How are Britain’s Biggest Brands 2025 managing their marketing spend?

Clever, controversial and often costly. Those words summed up the campaigns mounted by many of Britain’s biggest fmcg brands last year. From Cadbury unabashedly making the most of its 200th anniversary, to Coca-Cola’s provocative AI Christmas ad and Walkers’ ‘No Walkers, No Game’ push for the men’s Euros, it was a year in which brands dug deep to get their message out there.

In fact, ad spend grew 29.5% in 2024, according to exclusive data from WARC Media – an increase of nearly £1.4bn compared with 2023. It’s was a fairly surprising turn of events, given the incredibly volatile economic climate brands found themselves in last year.

So, what’s behind 2024’s surge in marketing spend? What does it say about changing growth strategies at Britain’s branded heavyweights? And is 2025 likely to be another bumper year?

The leap in spending in 2024 needs to be put in context, cautions Alex Brownsell, head of content at WARC. Budgets had taken a big hit the year prior as interest rates and food inflation hit a peak, and spending fell 18.2%. That made 2023 something of an anomaly. Compared with 2022, for instance, the increase in marketing spend in 2024 was a less outlandish 7.3%.

Last year was also marked by a handful of “big cultural moments” that encouraged brands to up marketing budgets, Brownsell adds. The Euros reportedly generated half a billion pounds in marketing revenues alone. Coca-Cola’s sponsorship is thought to have been one of the biggest brand deals ever struck.

“2024 was a bumper year for fmcg ad spend in the UK, with investment up by nearly a third as advertisers looked to cash in on rising consumer confidence and a summer men’s Euros,” sums up Brownsell.

Anomalies aside, that brands allocated considerable sums to marketing – at a time when margins were buckling under the pressure of soaring commodity and staff costs – speaks to the way in which marketing is now viewed by leadership.

Rather than a cost to be lopped off in a crisis, marketing is now a fundamental lever for brands seeking top-line growth. Armed with piles of data and increasingly sophisticated analytics tools, CMOs can pitch for extra cash buoyed by clear evidence of commercial results.

“As a marketer, if I’m talking about growing brand awareness, it’s interesting, but so what,” asks Gareth Turner, founder & lead marketing consultant at Big Black Door.

“As a marketing leader, I need to be saying that this investment will deliver X profit or X revenue to the business. We’re learning that we’re not the colouring-in department, we’re a demand creation department. This turns into cold hard cash at the end of the day.”

That’s borne out by this year’s Britain’s Biggest Brands ranking – from top to the bottom.

Number one Cadbury, for example, ploughed millions into an array of splashy celebratory activities for its 200th anniversary last year – from the revival of its ‘Mum’s Birthday’ TV ad to allowing shoppers to feature in classic Cadbury ads via AI. Plus, there was its “most generous on-pack prize and reward giveaway ever” featuring 200,000 prizes. “This investment continues our long history of establishing emotional connections with our consumers,” says Susan Nash, trade communications manager at Cadbury owner Mondelez.

The investment also aimed to drive sales, of course. At first glance, that may appear a failed mission: volumes crept into the red last year. But the fact the confectionery giant capped that decline at 0.4%, when average prices climbed by 9.3%, suggests it prevented many customers switching to cheaper chocolate.

Just outside the top 100, the fast-growing St Pierre also opted to follow-up a strong commercial run with the broadcast of its first-ever TV campaign in 2024.

The playful ‘Eat Avec Respect’ push “played a key role in driving growth”, says Sarah Boddy, MD of St Pierre, which added £20.5m.

“The campaign drove increases in awareness and the brand also increased household penetration over and following the campaign period. We closed 2024 able to lay claim to a series of new accolades: as the fastest-growing bakery brand in the top 15, the fastest-growing brand in rolls, the fastest-growing bakery brand in breakfast, and the fastest-growing bakery brand in lunch and evening meals.”

Read more:

• Britain’s Biggest Brands: the top 100

• 10 brands vying to become one of Britain’s 100 biggest

• Marketing in 2025 will be about where, not how much

• Who’s up and who’s down in Britain’s Biggest Brands 2025?

