Spending on Digital Ads Overtakes TV Advertising for the First Time

Advertising on TV now is a thing of the past as the world moves towards digital media for advertising. Last year digital advertising sales surpassed TV advertising in the U.S, bringing in up to $70 billion as compared to $63 billion for TV advertising.

It was also foretold last year that this change would take place globally by 2017. Spending on digital ads this year increased to $209 billion worldwide, which is around 41% of the market whilst TV ads stood at $178 billion or 35% of the total market globally, reported Magna.

Facebook and Google are trying their best to push the world towards digital marketing. Magna foresees digital ad spending scaling up to $237 billion, up by 13%, and TV ads growing 2.5% to $183 billion. The difference between both is slower due to Olympics and presidential elections.

What is Digital Marketing?

Firms that use internet advertising to target consumers is called digital marketing. Most common channels used are social media, emails, Google search and advertising on websites.

Digital vs TV

• Cost:

For advertising on TV, firms would have to pay tens thousands of dollars for just a minute of prime-time spot and without a guarantee that the ad actually targeted the right audience.

Whereas, advertising digitally can be both inexpensive or really expensive, e.g email marketing and blogging is costless where as a year-long SEO, SEM campaign is more expensive and might cost around $10,000 each. But in the end, there is a guarantee that the right audience has been targeted.

• Brand Exposure:

TV campaigns usually only last 6 or 7 months, depending on the budget and objectives, and once it ends the brand exposure is gone too.

Digital campaigns tend to last 24/7 even after the campaign ends, the exposure still remains.

• ROI

TV advertising lacks transparency and performance measure data. It is hard to know if investing $10,000 would actually bring in $10,000 worth of sales.

For digital marketing, it is easy to track out the data and quantify the price and value of the marketing

In short, digital marketing might be a little expensive but it does have its benefits. If the rate continues to grow, according to Magna, by 2020 digital ads would make up to 50% of all the ad spending.

Via Recode