Advertising Investment in Turkey by the Numbers: Where Digital Spend Sits

The 2024 figures on one page

Nine indicators carry most of what a planner needs. Each row below names its value, its source and the year it describes, followed by one sentence on what it actually tells you. Where a figure is a share of digital rather than a share of the whole market, the row says so, because mixing those two denominators is the fastest way to a wrong conclusion.

Indicator by indicator

Press and cinema, for completeness

The smallest channels in the same report are print at 1.64 billion lira and cinema at 261.71 million lira, which is roughly one thousandth of the market. Radio sits between them at 3.303 billion lira. All three grew in lira terms, print by 107% and radio by 100%, which tells you more about the currency than about audience recovery.

Why 83% growth is not 83% more advertising

Nominal growth measures lira, and the lira of 2024 bought less than the lira of 2023. Consumer prices in Turkey rose steeply across the same twelve months, so a channel that grew 83% in money terms grew by a much smaller amount in real volume. Deflate the series before you compare it with anything.

How to deflate the number yourself

Take the nominal growth rate and the annual consumer price index change for the same period from the Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu, Turkey’s national statistics institute, and divide one by the other. The result is a real growth rate. It is almost always a smaller and less exciting number than the one in the press release.

Which figures survive deflation

Share figures are immune. The 74.2% digital share, the 79.4% mobile share and the 47.08% social share are ratios inside the same year and the same currency, so inflation cancels out. That is why the shares, not the growth rates, are the part of this report worth planning against.

Digital is now three quarters of the market

At 74.2%, digital is not one option among several in Turkey. It is the market, and television is the significant remainder. For a company deciding where its first serious media money should go in 2026, that ratio settles the argument before the creative conversation begins.

Mobile is the actual format

With 79.4% of digital investment running on mobile, the working assumption is a phone held vertically in one hand. Landing pages, forms and video are judged on that screen first. A desktop-first asset in 2026 is a minority case dressed up as the default.

Social holds nearly half of digital

Social media platforms take 47.08% of digital investment, with influencer campaigns alone accounting for 6.75 billion lira in the same report. That concentration is efficient and fragile at once, which is why a single-platform plan is a known risk rather than a simplification, as any read of single channel marketing risk makes clear.

What the non-digital channels still carry

Television at 38.86 billion lira and outdoor at 10.94 billion lira together account for roughly 23% of the market. Both grew in nominal terms, outdoor sharply, at 115.2%. Neither is in collapse, and for certain categories with physical footfall or mass reach needs they remain the efficient buy.

Outdoor grew faster than digital

Outdoor’s 115.2% nominal rise is the highest growth rate in the report, above digital’s 83%. From a small base, that reflects both price increases and renewed demand for physical presence. It is the one number here that argues against treating the shift to digital as a straight line.

Where a small budget should not follow the market

Say you run a packaging film plant in Çorlu, Tekirdağ, selling to a few hundred industrial buyers. The national share table describes consumer advertising, and almost none of it applies to you. Market averages tell you where money goes, not where your customers are, which is the first thing an honest digital marketing pricing conversation establishes.

How the Turkish picture sits against Europe

IAB Europe’s AdEx Benchmark 2025 report puts the European digital advertising market at 131 billion euros for 2025, up 10.5% year over year, with video formats growing 19.6% and retail media 16.7%. It does not publish a separate Turkey line, so the comparison is directional rather than like for like.

Two different kinds of growth

A 10.5% rise measured in euros across 30 markets and an 83% rise measured in lira in one market are not the same quantity. The European figure is close to real growth; the Turkish one is mostly currency. Keep them in separate columns, as the table above does.

Where the formats agree

Both datasets point the same way on format. Video is the fastest-growing form in Europe, and mobile plus social dominate Turkish digital spend. If one planning conclusion survives the currency problem, it is that short vertical video is where the money is going, which is the argument behind why video marketing works.

What to take from the table into a budget

Use the shares, discount the growth rates, and check the publication year before quoting anything. For 2026 planning, the practical reading is that digital gets the default allocation, mobile and social set the production format, and television or outdoor enter only when reach or footfall justifies them.

Three figures worth carrying in your head

Digital at 74.2% of media investment tells you where the market is. Mobile at 79.4% of digital tells you what to produce. Social at 47.08% of digital tells you where concentration risk sits. Those three ratios survive inflation and will not move much in a year.

Check the vintage of every figure you reuse

The 2024 report is the newest full-year Turkish dataset confirmed at the time of writing in October 2026. Anyone quoting a 2025 or 2026 Turkish total should be asked which organization published it and when, which is the same discipline applied in turkey digital statistics.

Decide the split before the channels

A share table cannot tell you your own ratio of brand to performance, or of setup to monthly management. That comes from your sales cycle, and the structural version of that question is handled in marketing budget 2027 rather than in national data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Short Glossary

Nominal growth

Nominal growth is the change in a money figure before any adjustment for inflation, so it mixes price change with real change in volume.

Media investment

Media investment is the amount paid for advertising space and time, separate from the cost of producing and servicing the advertising itself.

AdEx Benchmark

AdEx Benchmark is IAB Europe’s annual study sizing the digital advertising market across European countries in euros.

Next Step

Pull your own twelve-month channel split and put it next to the three ratios above. If your allocation differs sharply from 74.2% digital without a reason you can name in a sentence, that gap is worth a short review. The structural version of this question, and whether the work belongs inside or outside, runs through agency vs in house marketing and the proposal checks in choosing a marketing agency, while the European series is published by IAB Europe.

Updated: October 2026