Advertisers are sending their dollars to digital advertising

The country’s largest marketers are slashing their advertising budgets as they shift a larger portion of their spending to digital, according to new figures released on today. The 10 biggest advertisers cut spending by 4.2 percent in 2014 to $15.3 billion from $16 billion a year earlier, according to the latest report, a research firm owned by the advertising conglomerate WPP. Procter & Gamble lowered its advert spending in 2014 by 14.4 percent, bringing its expenditures to $2.6 billion. 

The chief research officer at Kantar Media North America, Jos Salen said that large advertisers in particular are the ones that are most aggressively moving budgets into digital and the cost efficiencies of digital advertising enable many marketers to buy more for less. Kantar figures showed that a good portion of those dollars are going into fast-growing digital segments like video and mobile. Online display ad spending in the United States was relatively flat in 2014, rising only 0.9 percent after a slow second half of the year. The slow growth in online display expenditures stands in contrast with the 5.5 percent increase in television advert spending last year. Cable television advert spending rose 6.8 percent, while network television expenditures, which were buoyed in large part by the Winter Olympics increased 2.5 percent. 

According to Kantar, Spot television spending was up 5.5 percent, driven mostly by political spending for the mid-term elections. Spanish-language television, which benefited from World Cup programming last summer, posted a 14.7 percent increase in advert spending. Over all, advert spending rose in 2014 by 0.7 percent, to $141.2 billion. No miracles happened for print media, where advert expenditures continued to plunge. Newspaper ad spending decreased 10 percent, and local papers slide 11.6 percent. National newspaper expenditures were relatively flat, dropping only 0.3 percent. Magazine advert spending fell 5.1 percent. Radio ad spending declined 3.9 percent, while outdoor expenditures dropped by 0.2 percent.

It is like advertisers now prefer digital marketing over the conventional magazine and newspaper advert. If you ask me too I think the decline in the newspaper and magazine advert could continue because looking at it critically, the digital advertising targets a larger or wider audience which is the goal of an advertiser.