In fact, at every level of this year’s ranking, there are countless connections to be drawn between a strong brand performance and a strong track record in marketing over the past 12 months.

“Marketing now is absolutely being seen as a growth driver, an investment rather than a cost centre,” says Turner. “It goes back to brand building fundamentals. You grow your brand by making it salient with mental and physical availability. Mental availability is the wheelhouse of the marketing team and you achieve it by spending some money.”

That might seem logical – but it reflects a fundamental shift in attitudes in fmcg. “Historically, if you look at any other economic dip, such as in 2008 or even during Covid, you’ve got a lot of brands choosing marketing as the first thing to go,” says Georgina Holledge, business director at Capture media agency, which has worked with McCain, BrewDog and Organix. “It’s always historically been seen as a nice-to-have.”

It seems lessons are finally being learned from the fallout of marketing freezes during those previous crises. Take the 2008 financial crash. One study of 3,900 brands worldwide by Bain & Company found those that continued to invest in marketing achieved an average 17% compound growth rate during the downturn, versus 0% among those that didn’t invest.

This trajectory continued even years later. By 2017, where two companies had a comparable market value in 2007, the one that invested in marketing was worth three times as much a decade later.

“It’s a refreshing change,” says Holledge. It’s a very recent one, too. Even during the pandemic, when many of these findings were well-documented, she worked with a number of brands that switched off the tap on marketing.

“It’s a terrible decision to make,” she adds. “The ones that increased their marketing investment had their best ever years. It was phenomenal to see. You could see the growth that it was driving. And for those clients that switched off, the majority never came back as they couldn’t afford to outsource to an agency. There’s a lot more emphasis nowadays on recognising how marketing has the ability to grow your brand.”

 

Search growth

This focus on demonstrable commercial results is reflected in the channel mix, too. Most notably, the biggest absolute increase in spend in 2024 was in search, which was allocated an additional 58.3% (£657m).

“Search advertising as a channel is closer to the bottom of the funnel,” says Brownsell. “It’s not necessarily even advertising, it’s mental digital availability – and it’s increasingly seen as a cost of doing business, particularly by brands that sell directly to consumers.”

In short, it helps brands shift product rather than achieve brand-building – a function nearly every other channel provides to some extent. The fact investment is ploughed into search therefore speaks to “a lot more momentum in the performance end of the market”.

This echoes what Holledge is seeing among brands. “If I look at the objectives this year, when we’re doing annual plans and we’re looking at what brands are trying to achieve, it’s all about penetration,” she says.

“It’s all about getting more than your competitors. And that’s clearly a sign of the times. During some periods, it’s been about making my brand famous and other periods it’s about driving strong ROI.” In 2024 – and now 2025 – the latter is winning out.

Crucially, adjacent to the search category is retail media – which involves using retailer assets such as websites, apps and store space for advertising. The most recent IAB Future Scape Barometer estimates retail media ad spend will reach £8.6bn by 2030.

Grocery is at the centre of this growth, as major supermarkets double down on their own retail media arms. For example, Tesco is rolling out 6,000 in-store screens – set to be Europe’s largest estate of its kind– in partnership with its Dunnhumby data arm.

“Retail media is gaining significant traction, commanding a larger share of brand marketing investment as brands compete to secure and maintain listings while influencing shoppers along the path to purchase,” says Neil Brenson, managing partner at Jellybean. “With retailers like Tesco expanding their media offerings – particularly through in-store digital media – brands face both greater opportunities and higher expectations to invest.”

Such is its rate of growth that retail media is set to overtake TV ad revenue as early as the end of this year, according to GroupM’s latest analysis. “Brands are continuing to shift towards data-driven targeting and the ability to precisely measure how their ads are performing,” says GroupM head of commerce David Fieldhouse.

“The sales attribution attached to retail media makes investments in these channels attractive. What’s really exciting is how retail media is evolving into a full-funnel marketing powerhouse, thanks to the innovation and sophistication of grocers.”

