Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Online advertising spend nears £5 billion

London: Brands in Britain spent almost 5 billion pounds ($8 billion) advertising online in 2011, with video ads and marketing on social media platforms driving growth to its biggest increase in five years against a weak economic backdrop. Britain has led the way in moving advertising money to the internet from traditional media such as newspapers and radio and the latest report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) put growth for 2011 up 14.4 percent, with a similar rate expected this year.

Much of that growth was due to the high level of internet access and the proliferation of smartphones and tablets which allow users to access the internet on the go. It also follows the increasing popularity of e-commerce in Britain, where more and more consumers are shopping online, and the concerted push into digital advertising by the big ad groups such as WPP (WPP.L), Publicis (PUBP.PA) and Aegis (AEGS.L).

"In fairly stagnant economic times, online's like for like growth of 14.4 percent year on year is a really positive story," Tim Elkington, the director of research and strategy at the IAB, told Reuters.

"If we look at the take up of smartphones and tablets, that's going to be the next injection of growth with people accessing the internet on the go. So for 2012 we expect similar rates."

The study, conducted by PwC, said advertising on the internet increased by 14.4 percent in 2011 to 4.8 billion pounds. Previous surveys looking at the whole ad market have shown advertising money moving from newspapers to online while television remained stable. The IAB said 39.7 million people were on average accessing the internet each month in Britain, while 27 percent of all the time spent online was spent on social networks such as Facebook.

Among the fastest areas of online growth, spending on online video ads doubled in the year to 109 million pounds and has now grown eight-fold since 2008. Spending on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn was up 75 percent to 240 million pounds. And spending on mobile devices, which is included in the online category, was up 157 percent to 203 million pounds due to the increasing number of people who own smartphones.

Search advertising, which is dominated by Google (GOOG.O) and allows consumers to directly respond to a brand and purchase their goods, maintained its impressive performance, up 17.5 percent to 2.8 billion pounds, giving it a 58 percent share of online advertising spend, up slightly in 2010. Of the different sectors, finance brands were the biggest advertisers in display advertising, ahead of consumer goods and retail. ($1 = 0.6244 British pounds)

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