The weCAN Ranking 2023

2022 was a turbulent year for the CEE media markets, because the Ukrainian-Russian war brought about various challenges in the whole economy, which affected advertising budgets as well. Even though the economies and the media market showed moderate progress, trends seemed to slow down, such as the growth of digital and investments draining from television.

The methodology of the weCAN Ranking The weCAN Ranking is an index that shows the percentage of the ad spending per capita within a country’s nominal GDP. (The advertising spending data used in the CANnual Report and the weCAN Ranking consists of the TV, radio, print and OOH net spending figures, measured locally and converted into Euro – and the digital net ad spending measured by local IAB chapters or leading advertising associations, also converted into Euro.) We calculated both baseline data (GDP per capita and ad spending per capita) using the number of population older than 14 to ensure that the basis of the calculation only includes advertising target groups with independent purchasing power. weCAN Ranking reveals whether the advertising market as an economic sector is stronger or weaker than what the overall economic performance of a country would suggest. In most countries, media markets underperformed the overall economy, even with double digits growth in 9 countries. The only exceptions are the Czeck Republic, Slovakia (the two frontrunners) and Croatia. Here media investments grew more dynamically than in the previous year, and in Estonia the value remained the same. The biggest change is the fall of Ukraine, which is the direct consequence of war tearing up the whole economy, and naturally the media market received less investments. Ukraine dropped from the first place where it has been since 2020, and thanks to its incredibly booming digital segment, it had been in the top 3 since 2018. The other notable change is Slovakia jumping to second place with a respectable change in its weCAN index. We couldn’t pinpoint a specific answer for this, as all neighbouring countries - media markets and economies - faced similar if not the same challenges, so this is outstanding shift, especially in the light of other countries’ index change. All other countries kept their exact order from last year, as mentioned before with most of them worsening index numbers, showing that the Ukrainian-Russian conflict and the subsequent economic hardships affected country economies and media markets very similarly.