Today the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) revealed data from its bi-annual online advertising expenditure study. This report has been prepared in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC). The analysis of the first half of the year 2009 has shown that the Internet advertising spend in the UK has accounted for almost 24% of all ad spending (compared with 18.7% in the same time period in 2008), while TV ad spend currently accounts for 21.9% of all money spent on advertising int he UK, press display — 18.5% and direct mail — 11.5%. History is being made. This is the first instance in the world when the digital advertising expenditure has surpassed all other marketing channels.
Paid-for search continued to grow, proving itself a mainstay of marketing budgets with a 6.8% increase from H1 2008 to H1 2009. As the purest form of direct response advertising, search is proving recession-friendly with marketers investing £1.05bn during H1 2009, which equates to 59.8% of all online advertising expenditure.
Despite the property market crash and stalled automotive and recruitment sectors, classifieds grew by 10.6% to £385m – or 22% of all online ad spend – reaping the benefits of the continued migration of advertising from print to online formats.
Online display was down 5.2% year on year to £316.5m, with an 18.1% share of all online advertising revenues. Online display buoyed a tough year as all other mainstream media saw a double digit decline [bold font mine]
The research also has also shown that in the online display category, the top spenders are: Technology (19.1%), Telecoms (13.3%), Finance (13.2) and Entertainment & Media (11.8%).
Britain remains the world leader in terms of market share for online advertising, due to the use of online networks to place advertising, the availability of fast and cheap broadband and the popularity of new formats such as video adverts.
Eva Berg-Winters of PwC summarizes:
Perhaps surprisingly, a slowing economy has accelerated the migration to digital technology and hence the continuing shift from more traditional forms of advertising to online, which promises return on investment and measurability in a period of instability.
More on IAB’s website and on BBC News.