Social media spend

Despite the dominance of search in last year’s allocations, it wasn’t all about short-term boosts to a brand’s top line. The biggest proportionate increase in spend was social media, up 72.5% in 2024.

Although those social and digital channels allow marketers to join the dots between investment and commercial deliverables, they are also increasingly used within fmcg as a brand-building tool.

The Heinz ‘Beanz of your Dreamz’ interactive campaign in February, for example, wasn’t really about selling beans. Thee new flavour will be sold via its DTC channel, which is almost exclusively geared toward brand building – as pointed out by David Adams, Heinz VP of sales for northern Europe, at The Grocer Business Lunch in January.

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The opportunity for consumers to create their own recipes is all part of forging connections at a time when household budgets are squeezed and Heinz cans are three times the price of an own label equivalent.

Influencer-led brand campaigns on social are also gaining credibility as a way to drive sustainable growth, points out Megan Redmond, head of influence at Redpill. “They provide such an incredible platform from which to target specific audiences,” she says.

“These audiences really trust influencers. They trust their opinions, their recommendations, and they go to them for those reasons. I see a big increase in brands investing in influencers because they are seeing such positive results.” It’s also comparatively affordable, she adds, because influencers can lead on the strategic and creative side of a campaign.

Even more unlikely brands are getting involved. Take Arla Foods UK, which has leaned heavily on influencer tie-ups in the past couple of years, particularly to mark 25 years of its Cravendale brand in 2023.

The push included collaborations with Kaleb Cooper from Clarkson’s Farm, and culinary creator and rapper Big Zuu. Both featured in a full-length video for Arla’s YouTube channel.

“In every campaign, we look to improve our effectiveness in a way that feels relevant to consumers…while ensuring we have a positive business impact for our farmer owners,” says Danny Micklethwaite, VP of marketing at Arla Foods UK.

On the box

Despite all that, TV remains a key part of the marketing toolbox. Spend on linear telly in 2024 remained on a par with 2023, while TV on demand enjoyed a spend increase of 22.7%.

It might be a bit of blunt tool compared with the hyper-segmentation of a retail media platform, but it remains a cornerstone of many food and drink campaigns. That includes Fridge Raiders’ £2.2m ‘Get the Day Done’ push in April – which helped the brand edge its way into the top 100 with an extra £9.1m.

“If you can afford to be on linear TV, you need to be on linear TV,” says Turner. “There’s no better channel. It’s the number one channel for delivering salience, delivering reach, frequency and emotional engagement.”

 

Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, further pressure is set to land on budgets. That will have some impact on marketing spend. WARC forecasts budgets to decline across the sector by 5.1% to £5.6bn.

But given the context, that’s still a pretty promising sign, says Brownsell. “It’s an unfortunate year-on-year comparison, so it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a little bit of a step back. In fact, if anything, it’s probably quite a positive sign that there isn’t more of a rowback on what we saw in 2024.”

Being visible may, in fact, become more of a priority as brands brace themselves for the impact of the HFSS ad ban. From October, HFSS lines will no longer just be banned from prominent in-store locations – but brands won’t be able to advertise these wares on TV before the watershed, and will face a total online ban.

There remains confusion over what exactly that will entail. Earlier this month, The Grocer revealed that hundreds of millions of pounds of marketing spend for 2025 Christmas ads are in jeopardy, due to uncertainty over the ability to advertise at a brand level.

“Another challenge is simply keeping up with the speed of change,” points out Fieldhouse. “Media is evolving faster than ever, with retail media, AI-driven marketing, and streaming TV reshaping the way brands connect with consumers. It’s clear that staying ahead requires constant adaptation.”

All of which means brands will need to get more strategic about how they spend, advises Ben Alalouff, chief strategy officer at Live & Breathe. “There will have to be an evolution on how budgets are spent and what touch points are invested in,” he says. Brands will need to make sure “they’re only really investing in the spaces where there is shoulder room to be able to play and the creative opportunity to be as exciting as possible”.

“You’ve got to understand exactly who your consumer and future consumer is and what they want from you,” he adds. To achieve that won’t only mean spending more, it’ll also mean spending smarter.