Over the past several years, Russia’s advertising sector has faced multiple pressures. A key challenge has been the retreat of many foreign companies from multiple categories that once accounted for about a third of overall ad space sales. Television, where Western brands once purchased as much as half of ad inventory, bore the brunt of these shifts more than other channels, while outdoor advertising proved the least reactive. Industry participants responded with bold moves to stabilize operations and discover fresh footholds.
According to SberCeller, the industry’s transformation calls for innovative approaches. The media landscape has also undergone drastic changes as advertiser budgets reallocate, yet the market has shown capacity to adapt and is ready to back new projects and campaigns. As the supply of advertising inventory tightens, the emphasis has shifted to identifying new touchpoints with audiences and building tools for evaluating performance. Cooperation with Magnetto.pro is driven by the goal of expanding opportunities for Sber Group companies and SberCeller’s external clients, as explained by N. Dmitrieva in relation to this collaboration (citation: N. Dmitrieva).
Telegram Ads emerge as a comprehensive alternative to legacy platforms. Natalya Dmitrieva notes that advertising on Telegram, with its rapid traffic flow and broad audience reach, has become an integral part of modern marketing strategies (citation: Natalya Dmitrieva).
Coverage and audience insights
The platform enables marketers to consolidate data from all active projects into a single, intuitive interface with integrated segmentation by offices, creatives, and objects. SberCeller began with broad and narrow targeting tests to gauge platform capabilities. The approach combined wide theme and interest targeting with focused selections based on engagement and reach, supported by targeted channel choices and selective parameters (based on engagement and reach) (citation: Natalya Dmitrieva).
In their pilot, 100 channels were deployed. The experience demonstrated the ability to attract Telegram users to the official client application. The chosen strategy and pre-launch testing yielded a conversion rate of about 30 percent from app installation to purchase, with expectations that this channel will remain in demand (citation: Natalya Dmitrieva).
Overall, the 2023 outlook for the advertising market remained cautiously optimistic. Estimates from Group4Media, an affiliate of the Association of Communications Agencies of Russia (AKAR), indicated that ad distribution in the first half of 2023 exceeded 315 billion rubles, marking a 27 percent increase over the same period the previous year, and a 19 percent rise compared with the first half of 2021. These indicators reinforce the belief that the sector has moved beyond the peak crisis phase and is stabilizing across core metrics (citation: AKAR/Group4Media).