Irish television advertising revenue increased 3% during the first half of the year to €136.5m, figures from TAM Ireland show.
The total accounts for revenue generated for advertising on linear television, product placement, advertising-funded programming and broadcaster catch-up and on demand services (BVOD).
BVOD saw the strongest growth, growing 12% year-on-year, while linear television also saw solid growth of 2%.
With revenue of €69.5m, the first quarter was stronger than Q2 (€66.97m) by approximately €2.5m.
The findings are based on figures supplied by broadcasters RTÉ, Virgin Media, TG4, Channel 4 and Sky Media and compiled for TAM Ireland by Guardian Management Accounting.
During the first quarter, commercial television achieved an average weekly reach of 75% among people aged 15 and over, 67% among adults aged 25-44 and 70.2% among grocery shoppers with children.
RTÉ’s advertising and sponsorship revenues across television, radio, digital platforms and the RTÉ Guide totalled €121.1m last year, according to the broadcaster’s annual report for 2025.
This is broadly unchanged from the €121.3m in 2024.
Advertising and sponsorship accounted for as much as 76% of RTÉ’s total commercial income.
According to the annual report, the broadcaster generated total commercial revenues of €158.6m during the year, up marginally from €158.1m in 2024.
The report shows that television advertising and sponsorship income fell by €3.6m to €81.3m while radio and digital advertising and sponsorship revenues increased by almost 10% to €39.5m from €36.1m. Advertising and sponsorship revenues generated by the RTÉ Guide, meanwhile, remained stable at €300,000.
Other commercial revenues also showed mixed performances. Content, merchandise and related sales declined to €12.9m from €14.3m in 2024 while other income increased to €13m from €10.9m. Network income- largely related to its transmission division and its Saorview platform- remained unchanged at €11.6m.
In its review of trading conditions, RTÉ said the Irish television advertising market remained difficult throughout 2025.
Citing TAM Ireland figures, it noted that total revenue across television and broadcaster video-on-demand services was just under €284m, representing a 3% decline on 2024, although still 2% higher than 2023. RTÉ said the comparison was influenced by an exceptionally strong 2024 that benefited from the Paris Olympic Games and UEFA European Championships.
The broadcaster also pointed to stronger conditions in radio, noting that Radio Centre Ireland reported total industry revenues of €166m during 2025, an increase of 0.9% year on year. Growth was driven by branded content and digital audio as advertisers continued to diversify their use of audio platforms.
Against that backdrop, RTÉ said its commercial performance demonstrated resilience, with growth in radio and digital helping to compensate for softer television advertising revenues.
The improved financial performance also reflected continued cost management and additional in-year savings. RTÉ said its stronger-than-expected EBITDA was supported by solid commercial revenues, lower-than-planned headcount costs and the deferral of certain projects into 2026.
Overall, total revenues – including €224.8 in public funding amounted to €383.4m while the broadcaster returned a net surplus of €22.5m for 2025, up from €17.0m in 2024.
According to RTÉ’s director general, Kevin Bakhurst: “RTÉ has reversed the trend of reporting deficits and strengthened our financial position. Thanks to highly effective cost management and proper financial planning, we are reporting another
surplus this year. This result has also been supported by our new commercial strategy, which has driven digital revenue and is paying dividends.”
The Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI) has rebranded as the Creative & Communications Association.
According to the organisation, the rebrand reflects “the evolution of Ireland’s creative and communications industries and the increasingly integrated way agencies and consultancies operate today.”
According to Siobhan Masterson, CEO, the new name “reflects this changing landscape, bringing together a broader community under one representative voice while maintaining the Association’s long-standing commitment to championing creativity, professional excellence and industry leadership.”
The Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI) was established in 1964, evolving from the Irish Association of Advertising Agencies which was set up in 1928.
“The new identity marks the next chapter for the Association as it continues to support its members, advocate for the industry and help shape the future of Ireland’s creative and communications sector,” Masterson added.
An average of 944,000 viewers, representing an 82% share of the available audience, tuned in to watch Mayo’s historic win after a 75 year wait to lift the Sam Maguire Cup.
The peak minute at 17:11 had 1.1 million viewers. There have been 566,000 streams to date on RTÉ Player.
The national broadcaster revealed the viewing figures today.
RTÉ Head of Sport Declan McBennett said, “The Mayo victory – and the response to it – shows just how much our national games mean to us as a nation.” Meanwhile, an average of 324,000 viewers tuned in to Up For The Match – Live From Croke Park on RTÉ One representing a share of 38% of the available audience on Saturday night. To date Up For The Match – Live from Croke Park has had 57,000 streams on RTÉ Player.
