Programmatic ad spending will account for 93.6% of total UK display ad spending this year, or £7.90 billion ($10.09 billion). Open exchanges, though, will account for a diminishing proportion of that total; spend declined 2.4% in 2020.

Google's Chrome wasn't the first browser to put the kibosh on third-party cookies. Phil Acton, country manager for the UK, Benelux, and France at end-to-end programmatic platform Adform, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss how the company has been testing cookieless targeting with publishers in Europe, where Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox have significant market share, as well as the importance of supply path optimization (SPO).

UK programmatic digital display ad spending increased in 2020, despite the incredibly challenging conditions. The shift to programmatic trading will further accelerate this year, but certain methods are performing better than others.

According to the November 2020 Merkle research, 61% of UK and US executives said they would be increasing their investment in data clean rooms. The same survey found 23% had “prioritized” data clean rooms as a result of privacy-related changes.

This report collection explores programmatic digital display ad spending through 2021 across Canada, China, France, Germany, the UK and the US. Reports include breakdowns by device, transaction type and more, and explore the factors driving investment.

Programmatic ad spending will account for 90.0% of total UK digital display ad spend this year, or £5.81 billion ($7.75 billion). Of that proportion, programmatic direct will make up 65.5%, with social media spend underpinning that figure.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enacted in May 2018, was supposed to cause a huge backlash against programmatic trading in the UK. It was going to bring heightened awareness of privacy among consumers and more scrutiny of ad tech than ever before. Marketers were going to become wary of playing “fast and loose” with consumer data. Of course, there have been varying degrees of truth in those statements, and while initial effects were felt, the longer-term impact on programmatic ad spend has not been substantial.