I’m still thinking about a great week at Media Innovation Week in Madrid. 

The INMA Spanish Media Study Tour, which I co-led with INMA Researcher-in-Residence Greg Piechota, took us inside Prisa Media (El País and AS), Vocento, Unidad Editorial (El Mundo and Marca), Maldita.es, El Confidencial, elDiario.es, Prisa Radio, and Cadena SER, and concluded with an executive briefing from La Voz de Galicia. 

A few things make Spain different for advertising:

• News takes about 12% of measured ad spend (€750 million of €6.3 billion in 2025 according to InfoAdex), roughly three times the 3%-5% share news gets globally, and 45% of that is still print.

• Radio is a very healthy advertising medium (~9-10% of spend), and the national government is the country’s third-largest advertiser. 

• Subscriptions arrived on the later side. Vocento launched in 2015, El Mundo in 2019, and El País in 2020, and they’ve all grown fast once they did. El País is at 490k with almost 30% outside Spain, and elDiario.es has 123k paying members funding 47% of its revenue.

I kept hearing something at every stop that wasn’t necessarily unusual but was unusually pointed: Traffic is down everywhere, and everyone is moving money and effort from display inventory to branded content, social, and events. 

AS told us its advertising revenue is up this year while its Web traffic falls, not by raising CPMs but by doubling social branded-content revenue. Marca’s François Guerin: “Every day programmatic revenue is going down. The CPM is going down.”

His new music brand for young adults, NOIS, paid for its year with two branded content campaigns, and the idea came from advertisers. One-third of elDiario.es’ advertising income is events. El Confidencial’s Alejandro Laso told us about one million people, 7% of the monthly audience, produce 70% of the business: “We are not in the traffic business.”

Everyone described the display business the same way publishers describe it everywhere:

elDiario.es gives its members an ad-free site because the programmatic was “more aggressive” and then sells sponsors at its member events. El Mundo is choosing “quality over quantity” and holding ad positions down when it could add 20 more. La Voz de Galicia’s Tomás García Morán, on the mobile ad experience, borrowed a line from the owner of Webedia: “We have Michelin star restaurants with the rubbish in the middle of the restaurant.”

Nobody apologises about a sponsored festival; almost everyone apologises for the programmatic. And when I asked three hosts whether event revenue counts as advertising or something else, I got three different answers. 

That’s what I would point to as the big insight from the week: Everything is transforming (as I’ve said repeatedly over the course of the year), but the demand side of this shift (advertisers asking for branded content, social, and events) is well ahead of pricing, measurement, organisation, and even offering. 

Like everywhere else, Spain is in the middle of a transformation from an inventory business to what I’ve called a “solutions” or “partnerships” business. The language I heard over and over in Spain was “brand partnerships,” which clicked more and more throughout the week to the point that I made it central to my own Friday morning keynote (more on that in my next newsletter). 

But the overall shift is becoming clearer and clearer. Spain is earlier in the print-to-digital transition, earlier in the reader-revenue journey, and has a plethora of legacy brands (INMA’s Dawn McMullan called it “a density of competition found almost nowhere else”). But the advertising market is transforming in line with the rest of the world, so the extraordinary contrast between the old inventory business and the new partnerships business became clearer and clearer throughout the week. 

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