Brands including Kia, HSBC, Iceland, Matalan, L’Oreal, Sony, Everything Everywhere, Spotify, B&Q, Boots, Diageo, Sainsbury’s, Premier Foods, Nokia and McDonald’s took part in the survey, which gathered 333 responses. A total of 4,300 clients on FindGood’s database of companies that use marketing agencies were contacted.

Some 37% thought budgets would increase, while 45% believed they would stay the same across all channels during 2012.
The data comes after the IPA Bellwether Report showed marketing spend for the financial year has risen slightly for the first time since 2008/09 and marketing budgets had been revised up for a third successive quarter.

This increase was marginal, however, with 22 per cent of companies reporting an upward revision of budgets during the first quarter of 2012, compared with 21 per cent that reported a reduction.

The Bellwether surveys 300 UK-based companies and respondents are primarily marketing directors/budget decision makers, selected to ensure data provides an accurate indication of actual marketing trends in the whole economy.
In the FindGood research, advertising is expected to see the most robust performance across the year with 85% of respondents believing that spend would increase or stay the same.

Meanwhile, digital is expected to see the most fluctuation with only 37% of respondents believing it would stay the same.
Some 41% thought budgets would increase, the highest percentage across all media, while 12% thought they would decrease, which was also the highest percentage across all media.

An additional 9% were unsure how digital budgets would change throughout the year.
At the time of the survey, which took place across the first quarter of 2012, some 67% of respondents did not have or have not used internal procurement teams to make their agency selection decisions.

Only 4% of respondents responsible for agency selection had used an intermediary or other marketing agency search and selection consultant to help choose an agency.

A majority of respondents (64%) would prefer to work with owner-managed firms, while 10% of respondents wished to work with an international agency network.

Some 74% stated they would prefer to work with small agencies with 35 or less employees.

Kimberly Mears, managing director at FindGood, said: “Of particular note is that marketers are still saying very clearly they prefer to work with smaller agencies – in an entrepreneurial sector that’s good news indeed.

“It’s very reassuring to see that budgets are once more on the march, suggesting that marketers see investment in marketing activity as the best way of growing sales whilst the economy remains becalmed.”

Source: Campaign Live

This was included in the association’s bi-annual report, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) which also states that total internet adspend has grown 14.4% to £4.8bn in 2011, up £687m year on year.

Strategy manager for PwC Anna Bartz said that this year’s results reflect the continued appeal of digital media – on desktop, mobile or tablet – to advertisers for both brand advertising and direct response.

All formats grew, with strongest increases in video and social media, and in search. Internet adspend’s 14.4% growth is exceptional when compared to an estimated advertising growth of less than 2% across all media in 2011.”

Other highlights are as follows:

UK e-commerce helped the retail sector see the biggest overall growth in the second half of 2011, as it became the third biggest display advertiser. FMCG moved to second place, while Finance just held on to top spot.

Online video ads doubled year on year to £109m (£54m in 2010). The format has grown more than eight-fold since 2008, when video spend was just £12m. Video ads now account for 10% of all online display advertising, with 40% of marketers planning to use online video to increase brand awareness in next 12 months.

Banner ads on social media platforms increased by 75% to £240m – an eight-fold increase since records began in 2008.

Search marketing grew 17.5% to £2.767bn (£2.346bn in 2010) with a 58% share of online advertising spend (57% in 2010). In comparison, Econsultancy’s SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide, published last month, states that the UK SEO sector is now worth over £500m annually. Econsultancy analysts estimate that the market grew by 18% over 2011, reaching an end of year value of £514m, compared to £436m at the end of 2010. The valuation, contained in the 2012 SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide, includes payments to agencies as well as investment in client-side staff to manage SEO and implement changes.

Classified ads grew 5.2% to £785m (£751m in 2010) with a share of 16% (18% in 2010). Consumer and B2B classifieds (property, cars, holidays and B2B) reached the half billion milestone for the first time with £509m (£485m in 2010).

Mobile rose by 157% in 2011 to a new high of £203m.

The IAB doesn’t cover 2012 predictions in its report, though Warc released figures in February that suggested The Olympics will help drive a 4.2% increase in UK adspend in 2012 compared to 2011.

Source: Econsultancy

This is a reminder that the online advertising space is buoyant, something supported by the million-dollar pricetag on YouTube’s new channel ad model as revealed yesterday.

The industry looks healthy, and these figures are only based on companies that submitted data for 2010’s reports so as not to skew results, but as always should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The research also suggests that is “there is less benefit for brands than was originally thought” to using social media.

For example, just under half (44%) of the British online population would not be more positive about a product their friends have followed and/or liked 43% are unlikely to talk about a brand on a social media site even if they heard something positive about it.

In addition, the YouGov study says that brand marketers and media owners need to be careful of new targeting models with just under half (47%) saying that they positively do mind seeing ads on social media services that are based on their profile activities.

The findings coupled with other research suggesting that people do not want mobile ads suggest that the public is reaching point of saturation, but with Facebook and Twitter both introducing mobile ads they will become harder to avoid.

