Big-name and -money advertisers have hitherto been reluctant to put much money into web advertising, but that trend is reversing fast, according to eMarketer, a leading advertisement tracker.
In 2006 the top 100 advertisers cut their spending on TV, radio, and print by $230 million and raised their online ad spending by $558 million—an increase of approximately 17 percent.
According to the New York Post, that trend is expected to continue:
Emarketer expects the Internet’s share of total ad spending to climb from 7.4 percent this year to 13.3 percent in 2011.
In that same period, online spending will roughly double, rising to $42 billion from $21.4 billion.
In 2006, "more than half of the biggest advertisers cut spending on traditional media while boosting their online ad budgets, eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman wrote in the report," the Post notes.
Although this could be seen as a bubble or fad on the part of big companies, it almost certainly is not, instead reflecting a real restructuring of the U.S. media that the advertising money is simply following and confirming. If anything, big advertisers have been slow to acknowledge the change, and the underlying movement to the Internet as a central medium of communication is probably even stronger than these numbers suggest.
This all sounds reasonable to me, CC. Thanks for sending it.
What you’re seeing is part of a shift from one advertising model to another. The old way was to think of audience as prey: hunt them down and hit them over the head. The new model is: go out and make friends for our brand.
The historical dominance of TV advertising was based on its ability to strongly impact very large audiences with just a few placements, making it efficient to buy and giving it the ability to noticeably move the needle on product sales. Over time the TV landscape diversified and fragmented, and more recently the audience is escaping from the captivity of real-time viewing. The entire broadcast and tv ad industry has been slow to wake up and adapt. TV is not going away, but there are more changes ahead as it looks for new models of advertising support in a world where attention cannot be gained by force.
In its early days, online ad buying was marginalized as a specialty within ad agencies; regular media planners weren’t allowed to learn about it. It took time to develop appropriate methods and practices that didn’t simply mimic other ad forms. It also took time for business processes to adjust and allow for building it into overall communication planning, but once this happened, it took off. Online advertising, if correctly woven into the marketing process, can more readily prove its effectiveness than any other medium. It is also much better at focusing on the right prospects and avoiding wasted exposures.
In the end, such a shift depends on what ad managers on the client side are comfortable with and expect to see in a media plan. Something that makes sense can still be a tough sell until clients are ready for it. They are now sending signals that they would like to see a bigger online component, and that’s what they’re getting.