According to the new report, online marketing spend has reached 27% of all UK marketing, growing 13.5% year on year, while the wider advertising sector grew by only 1.4%. TV sits, uncomfortably, at 26%.
But what do these figures exclude?
The IAB themselves report that mobile advertising is not counted. But what about brand websites, or the cash spent by brands on social media? These are missing too, of course.
Neither does the IAB count the money spent getting brands high up the search engine results pages (SERP), as far as I can tell. Of course including things like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) would only serve to make the 'digital' spend an even bigger proportion of the whole.
But the IAB figures are interesting in spite of the omissions. Paid-for search marketing increased 12.6% and comprises 58% of their definition of online advertising. This share is the same as last year, it's the pot that's growing.
Some of the coverage today of this new survey has highlighted the 100% growth of online video as a display format - and this has caused display advertising to account for almost a quarter of all digital spend in the first half of the year.
But I was also interested in the 20% increase in 'lead generation'. This is where advertisers pay by the sales lead rather than the number of times the ad is served or the click throughs. This has to be virtually the ultimate in measurable ROI. Okay - an online retailer can measure marketing success by the size of a shopping basket, but for other businesses sales leads are The Holy Grail.
In August, Sonia Carter, the top UK digital marketer for mega-corp, Kraft, said "I’m surprised and disappointed that nobody has cracked exactly how you demonstrate return from social media yet."
The frightening fact for traditional media is that as soon as FMCG brands like Kraft figure that out, the online numbers released today could be small beer.
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