Source: Revolution

Of the 2,400 consumers questioned for the study, 13% are more likely to view the brand in a favourable light after watching an ad created for digital, while 12% said it would improve brand association. Additionally, purchase intent increased by 23% among those that were exposed to relevant video advertising compared with those that were not.

Chris Worrell, Specific Media’s director of insight, said, “We are now reaching critical mass, both in terms of brands treating it seriously and consumers accepting and embracing it as the norm.”

But he advised that the quality of video content needs to keep up with the speed at which the platform is evolving because it is now regarded as a mainstream activity.

John Baylon, Starcom Mediavest group digital trading director, said, “The industry is not taking advantage of such a great platform and all the benefits it can offer, such as more efficient targeting, optimised design and interactivity.”

To illustrate this point he said, “Channel 4 once told me that 95% of all investment in video online is on 30-second repurposed TV ads.”

The advice he gives to clients is: “Think video, not TV, so it can be applied in a more strategic way.”

Graeme Hutcheson, MediaCom associate director, agrees that merely repeating ads made for TV is far less effective than creating an online-specific creative. “The main hurdle now is engaging creative agencies and making them aware of this fact,” he said. “The holy grail is to have a piece of copy for every platform that tells a narrative story. Further down the line, it will be about having multiple copy for each platform so that different ads can be served to different consumers based on age, sex and where they are based.”

As content can be viewed on an increasing number of devices, consumers are more likely to adopt non-linear viewing habits as they are not as tied to rigid broadcast schedules. As such, content length is key and brands need to work harder to attract and keep consumer attention.

Baylon highlighted that people consume content in different ways at different times, so a person watching a two-minute news clip on their PC during their lunch break is going to be in a different position and have a different frame of mind to someone catching up on a hour-long episode of The Wire on Tevo.

“The engagement level is going to be very different, so advertisers need to think about a number of things: the time, the day, whether a viewer is at work or at home and whether it’s short- or long-form content,” he said. “If it’s short form, 12 seconds is the optimum, but if it’s an hour-long episode, consumers will have a higher propensity to watch a 30-second ad. It will also depend what platform consumers are watching video content on.”

Worrell thinks consumption patterns have changed brands and advertisers need to strike a balance between engagement and disruption. “Staying on the right side of this line with be a key challenge for brands and advertisers in the year ahead,” he said.

He reckons marketers also need to deploy softer, brand-led metrics that more established advertising platforms use, rather that relying solely on clicks. “We need to measure the impact video advertising has on the brand, against relevant target audiences,” he said.

Baylon highlighted The Pool research by Publicis’s strategic arm Vivaki, which found that its three-slate ad selector format ASq was the best format for engaging the online industry (nma.co.uk 7 October 2010).

Channel 4, YouTube and Microsoft were the first UK publishers to launch trials of the ad format, which allows viewers to pick which ad they want to watch ahead of video-on-demand content (nma.co.uk 17 November 2011).

Specific Media’s research was based on four key consumer groups: young men, young women, ABC1 adults and full-time mums. It forms the latest installment of its video testing and measurement insights (VITAMIN) study, which is being conducted in association with digital media consultancy Decipher.

The first VITAMIN research project showed that original content relating to and featuring advertisers’ brands has the highest brand recall levels and brand favourability among consumers.

Source: New Media Age

Internet usage: higher in the UK than other major countries according to Ofcom survey

Broadcasting regulator Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report says people in the UK watch more TV online, use the internet on their mobiles more often and play more games on their phones than people in other countries.

The research found over a quarter (27%) of UK internet users said they watched TV online every week – up 3% from the 2010 survey and higher than any of the other countries surveyed.

Eight out of 10 UK internet users (79%) said they had ordered goods or services online, higher than any other country, and UK internet users were more likely to visit retail websites online than other countries– 89% had done so in 2011.

The study found the proportion of the population owning smartphones nearly doubled in the UK between February 2010 and August 2011, up from 24% to 46% and higher than the other European countries surveyed.

The other countries surveyed included France, Germany, Italy, US, Canada, Japan, Australia, Poland, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Brazil, Russia, India and China, although a smaller sub-set was used for some of the analysis.

Ofcom looked at five typical baskets of communications services (fixed-line phone, mobile phone, broadband and pay-TV) and found the UK offered the lowest prices for all five when buying services individually, and four out of five when including bundles.

Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, said: “Across the globe, people are embracing e-commerce and social media with enthusiasm.

“Our research shows that the UK communications market is performing well with prices, the range of services and innovation standing up well against international benchmarks.

“There are also issues which we will monitor carefully, such as the future rollout of 4G mobile services.

“We are pressing ahead with plans to release this valuable spectrum at the end of next year, which will enable new mobile services for consumers.”

Although the availability (59%) and take-up (4%) of superfast broadband in the UK compared favourably to other European countries, take-up lagged behind Japan (40%) and the US (10%).

