Digital advertising in Australia will become an $11 billion industry over the next five years, growing at about 11 per cent a year, according to a report from global analytics firm Socintel360.
At that point, more than 50c in every advertising dollar will go online. But the Digital Advertising Spend in Australia report also forecasts that by 2019, almost 80 per cent of those digital ad dollars will go on mobile advertising.
It has been coming for some time. Look at Facebook — perhaps the most mobile of all the world’s media companies. Around three-quarters of its advertising revenues now come from mobile, reflecting people’s desire to check in on Facebook and other media sites on their smartphones.
But Australian businesses are still largely unprepared for the sea change, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, which publishes Australia’s other major five-year advertising forecast report, the Entertainment and Media Outlook. This year’s Outlook is a little more conservative with its internet advertising projections, forecasting it to top $8bn in Australia by 2019, up from $5bn this year.
“This is always the story of advertising,” PwC analyst Megan Brownlow says. “Consumers are ahead of advertisers. It was the same with radio and television.”
PwC says the move to the mobile web, fuelled by the rapid adoption of smartphones, is a “paradigm shift” in digital marketing, rather than an extension of current online marketing activity.
“Businesses need to dramatically increase their spend on mobile but they also need to think about it differently,” Brownlow says.
“People are not receptive to banner or interruptive-style advertising. What you’ve got are other advantages, such as location data because of the GPS in phones. You’ve got that opportunity to do contextual marketing. Companies also need to look at combining data sets to do really targeted marketing.”
At its essence, marketing will go from targeting devices to targeting individuals, supported by audience measurement systems that are only now beginning to come to terms with the need to incorporate mobile platforms. Some marketers are forcing their own hand: Mondelez, which owns the Philadelphia and Cadbury brands, this year said it would spend as much as 20 per cent of its total media and marketing budget on mobile, ahead of the 10 per cent global target.
The Asia-Pacific is the world’s biggest mobile advertising market, according to Big Mobile group chief executive Graham Christie, with mobile attracting about a third of all online traffic.
PwC says companies need to marry individual and location-based data, with creative brand messages and automated, programmatic technology.
The other big factor is social media: according to the Socintel360 report, more than 80 per cent of the population will engage in social media activity by 2019. Add social to that list.
This article was originally published at TheAustralian.com.au, by author Lara Sinclair.
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