At the end of April 2009, the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) has published their “EIAA Marketers’ Internet Ad Barometer” report, which provided some encouraging news for European online marketers. Some of the key findings of the study were:
- Advertisers will continue to increase investment in online marketing despite current economic climate
- Many are reallocating marketing budgets from traditional media (TV, radio, press) to the digital sector
- There is a renewed focus on targeting to further increase ROI
- Mobile and video innovation are seen as key market drivers over the next three years [source]
Search, e-mail and display were named as the top 3 marketing tactics to explore, while affiliate marketing was ranked #5 in the online marketing avenues for 2009 (beating behavioral targeting, ad networks, classifieds, sponsorships, etc). Here’s an eMarketer.com’s graph (with my highlighting added) to visualize the response:
While this is certainly some interesting and encouraging data to receive in these turbulent times, I wonder how many respondents that took part in the above-quoted EIAA survey actually realized that an aggressive affiliate marketing can easily help them replace their search, display and video advertising.