Digital captured 72 cents of every new ad dollar and TV captured 21 cents in 2016, according to the latest analysis from GroupM, which is disregarding print from the equation as its share of all advertising is falling. The company predicts that in 2017, 77 new ad dollars will go to print and 17 to television. “We do not consider digital as big as traditional TV yet, with TV’s ad share largely stable at 42% in 2016 and 41% in 2017,” the company adds in its annual ‘Interaction’ study, which is a broad analysis of the advertising world for clients and partners.
GroupM says digital fuels its growth by recruiting long-tail advertisers and winning share from other media. “To this it now adds a serious attempt to win TV’s big-brand advertising, an endeavour which will turn [rely] as much on digital’s quality as on its undoubted quantity.”
The television industry can take heart from some of the ‘Interaction’ commentary about digital video. Regarding YouTube, GroupM says its ‘opted-in’ TrueView ads, which viewers choose to watch and which come with a mass of data from the Google ecosystem, are irresistible but YouTube never delivers the watercooler moment of significant simultaneous reach, and the platform lacks sufficient inventory that an advertiser – or the television industry – would describe as ‘quality’.
“As a complement to television, YouTube has great value but it is rarely a replacement,” GroupM observes in the document, which was presented to journalists this week by Rob Norman, the company’s Chief Digital Officer.
The ‘forced view’ will remain at the heart of the television model, the company adds, despite some experiments with limited commercial interruption either within individual programmes or on a channel as a whole.
‘Interaction’ points to a structural issue with digital advertising generally that works against long-term brand advertisers. Dot com and e-commerce companies, with access to rich data and driven by short-term performance, find great value in the availability of micro-segments and benefit from relevance-driven market pricing that rewards short-term advertising effect.
“Advertisers that drive performance for themselves and the [digital] platform tend to force up pricing for advertisers who are either less effective or are pursuing longer-term marketing goals that don’t precipitate immediate actions. Achieving relevance in this sense is an extremely difficult thing to do for individual brands that don’t luxuriate in the pool of data available to retailers and multi-location businesses at one end, and hyper-local ones at the other.”
