Digital advertising has been growing in importance for the last several years and, in the UK, will surpass all other forms of advertising, in dollars spent, during 2015.
According to marketing researchers Strategy Analytics, more than half of all advertising dollars will be spent on digital media. The total advertising market for the UK will reach $24.3 billion dollars (L15.8 billion). This is up 5.5 percent from 2014. More than half of that will go for digital ads, including pay-per-click (PPC) on different types of media. These include mobile apps, newspaper websites, search engines, video-on-demand services and more.
“British people love their smartphones, and they love shopping online, which is why our digital advertising sector leads the world,” said Ian Barber, spokesman for the Advertising Association, to The Guardian.
The UK leads the world in digital advertising and PPC management. The rest of the world spends approximately 28 to 30 percent of total advertising on digital media. The United States still spends the majority of its advertising dollars on TV advertising, but digital advertising is quickly catching up.
In the UK, television advertising is expected to see a rise of 3 percent in market share but still fall to less than half of digital advertising. Traditional print media, such as newspapers and magazines, have taken the worst hit on advertising money and revenues for that outlet are expected to fall slightly during the next year.
“TV’s declining share is actually less about ad pounds flowing out of TV and more about them flowing into digital from print and radio,” said Michael Goodman, co-author of Strategy Analytics report. “Thus, broadcasters such as ITV, Channel 4 and Sky will see little, if any, real decline in revenues – just a shift in the source from linear TV ads to online video.”
Innovations in targeted digital advertising have led to a surge of ad-tech startups and an influx of smaller advertisers into the digital realm. Targeted advertisement in social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have levelled the playing field between large companies and smaller businesses in the advertising arena resulting in a better investment using digital advertising.