Karen Preston, one of the leading lights in the Irish media and advertising industry over the last 20 years, is to step down as chief commercial officer of Mediahuis in October.
Well-liked and well-known within the industry, Preston has played a central role in the transformation of Mediahuis Ireland’s commercial revenue model, helping to build a more diversified, digitally led and multi-platform business.
“It has been a privilege to work with Mediahuis Ireland for most of my career and to be part of such a talented team,” said Preston.
“I am proud of what we have achieved together over the years, particularly through a period of significant transformation. I now look forward to spending more time with my family and to travelling.”
“Karen has been an important member of the Mediahuis Ireland executive leadership team and has made a significant contribution to the business over many years,” added Sheena Peirse, CEO of Mediahuis Ireland.
“She has played a central role in shaping our commercial growth strategy and in strengthening the business across digital channels and new revenue opportunities. We thank her sincerely for her leadership and commitment and wish her every success for the future.”
Earlier this year, Mediahuis secured Gold for Media Brand of the Year with Indo Sport with Joe Molloy from the Irish Independent at the Media Awards, alongside another Gold for Best Use of Irish Language for the An Post Proud Sponsors of Seachtain Podcast which was delivered in partnership with Core Sponsorship and Starcom, part of Core.
Fáilte Ireland is spending more than €10m on a campaign to encourage short breaks at home after domestic tourism hit a “flat” spot in 2025.
The tourism authority paid out €2.46m developing its “Find Yourself” campaign, with €1.85m spent on videos and other promotional content.
There was a further bill of €293,000 for “key visuals” for regional areas and about €20,000 paid for radio and digital audio material.
Fáilte Ireland also spent €301,000 on “social media assets”, according to records released under Freedom of Information.
In the first part of the campaign covering March to May, the marketing budget was €2.28m, of which €460,000 was spent on digital marketing and €421,000 on traditional media.
Further expenditure included €215,000 for public relations and €1.18m that was categorised as “audio-visual” spend in the records.
Fáilte Ireland said the 2026 spend on the campaign would be around €8m and that the content created was a long-term investment for use over a five-year period.
It said that €250,000 of the budget was earmarked for content creators, including travel influencers and celebrities.
A slideshow said this could include five content creators with a combined following of 2 million, including Roz Purcell and Kevin Penrose.
A separate page said “rejuvenators” like Katja Mia, the Gastro Gays, and Tadhg Fleming had an audience of 4.3 million people.
The presentation said the “Find Yourself” motif had scored far better than Fáilte Ireland’s “Keep Discovering” branding and other global travel advertising.
It said short breaks in Ireland meant less pressure to do and see new things, freedom to make last-minute decisions and “comfort in the familiarity.”
A design brief said: “We want people to prioritise themselves by taking short breaks. We want them to be captivated by the spirit of Ireland, freeing them to go with the flow and find the joy in small moments.”
It said Fáilte Ireland was looking to grow revenue especially in off-peak periods and “less mature” destinations like the northern part of the Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands, and Ireland’s Ancient East.
One slide said there had been significant growth in domestic revenue since 2019, but that 2025 had been “tracking flat.”
Asked about the campaign, Fáilte Ireland said domestic tourism generated 40% of overall tourism revenue in the country.
“Domestic tourism is a vital driver of Ireland’s visitor economy. In 2025, Irish residents took an estimated 15.4 million domestic trips, generating approximately €3.6 billion in domestic tourism revenue,” a spokesperson said.
“In Quarter 1 of 2026 the number of trips taken by Irish residents within the State increased by 6% compared to the same period last year, while domestic tourism expenditure grew 9%, with stronger growth in holiday spend (+14%) recorded,” they added.
The chief executive of the Association of Advertisers in Ireland (AAI) Barry Dooley will again return as chair of Marketer of the Year.
Dooley has been CEO at the AAI since 2013.
He has extensive advertising experience working in agencies such as Irish International (now TBWA\Dublin), Wilson Hartnell (now Ogilvy) and Saatchi & Saatchi.
Since 1993, Marketer of the Year™ has recognised and honoured standards of excellence in Irish marketing, specifically for work done in the last two years.
The person is someone who, using strategy, innovation, communications and impact on the target market, has been responsible for making their brand, product or service an outstanding success.
Previous winners include Caroline Donnellan, Sky Ireland (2023); John Concannon, Fáilte Ireland (2010); John Keogh, Bulmers (2001); Emma Kiernan, Dublin Zoo (2019); Niall O’Grady, Permanent TSB (2007); and Kevin Donnelly, Britvic Ireland (2012). In 2018, Fiona Dawson of Mars was named Ultimate MotY to mark the award’s 25 years.
