The digital advertising market in Poland and communication to people aged 50+

Online advertising in Poland was worth PLN 10.9 billion in 2025 and grew by 14.6 per cent year on year. No published figure says what part of that money went on communication aimed at people over 50. The first sentence is a measurement by IAB Polska and PwC. The second is the absence of a measurement, and that is how we describe it here.

How much is the online advertising market in Poland worth?

PLN 10.9 billion for the full year 2025, with growth of 14.6 per cent year on year. The value comes from the AdEx study run by IAB Polska together with PwC, announced in a press release of 11 May 2026. Digital is growing faster than the other advertising segments, and PwC forecasts an average annual growth of 8.8 per cent for it up to 2029. That is the publisher's forecast, not a measurement.

The smartphone row refers to all internet users. It must not be carried over to the 50+ group, because IAB does not publish this share broken down by age, and the difference between a twenty-year-old and a sixty-year-old could go either way, and neither direction can be defended here. Anyone who needs such a value for the 50+ consumer has to measure it themselves.

How much of this money reaches people over 50?

Nobody knows. AdEx splits the market by format, channel and advertiser category, but not by the age of the audience the campaign was aimed at. No other public measurement in Poland does this either. This article will not give such a figure or estimate it, because an estimate placed next to five values with a named publisher starts to look like a sixth measurement within a week.

Why does programmatic not answer this question?

Automated buying accounts for PLN 5.07 billion, or about 47 per cent of the market. In programmatic, the audience's age is a buying parameter, not a research result: platforms target the age declared by the user or modelled from their behaviour, and a market report aggregates spending, not profiles. If someone added up the budgets with 50+ targeting switched on, they would be adding up planners' intentions. Reach is a different quantity.

What does this gap mean for budget planning?

From here on we write about our conclusion, not about the data. There are 14.9 million people over 50 in Poland, or 39.9 per cent of the population, and the 54+ group's share of consumer spending exceeds 40 per cent. On the other side of the table sits an industry in which only 10 per cent of advertising professionals are over 45. Putting these three values together is our interpretation: no study combines them into one thesis; we do, because we see the same mechanism in them.

The practical effect is simple to describe. In a media plan, the 50+ group rarely gets its own line, because there is no figure to pin it to when the budget has to be defended. Money goes where it can be accounted for from a report after the campaign. In conversations with planners, the question about the share of the 50-plus audience comes up regularly and every time ends the same way: with a referral to data that nobody collects.

What to do before such a measurement exists?

Measure in-house and describe the method. A brand's own campaign data, broken down by audience age, is today the only source that answers this question for a specific brand. We publish our measurements from Silver TV's channels in a separate dataset and give the method alongside them, so that they can be checked or challenged. Until the market starts reporting audience age, every such measurement is local and has to be described as such.