January 14, 2008 | Monday
Online ad budgets up again in Q4
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |PPC
According to the quarterly IPA Bellwether report, online was the only sector of advertising which saw increased budgets in the last three months of 2007.
So what kind of numbers are we looking at?
Three-quarters of the companies that comprise the Bellwether panel had set their 2008 marketing budgets by the time it went to press and of these, 47% had increased marketing spend. Just 17% had reduced their budgets year on year.
In terms of main media advertising, initial 2008 budget levels also suggest that most companies are expecting a further year of growth. Just over 40% have increased budgets for 2008 - outnumbering by two to one the percentage that have decreased spend - resulting in the largest net increase in the proportion of companies revising budgets up since 2000.
Bellwether attributes this to a combination of business expansion plans and investment in building on traditional advertising media, as well as an increased spend on internet advertising.
Further:
23% of companies revised up their budgets for the internet, while 7% saw a decline. Online search is now being monitored by Bellwether and saw the same pattern of upward revision.
While most of the media stories have concentrated on the fact that this was the smallest rise for online in four years, they have also failed to make the point that the leaps are bound (no pun intended) to get smaller as online has become a non-negotiable staple of marketers’ ad budgets. Add to this a shaky outlook for the global economy, and it’s fantastic news that marketers are still persuaded to invest in online in ever-increasing numbers.
It is also good news that Bellwether is finally tracking search engine marketing as part of its remit. After all, search is and has been the most successful area of online marketing for quite some time.
If and when an economic downturn does come, it will be more than a little interesting to see how the numbers play out within online marketing as a whole. Watch this space…
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