Marginalia
A miscellany of musings on the tech that crosses my path
Wednesday 30 September 2009, 7:42 AM
Internet advertising surpasses TV
The switch was always expected to happen, but the recession has caused advertising to move online and away from TV, radio and print more quickly than might have otherwise been expected.
Technology firms have been found to make the largest ad spend with about 19 percent of spending, with telecoms, finance and entertainment following on.
TV advertisers look like they are coming out fighting with industry body Thinkbox saying that online and TV advertising aren’t in competition but are complementary.
Well, I’m no economist. But it seems to me that while in a theoretical world, that might well be true, in a world where there is £x to spend on advertising and the advertisers want to get the greatest return for their investment, they want to highly target their ads. Choosing to advertise shoes on a Web site that is about shoes seems more efficient than advertising them on a medium which is going out to potentially everybody i.e. TV.
And I suspect that even if a shoe ad is sandwiched into a TV programme about shoes, the targeting is less good on TV than online due to the fact that people are more likely to have sought out a Web site and flopped in front of a TV prog.
Factor in ad production cost and it seems to me it is a no-brainer where the £x should be spent.
The real point isn’t that the line has been crossed, but what this means for the future of commercial TV and whether its demise is closer than we think.
PreviousComments on this post
A lot of credit for the swift change should go to Google for creating a platform where advertisers and webmasters may collaborate. Google Adwords has saved advertisers from devoting resources to sift good websites. Publishers on the other hand easily get good returns. While TV does help in targeting a big population, the conversion per pound spent is much higher on the Internet.
Interesting to see online advertising outweigh TV in UK... but are people spending their digital budgets in the best way?
Engaging people online is obviously the key aim for digital spend - and I think Google ads make up a large portion of the stats from this report - but where' the social media spend?
Finding and engaging people where they are already having conversations is vital for developing brand advocates - but all too often digital spend goes on advertising - banner and display ads - not on community engagement.
I think this is because people think social media outreach is fluffy... but there are stats to prove otherwise.
We ran a benchmarking study with social media against banner advertising... the results were really interesting.
You can see the report for free here if you're interested:
http://www.qubemedia.net/banner-ads-social-media.php
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NIgel Cooper
Community Director - Qube Media
www.qubemedia.net
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