Despite all the purported death knells we’ve been hearing, maybe we should drag ourselves back to the real world and realize the current economic downturn, and its concomitant slowdown in the online advertising market, will not last forever. Sure, weaker companies will be pruned away, there might be some consolidation, and those who make it through will have to pare back their growth projections, but only in the short term. The numbers simply point to strong future growth.

Let’s start off with a few interesting figures that have appeared in the last few months:

• online advertising accounts for about 8% of all advertising in the US
• however, it accounts for about 20% of all advertising in the UK
• Americans spend 30% of their leisure time online, compared to 28% among Brits

Maybe it’s not that the US advertising market needs to catch up, but the UK online ad bubble needs to pop? Maybe.

Interestingly, in Deloitte’s annual State of the Media Democracy survey, TV is considered, across all surveyed geographies, as being the most influential media format when it comes to their buying decisions, followed by online in some countries (Japan, Germany) and magazines and then online in others (US, UK, Brazil). Radio advertising ranked lowest.

Why? Maybe it’s a matter of the sophistication and sensory impact of advertising, which is still indubitably the domain of television.  It also could be a factor of reach: blog advertising is relatively influential in Japan, where blogs are exceedingly popular.

In either case, this bodes well for Internet advertising, where innovation and broadband connectivity are boosting the sophistication and depth of engagement of online ads, and where consumption patterns are favoring online media consumption growth at the expense of more traditional media.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.