A mid-sized retailer in Manchester recently discovered that its Google Ads click-through rate had barely moved in six months, yet its TikTok Shop sales had doubled over the same period. That kind of lopsided result tells you more about where the UK’s online marketing landscape is heading than any forecast deck. The channels pulling weight today are not the ones that dominated two or three years ago, and the regulatory ground beneath them is shifting fast.
Social and video ad spend overtaking search in growth rate
IAB UK’s full-year 2025 Digital Adspend study, produced with Oliver Wyman and published on 3 March 2026, confirmed what many media buyers already suspected: social and online video grew faster than the overall digital market, while search grew more slowly. Search still commands the largest share of total spend, but the momentum has clearly shifted.
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For teams allocating quarterly budgets, this means re-examining the default split. A brand that routes the bulk of its paid media through search may be paying more per incremental conversion than one investing in short-form video or sponsored social placements. The gap is especially visible in sectors where product demonstration matters, from beauty to home improvement, because video lets a prospective buyer evaluate a product before clicking through.
The practical takeaway is not to abandon search. It remains the channel people turn to when they already know what they want. The shift is about where you catch attention before that intent forms.
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Retail media as a UK marketing budget line
IAB UK’s 2025 figures also highlighted retail media as a growing slice of the UK digital mix. Brands selling through major online retailers now face a choice that did not exist at scale five years ago: spend on the retailer’s own ad platform, or spend on broader-reach campaigns that drive traffic to the same retailer anyway.
The distinction matters operationally. Retail media budgets often sit with trade or shopper marketing teams rather than with digital marketing. That creates a reporting gap. If your brand tracks digital spend in one dashboard and retail media in another, you risk double-counting conversions or missing cannibalisation between the two.
When retail media makes sense
- Products in competitive categories where organic ranking on the retailer’s site is difficult to maintain without paid support
- New product launches that need visibility at the digital shelf immediately, not after months of review accumulation
- Seasonal peaks where the retailer’s own audience is already browsing with purchase intent
Outside those situations, broader social or video campaigns may deliver better brand-level returns, particularly for categories where the purchase cycle is longer than a single browsing session.
Fake review rules under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act
The UK’s DMCC Act introduced direct consequences for how businesses handle online reviews. The CMA’s guidance expects businesses publishing reviews to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and address prohibited practices. That language sounds measured, but the enforcement implications are not.
For marketing teams, this changes daily operations in two concrete ways. First, review solicitation campaigns must avoid any mechanism that filters by sentiment. Sending a follow-up email that routes happy customers to a public review page and unhappy ones to a private feedback form is exactly the pattern the guidance targets.
Second, brands that host reviews on their own site carry responsibility for moderating fake submissions. A hands-off approach, letting all reviews through unmoderated, is no longer a defensible position if patterns of fake positive reviews become visible.
What this means for reputation management
Reputation strategies that relied on volume, encouraging as many positive reviews as possible to dilute occasional negatives, need rethinking. The emphasis now falls on authenticity. Verified-purchase badges, transparent moderation policies and clear disclosure when a reviewer received a product for free all reduce regulatory risk.
Agencies offering “review generation” services should be scrutinised carefully. If the method involves incentivising positive reviews specifically, it likely falls foul of the new rules.
Cookie consent and the advertising pixel gap
The UK’s data protection framework introduced an exception for certain analytics activities, but that exception explicitly does not extend to online advertising purposes, including ad measurement. In practice, this means your analytics tag and your advertising pixel now operate under different consent rules.
Many UK businesses still treat all tracking scripts identically in their consent management platform, loading everything once a visitor clicks “accept all.” That approach technically works, but it obscures a real problem: visitors who accept analytics but decline advertising cookies disappear from your remarketing audiences and your conversion attribution.
The operational fix is straightforward but tedious. Audit every tag firing on your site and classify each one as analytics or advertising. Configure your consent tool to request granular permissions rather than a single bundled consent. Then rebuild your attribution models to account for the proportion of traffic that opts out of advertising tracking. Without that adjustment, reported return on ad spend will drift further from reality with each quarter.
AI-generated content and the ASA’s existing ad rules
UK advertising regulation already requires that marketing communications be obviously identifiable as such. When AI generates ad copy, social posts or influencer scripts, the same rules apply, but the speed of production makes compliance harder to police internally.
The practical risk is not that an AI tool writes something misleading on purpose. It is that a team producing dozens of ad variants per week through generative AI loses the editorial review step. A human copywriter producing five headlines a day naturally self-checks each one. An AI producing fifty variants shifts the bottleneck to review, not creation.
- Build a mandatory sign-off step into any AI-assisted content workflow, even for minor copy variations
- Flag any AI-generated claim about product performance for manual fact-checking before publication
- Keep a log of prompts and outputs for audit purposes, particularly in regulated sectors like finance or health
The ASA has not yet published AI-specific guidance, but existing codes on misleading advertising and hidden marketing apply regardless of how the content was produced. Teams that assume AI output is compliant by default are storing up problems.
The UK’s online marketing landscape in 2026 is shaped less by any single technology and more by the friction between fast-moving channels and tightening regulation. Budgets are migrating towards social, video and retail media. Consent frameworks are splitting analytics from advertising tracking in ways that complicate measurement. Review rules now carry real enforcement weight. The brands adapting quickest are the ones treating compliance as a marketing operations task, not a legal afterthought.
