The sun is shining in digital marketing - IAB

April 17, 2009
by Neil McCarthy

This week IAB presented their 2008 advertising spend figures, which showed that the future is bright for online advertising in 2009.

The data shows that Internet advertising continues to buck wider advertising industry trends, with spend rising 17% to £3.3bn in 2008 from £2,812.6m in 2007. However, there was a slight slowdown of internet marketing ad spend growth slowing to 17% in 2008 from 38% in 2007. Despite this, Internet’s share of the advertising industry grew 19.2% with the whole advertising industry reducing in size by 3.5% to £17.5bn. In the words of the IAB this has been driven “as advertisers seek greater accountability and return on investment”, which, as discussed at the client summit, is what conversion analytics are at the heart of.

In the advertising industry breakdown paid search led the way again with £1.987m a massive 59.3% share of all online advertising spend. What makes this figure all the more surprising is that many industry analysts predicted paid search would struggle to grow year on year, but this figure represented a 22.7% growth on 2007. Unfortunately the figures do not include SEO, which is likely to be one of the fastest growing sectors, however, Econsultancy estimated that SEO was worth about £330 million in 2008 which we think will grow aggressively in 2009.

These figures create a bright outlook for 2009 for all Internet marketers, with money evidently shifting from the traditional to online as the economy got worse in 2008. If you add these numbers to the recent suggestions that the housing market has bottomed out, and of course the sunshine, we may have reason to be optimistic about the year ahead.

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