Details on how to enter MotY 206 and on this year’s panel of judges will be shared soon
The closing date for submissions this year is Thursday, September 24th 2026.
Marketer of the Year™ is a Marketing.ie initiative partnered by dmg Media.
A new report finds the ad industry has over-optimised for short term performance at the expense of building brand, authors Eva Zawol and Kelsey Tyson tell Inside Marketing’s Dave Winterlich
If you’ve instinctively felt that attention doesn’t just drive clicks and short-term uplift, it builds long-term brand equity and sales growth, congratulations: you were right.
A new report from Dentsu, in partnership with data giant Kantar and attention expert Lumen, has, for the first time, quantified how next-gen video platforms deliver real business outcomes.
Using a new framework for growth in the algorithmic era, plus one of the industry’s largest video effectiveness data sets – 40,000 respondents from the US and UK – The Brand Reset brings into focus how digital video drives multiyear brand growth.
It not only shines a spotlight on how voluntary attention outperforms forced exposure, but looks at the evolving role of connected TV versus linear TV, and figures out how to best balance brand and performance to unlock growth.
“The biggest thing we wanted to address with the [report] is the imbalance of investment between brand and performance advertising,” says Eva Zawol, Dentsu’s global partnership director, based in London.
“We’ve been living in this performance marketing era for around 10 to 15 years, and over this time, brands have started to invest more in performance marketing, to the detriment of brand, taking budgets out of brand and fuelling bottom funnel activities.”
Eva Zawol, Dentsu’s global partnership director, based in London
It’s why all the money has gone to search and feed activity, clicks and conversions, “everything that stands for short-termism,” she says. “We got a little bit lost because if we continuously invest in short-termism, we’re not fuelling brand, and the power of brand is that it fuels the entire ecosystem and impacts the bottom line. So what we really wanted to do is reset brands into revisiting that investment imbalance.”
The best way to do that was to focus on video. “The majority of clients, when they think of investing in brand they think video because it continues to sit at the heart of effectiveness. We needed to figure out the best methodology for testing these video assets,” she says. “So we brought together two big powerhouses, Lumen for attention and eye tracking measurement, and Kantar, which has decades of experience in brand tracking and combining those brand equity measures – brand power with financial performance.”
The pair then looked across the modern video ecosystem, not just traditional linear TV.
“Linear was included as the benchmark because historically it has been the gold standard for brand building,” says Kelsey Tyson, vice president global partnerships at Dentsu, based in the US city of Atlanta. “But we also looked at connected TV, streaming environments, social video, short-form video and broader video sharing platforms. And within those environments, we tested both skippable and non-skippable formats.”
The aim was to look at different types of ad experiences, where people either have to watch, or where creative advertising has to earn their attention.
“The last bit that we hit on, which I think is super important, is that it was brand building creative only, so no promotional, no ‘buy now’, no call to action. These were assets designed to really build memory and emotion and long-term impact,” says Tyson.
The key was to help clients break free from the advertising doom loop. It’s where brands overcorrect too far towards short term performance marketing and invest only in activities that capture demand through clicks and conversions. They then stop investing enough in the work that actually creates demand in the first place.
With skippable formats, when someone chooses to stay, the attention is more intentional and, second by second, can actually work harder
— Kelsey Tyson, vice president global partnerships at Dentsu
It’s a downward spiral that causes brand equity to weaken over time, not least because people become less familiar with your brand, less emotionally connected to it and ultimately less likely to choose it. The irony is that this makes performance marketing harder and more expensive in the end. “Because you’re trying to convert people who don’t already have a strong reason to care about or know your brand,” says Tyson.
The problem is that while performance marketing may look really efficient in the short term, “the brand demand weakens and performance just gets more expensive and then brands double down even harder on those short-term tactics. What The Brand Reset is trying to do is break that cycle,” she says. “It’s not about walking away from performance. It’s about rebuilding the brand equity that makes performance work harder.”
Part of the challenge is that algorithms are serving us all increasingly personalised and automated advertising experiences. “But measurement hasn’t fully kept up,” she says. “While the ecosystem has evolved really quickly, planning and measurement is still catching up and that’s the gap we’re trying to fill with The Brand Reset: moving the conversation beyond whether an ad was just served or viewable, but if someone paid attention, whether that shifted brand equity, and what that means from a sales impact perspective, not just for the short term, but for the long term as well,” she says.
