Three ways to access £15bn in adspend
Opinion
The UK advertising industry continues to measure the wrong market. It’s time to stop ignoring the long tail and start helping it thrive.
Two unrelated things happened last Thursday that, like a piano played by different hands, came together in perfect harmony to show why this industry needs a wake-up call.
The first was the IPA Bellwether report — a survey of around 300 senior UK marketers — announcing that “main media budgets are flat.”
The second was the ‘Advertising Who Cares?’ conference, where Anthony Jones, research director at Thinkbox, unveiled new research on how small businesses actually advertise. His main takeaway? Most are clueless — despite collectively accounting for somewhere between £15bn and £20bn in annual ad spend (my estimate, not his).
Taken together, these two snapshots expose a dangerous blind spot. Even in this futuristic-sounding year of 2025, our idea of “the advertising market” still lives in the past.
We obsess over the top 300 advertisers — the ones Bellwether surveys — while ignoring the 300,000+ more who are quietly driving most of the growth.
That needs to change. Small advertisers deserve better advice, better tools, and better ways of engaging with the established advertising and media ecosystem.
I’d like to offer some ideas.
Advertising is growing, perspective is shrinking
Big advertisers are stagnant. Small advertisers are surging — they must be.
Because the more comprehensive AA/WARC Expenditure Report, which includes IAB digital data, shows that rising spend in social and online display is what’s driving overall ad market growth. And those channels are driven by SMEs buying direct from the platforms.
Yet all our measurements, trade bodies and media coverage are still wired around the former, giving us a false picture of how buoyant our industry really is.
No wonder the tech platforms keep outpacing legacy media. We, the so-called advertising industry, have largely overlooked the advertisers who are growing the fastest.
If the only advice or tools a small business ever hears come from Google and Meta, how else would you expect them to behave? Yes, big brands can still find new ways to waste money (see my previous column). But as Bellwether has been telling us for years, the growth story isn’t with them.
At Advertising Who Cares?, Jones and his fellow AWC volunteers asked a simple question: how much do we actually know about these advertisers?
“The answer,” he said, “was: not much.”
Their research found that two-thirds of SMEs operate without any kind of marketing plan. “Half of them don’t even have any defined KPIs,” Jones added. “They get stuff done without necessarily worrying about the long and medium-term impacts.”
When it comes to measuring effectiveness, the picture is even bleaker. “They find it really, really difficult to link spend to anything resembling ROI,” he said. “They know they spend money, they know they get sales, but they’re never quite sure how the two are related.”
In other words, SMEs are already spending, but they’re flying blind. Their advertising is reactive, fragmented, and short-term.
These aren’t careless business owners. They’re the backbone of the economy — plumbers, builders, bakers, retailers — people doing everything themselves, including the marketing. “It seems to be,” Jones said, “that if the owner doesn’t do it, nobody’s going to do it.”
And so they default to the only support they can access easily: Google and Meta dashboards. “Ease of use overruled anything resembling technical rigour,” Jones said. “A few facts and figures that may or may not be true is better than nothing.”
Three reforms
If that doesn’t make you uneasy, it should. If the industry wants to grow, this is where it will happen — in the long tail we’ve ignored for too long.
We can fix this. But it’ll take new thinking and a bit of humility.
Here are three ways we could start…
1: Build a small business ISBA
If 99% of advertisers are small, why do 100% of our trade bodies represent the big ones?
ISBA does an excellent job for major brands. The IPA does the same for agencies. However, SMEs — which make up the vast majority of advertisers by volume — lack a unified voice.
Jones was clear that small businesses want help, not handouts. “There’s definitely a latent demand for tools and training,” he said. “They want to understand how to connect measurement with ROI. They want clear and accessible guidance. They kept saying it: We need case studies.”
That appetite exists. What’s missing is anyone to meet it.
We need a Small Business ISBA: a coalition to educate, represent and empower small advertisers — demystifying planning and measurement, promoting transparency, and countering the self-interest of platform giants.
Because right now, Google and Meta aren’t just selling advertising. They’re defining what advertising is.
2: Agencies must use technology to scale SME support
Agencies love to talk about transformation but rarely apply it to their own model.
The SME market has long been seen as too small, too messy, too costly to serve. Agencies chase global retainers because they’re familiar, even as those retainers shrink. Meanwhile, the long tail keeps expanding.
Jones summed up the challenge: SMEs “know that tests and experiments are a thing they should do… but they haven’t got time or the capabilities to do it.”
Agencies could fix this. They already have the brains, the data, and the creativity. What’s missing is the business model. Instead of seeing small advertisers as unprofitable, they could build tech-enabled services that make small-budget campaigns viable at scale — automated planning, pooled data, standardised measurement, shared creative assets.
If agencies want to future-proof themselves, they should start there.
3: Media owners must innovate with true self-serve platforms
If media owners want SMEs to advertise with them, they need to make it as easy as buying on Facebook — without losing what makes them special.
“SMEs want affordable and easy-to-use measurements they can trust,” Jones said. That word — trust — is crucial. Traditional media still has it, but it’s squandering it through friction and opacity.
Imagine broadcasters, publishers, and radio networks offering transparent, outcome-based self-serve systems — tools that let small advertisers sync their CRM data, track real business outcomes, and see precisely what their spend has delivered. Add templates, case studies and a support network, and local media stops being an afterthought. It becomes a growth engine.
And there’s another reason to act now: AI is making the platforms’ grip even tighter, turning advertisers into data serfs unless we build our own shared, transparent models.
This is how you compete with Big Tech: not by shouting about quality, but by making quality easy to buy.
Overdue intervention
So when Bellwether tells us main-media budgets are “flat,” don’t read that as stagnation. Read it as a failure of measurement. It describes a world that no longer exists.
While the top 300 marketers stand still, the next 300,000 are quietly experimenting — often wastefully — with digital ads. They’re spending small amounts, but together they represent a multibillion-pound opportunity that is currently captured almost entirely by two companies.
As Jones put it: “Those who aren’t doing anything at the moment will stay there unless there’s an intervention.”
Advertising’s future won’t be saved by another round of consolidation at the top. It’ll be built from the bottom up — by the millions of businesses that keep the economy alive and deserve better than “boost post.”
If we don’t stop ignoring the long tail, we won’t just lose our future advertisers. We’ll lose control of advertising itself.
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.