My new column is live at The Drum:
No, advertising spend is not moving online – here’s why
TV is dead. People want to have relationships with brands on social media. The marketing world is full of grand proclamations that turn out to be completely wrong when you look at the data. The latest belief is that digital advertising spend surpassed that of television last year.
If you want to terrify traditional marketers, show them this chart that Recode created in December 2017 based on data from Magna, the research arm of media buying company IPG Mediabrands.
The fear is real. Late last year, I gave a keynote talk at CASBAA’s annual convention in Macau on how television is not actually dying. Among the gathered TV, cable, and satellite executives, much of the talk that I overhead focused on one question: when will the digital Sword of Damocles finally fall and cut their jobs?
But that fear is misguided as well. When you focus on the definition of the word “advertising” and look deeper into the trends, the big picture changes dramatically. A simplistic view of “digital” versus “television” – or even “online” versus “offline” – hides a reality that is much more complicated because not all media spend is created equal. This column details my findings.
For this column, I contacted advertising measurement company Zenith, London media analyst firm Enders Analysis, and Forrester Research – all of whom shared internal data with me. The information covers annual global spend from 2015 to 2017 on various mediums and the specific advertising tactics of brand advertising or direct response. To my knowledge, this is the first time that such an analysis has been done.