing leaders…

James Macdonald, co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Limelight

“The Bellwether report findings suggest a continued mood of “cautious optimism” across the UK market, with prioritisation centring around strategies that provide measurable outcomes and direct customer engagement.

“Against this backdrop, the integration and development of AI technologies remains at the forefront – not particularly as a standalone solution, but one whose integration enables efficiency, performance and scale, supporting human-directed strategy and goals.

“At the same time, programmatic advertising continues its growth trajectory, with more businesses adopting bespoke, white-label solutions.

“These solutions can deliver results without the operational burden of heavy development, cost or maintenance.

“With the focus on performance-led approaches, the emphasis is increasingly on results rather than tools alone.

Suzanna Chaplin, CEO & Founder, esbconnect

“The Bellwether report highlights some genuinely worrying trends for the industry. Most strikingly, we didn’t see the usual Q4 peak in spend, a quarter that historically makes or breaks a brand’s year.

“That absence alone tells you how cautious the market really is. Marketing is increasingly being treated as a cost to justify rather than a lever to pull, and if that mindset persists, brands need to seriously rethink where incremental growth can realistically come from.

“The report itself points to the growing pressure on marketers to demonstrate short-term returns, noting that businesses are “under pressure to deliver ROI as firms scrutinise spending decisions more harshly given the competitive market landscape”.

“That pressure is clearly coming from the top, pushing teams further down the funnel. The risk is that when brands over-index on bottom-of-funnel activity, they start cannibalising their own growth.

“You’re not creating new demand, you’re simply fighting harder over the same users – and if that user switches off, where’s the tap to fill the bucket?

“Likewise, the report highlights a focus on proving that spend works. But the truth is, no single channel delivers results in isolation; sustainable growth comes from the combination of channels working together across the journey.

“If you just focus on yes/no outcomes on a single channel, you will overspend in the wrong places.”

James Taylor, CEO and Founder, Particular Audience

“The latest IPA Bellwether findings confirm what we are seeing on the ground: while broad marketing budgets are flatlining under macroeconomic pressure, the ‘Other Online’ category—including retail media—is surging with a +13.2% net balance. This isn’t just a seasonal spike; it’s a flight to accountability.

“In an environment where 2026/27 preliminary outlooks are at historic lows, the industry is ruthlessly prioritising channels that deliver a proven return on investment.

“For retail media, the opportunity lies in moving beyond ‘one-size-fits-all’ legacy systems toward AI-powered hyper-personalisation that understands real-time human intent. By leveraging machine learning to automate the ‘ranking cocktail’ of organic and sponsored discovery, retailers can provide the visibility brands crave even in a quieter market.

“As we look toward 2026, the winners will be those who use technology to extract efficiency gains and innovate through the noise, rather than waiting for broader market confidence to return.”

Thomas Skowronski, EVP, Jellyfish

“The fact that four out of the five Main Media sub-components registered reductions in spending in the latest IPA Bellwether report is significant.

“We are seeing a continued shift away from mainstream advertising channels towards online content produced by influencers, creators and communities that people trust.

“There’s a reason why YouTube surpassed UK commercial TV in 2025. It’s because it’s not TV, social, OLV, broadcast or niche – it’s all of them, and that’s an incredibly powerful combination.

“As budgets tighten, YouTube and other online communities offer a highly cost-effective way to engage with audiences in an authentic, trusted manner.”

“The report also cites concerns over AI. While we are optimistic about AI’s potential to do good, we have our own concern, and that is that companies’ current tech stacks are not ready for the AI reality.

“As the clamour grows to implement AI capabilities across organisations, companies are building new AI capabilities on top of infrastructure that isn’t yet fully operationalised – Gartner data shows martech utilisation has slipped to 49%.

“To make AI work, we need clean, unified data, not more tools. We need to stop buying and start auditing.

“The most successful data strategies for 2026 will focus on de-bloating the martech stack to let the high-value use cases grow.”

Piero Pavone, CEO, Preciso

“It’s not impressive to see marketing spend flat in Q4 after two consecutive quarters of growth, but with the geopolitical and economic uncertainties all around us, it’s perhaps not surprising.

“When budgets are under pressure, as they are now, it’s vital that brands make their money, and especially their advertising budgets, work as hard as possible, and in this respect, I believe native advertising could be the answer for many.

“In an era of banner blindness, native ads work because they make sense in the context of the content they appear in.

“They are not disruptive, but additive, to the browsing experience, and this is why I believe more and more companies will devote more of their ad spend to native in 2026.”