CEE regional advertising spending in 2024

Inflation still pushed up media prices in 2024 in the CEE region, which translated into higher advertising expenditures across markets. In many markets, however, this increase reflected nominal growth rather than real expansion.

Still, the region as a whole recorded a notable upswing: total ad spending reached €12.662 billion, representing a 13% increase compared to 2023.

The year was marked by ongoing challenges for CEE media markets. High inflation, limited economic growth, and shifting political contexts all influenced legislation, investor confidence and overall market stability. Several countries achieved double-digit growth, including some of the region’s largest players such as Poland, Ukraine and Romania. Yet appearances were sometimes deceptive: in Hungary, for instance, the weakening forint meant that the 1% YoY growth in EUR translated to an over 7% growth in local currency. This year we added Albania and Montenegro to our regional report, however these smaller markets only make up about 1% of the regional spending combined.

The most dynamic development once again came from the digital segment, which reached €7.23 billion and accounts for 57% of the total regional as spending. However the 13% increase only made online the second most dynamically growing segment, radio reached a whopping 24% expansion in 2024. Television retained its role as the second-strongest channel, but its share slipped to 28% as investments continued to be channeled in digital more. Print retained it 4% in the total, and OOH advertising also kept its 6% share of the total spend.

Overall, the structure of ad spending continued to follow the same long-term trajectory. After last year digital took TV’s lead in average, this year we see a “setback” to equal share, 39% which is due to the fact that the two newly added markets, Albania and Montenegro are heavily TV-dominated markets, which pull these two share numbers. However, the trend from previous years is undeniable, television is slowly losing to digital, while smaller segments get by with 1-2% changes.