In today’s ExchangeWire news digest: UK ad spend is forecast to hit £14.0bn in Q4 as the full-year forecast climbs to £51.3bn, Meta promises full consultation with publishers as backlash over its scraping terms grows, and Alphabet posts 25% revenue growth on cloud and AI demand, but shares slide after hours...

UK ad spend forecast to reach £51.3bn in 2026

UK advertising investment is forecast to reach £14.0bn in the fourth quarter of 2026, up 8.2% year on year, according to the latest Advertising Association/WARC Expenditure Report. This follows a strong second quarter, when spending rose 11.0% to £12.3bn, helped by the FIFA World Cup and a 31.2% surge in retail media, which took an 8.4% share of the total. Cinema (24.5%), social media (22.2%), out of home (12.7%) and addressable TV (12.7%) also posted double-digit growth.

For the festive quarter, social media is projected to grow 18.5%, retail media 16.2% and addressable TV 15.1%. The report puts full-year 2026 spend at £51.3bn, up 9.9% and 1.8 percentage points above the July forecast, led by retail media (23.0%), social media (20.7%) and addressable TV (14.7%). Growth is expected to cool to 6.5% in 2027, taking total spend to £54.7bn. WARC’s Suzy Young said Q2 spending held up despite geopolitical headwinds and weak consumer confidence, and increasingly reflects AI investment.

Meta promises Publisher talks amid scraping backlash 

Meta has pledged to consult news industry leaders before finalising its new ads and business terms, even if that means delaying the rollout again. Communications vice president Andy Stone said on 28th October that talks could run past the 20th November start date, in which case implementation would be pushed back. Meta did not say whom it will consult. The terms would permit broad scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts and could let Meta use that content to train AI models, with no opt-out. Meta has already postponed the rollout once and removed the word “train” from the text.

Hours after Stone’s announcement, a Norwegian court blocked the terms from taking effect on 20th November pending a legality review, a day after the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association filed what appears to be the first lawsuit against them. The European Publishers Council joined a letter urging the European Commission to block the terms under the Digital Markets Act, and US senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn separately demanded that Meta withdraw them. The EPC welcomed the offer to consult but said it must produce binding contractual safeguards for publishers.

Alphabet posts 25% revenue growth on cloud and AI demand

Alphabet reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of USD$127.6bn (£97bn), up 25% from a year earlier. Google’s search advertising revenue rose 10.5% to about USD$82bn (£62.3bn), from roughly USD$74bn (£56.2bn). 

CEO Sundar Pichai said AI investment is driving search query growth, including commercial queries, at its fastest annual pace in five years. Google Cloud revenue more than doubled, up 103%, on demand for AI infrastructure and solutions.