Kelsey Tyson, vice president global partnerships at Dentsu
While linear TV is well studied, digital environments have not been sufficiently researched for their brand building capabilities.
“What we found is that, yes, we can build brands with all types of video formats, on big screens, on small screens, with skippable and non-skippable ads. It’s just that every format, depending on the platform, will deliver different results. The name of the game is to understand what they deliver, which objectives they deliver the best on, and to pull all these different levers in our planning system, to then design and craft the most optimal media plan,” says Zawol.
Among the findings was the fact that, while we instinctively feel skippable advertising is weaker, in fact, when people do choose to watch something, that attention can be really valuable.
“Forced attention and voluntary attention are not the same thing. Non skip formats give you that guaranteed exposure, but doesn’t always mean someone is fully visually engaged,” says Tyson. “With skippable formats, when someone chooses to stay, the attention is more intentional and, second by second, can actually work harder.”
It’s why good creative remains key. “Being able to keep the audience and getting them past those first two seconds is critical,” she says.
The report also identified the power of audio too. “Even when people weren’t looking at the screen, when we weren’t capturing their visual attention, they were still listening,” says Zawol.
The streaming giant is rolling out the lower-cost option in several new countries, after already launching it in the UK and the US.
In the UK, the cheapest plan with adverts costs £5.99 (€6.87), while the next ad-free tier costs £12.99 (€14.90). Netflix has yet to confirm pricing for the ad-supported tier in Ireland.
Users who opt for a cheaper plan will typically watch around five minutes of ads per hour.
Netflix isn’t alone in making the move, as Disney+ also introduced an ad-supported tier in Ireland in March. It is €2 less than its standard ad-free subscription.
As more streaming platforms introduce cheaper plans with adverts, more viewers are being given the option to give up uninterrupted watching for a lower monthly fee.
Onic Audio reports loss of €3.58m for the year, with group directors saying economic conditions were ‘turbulent’
The company behind Dublin radio stations Q102 and FM104, plus LMFM and Cork’s 96FM, has reported a fall in advertising revenue for its last financial year.
Onic Audio, which is ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had net advertising revenue of €22.9m in the year ending June 29, which was down from €23.27m recorded the previous year.
The drop reflects a stagnant Irish radio advertising market in that period. The industry had reported that all Irish radio generated revenues of €79.4m in the first half of 2025, up just 2pc on the same period the year before.
The Onic group also includes Limerick’s Live 95, and the U105 station in Belfast, which recently suffered the loss of five presenters after a breakdown in contract negotiations.
Over the last two years, Onic has included Ryan Tubridy in its presenter line-up, initially through his contract with the Murdoch-owned Virgin Radio in the UK. Tubridy’s weekday show for the station was broadcast on Q102 between January 2024 and last December. He now presents a Sunday morning show across the Onic stations.
The group has reported a loss for the year ended June 2025 of €3.58m before taxation, which compares to a loss of €2.75m for the previous year.
The directors say economic conditions were “turbulent” during the year, “with the ongoing challenges of spiralling cost-of-living increases, and the changing global political environment”. In the financial report, there are references to “the impact of global macroeconomic inflationary pressures” and “the general challenging market environment”.
They say that in spite of these challenges, the company continues to generate a “strong revenue performance”.
The impact of reduced revenue on ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) was “compounded” by an increase in operating costs during the year.
It reported administrative expenses were €25.02m, up from €24.38m the previous year.
The directors say that the group is facing “strong competition” for advertising, but digital revenues did deliver significant growth, “and we continue to invest in this area to promote future growth”.
Last May, the company changed its registered name from Wireless Ireland to Onic, which it said was “to reflect a strategic rebrand”, and with no impact on its legal status.
“In addition, we also launched a suite of new digital services to become the largest content provider on a new DAB+ trial across Leinster, and rolled out a number of new podcast and visualised offerings to complement this,” the report says.
“We have invested heavily in visualised studios for our radio output and also a dedicated space for our Onic Original and TalkSport Ireland series.”
The group’s staff numbers increased from 235 to 238, with production staff up to 153 from 144. The wages and salaries bill came to €10.5m, up from €10.3m in 2024.
News Corporation originally bought the Wireless Group in 2016 in a £220m (€254m) deal, paying £3.15 per share.
It had previously been owned by UTV Media, which sold its TV assets and its name to ITV the previous year.
As well as the seven Irish radio stations and Virgin, the group also included the London-based TalkSport, which had many lucrative football rights.
It has since launched Times Radio, a digital channel, in conjunction with the Murdoch-owned newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times.
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