The Ofcom study found that global communications revenues increased by 3.4% in 2011 when compared with 2010, mainly driven by strong growth in Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Total retail telecoms revenues were £594bn in 2010, up 1.9% year on year, total radio revenues were £25bn in 2010, up 5% year on year, and total TV revenues were £239bn, an increase of 7.7% year on year.

Source: Mediaweek.co.uk

According to the findings of the DMA’s 2010 H2 Email Benchmarking Report, click-through rates from emails leapt from 12 million in H2 2009 to 16.1 million in H2 2010 – an increase of 33 per cent in the amount of traffic email is marshalling to clients’ websites. The half year also saw a 35 per cent rise in the volume of emails being sent during H2 2010. The number of email addresses that Email Services Providers (ESPs) manage grew across the year from 90.2 million in Q1 2010 to 101.7 million in Q4 2010.

Email marketing budgets rose through the half-year, with a third of clients spending between 21 – 40 per cent more on email in Q4 2010 compared to Q4 2009.

Surveying 20 of the UK’s ESPs, the biannual Email Benchmarking Report is produced by the DMA’s Email Marketing Council. Commenting on the findings of the report, the Council’s James Bunting said:

“Email marketers in the UK are continuing to improve on their success. The DMA’s email tracking study earlier this year showed that consumers are receiving more emails of interest to them than ever before and this latest research shows that those relevant emails are working. Email is driving more traffic to websites than ever before.

“The future looks to be even brighter because this success is occurring at a time that ESPs are promising advanced tactics within their product suites enabling even greater targeting and relevance.”

Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx – sponsors of the report, added:

“Our clients are sending more emails than ever before as they begin to embrace the ‘more is more’ maxim. With increases in volume and frequency, of course, comes the corresponding challenge of producing ever more innovative emails and the demand this places on internal resources.”

The H2 2010 Email Benchmarking Report also features the latest data on strategy and segmentation, as well as open rates and deliverability.

Source: DMA News

The bi-annual report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that UK brands had boosted their online spending by 13.5% on a like-for-like basis in the first six months of 2011 to £2.26bn, a 27% share of the ad market.

This puts digital spend on track to overtake last year’s figure, which the IAB and PwC reported as £4.1bn.

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, said the proliferation of new technologies such as smartphones, tablets and faster Wi-Fi, means consumers are spending more time using the internet as a “social and entertainment hub”, which is the driving force behind the £244m year-on-year increase in online ad expenditure.

“What is truly exciting is we are seeing is a move away from the internet as an information channel into a portable entertainment channel, with social media and video being both hugely influential.”

“Online is an entertainment media, much in the same way TV has been for the past decade.”

Online share on the total ad market

According to data from UKOM the UK’s online user base grew from 38.4 million in June 2010 to 39.5 million in July 2011.

UKOM Figures also show 26 million people watched 2.3 billion videos for a total of 6.4 billion minutes, averaging out at 87 videos viewed per month for an average of 4.1 hours per person.

Display is continuing its growth spurt, with an 18.5% increase year on year to take it to £510m on a like for like basis. The IAB said this was due to an increase new formats, particularly in social media.

It also pointed to video advertising increasing 100% year on year, to £45m for the first half of 2011, compared to £23m in H1 2010, as a driver for growth in display.

The Display digital media mix in £m for H1 2011

While display accounted for 23% of total online ad expenditure, paid-for search continues to command 58% of total online ad expenditure, with classifieds accounting for 17%.

The digital media mix: % share of revenues for the H1 2011

The IAB quoted UKOM data showing that 25% of time spent online in the UK is on social networks. Phillipson said the fact social, gaming, video and portals now account for 49% of time spent online, makes the medium “very attractive to brands and advertisers.”

Phillipson said the “FMCG story”, however is “most interesting” from the spend figures, adding that two years ago the sector only accounted for 9% of online ad expenditure.

According to the latest survey, consumer products account for 14.5% of online display ad expenditure, overtaking the entertainment industry for the first time, which accounted for 12.4% of display ad expenditure this half.

The consumer goods sector is now the second highest spender in digital after the financial sector.

Brands including Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Virgin, Sky and Ford are among the top 20 biggest spenders online, according to the study.

Industry sector display market shares: H1 2011

Though the stellar growth in video advertising can only be good news for the sector, the total figures are still only a fraction of TV advertising and it has been suggested the increase in online video spend is largley due to the growth of platforms such as ITV Player that have had some success transferring standard TV advertising online.

Phillipson was unable to break down where the extra spend in video advertising was coming from but said it is seeing brands invest more and more creating cross-media advertising, pointing to the Tippex ‘Hunter shoots a bear’ and Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’ ads as successful video creative campaigns to illustrate the point.

“Video advertising provides a medium for brands which want to tell a story. But online is no longer a silo and we see it as a complementary media to TV,” he said.

According to recent figures from GroupM, adspend on the internet was £3.9bn in 2010, with TV at £3.4bn and newspapers (regional and national) at £2.7bn. It forecasts that for 2011, online ad expenditure will reach £4.3bn, TV will be £3.5bn and newspapers will be £2.5bn.

On the subject of where this increased investment in digital would come from, Phillipson said: “The total ad landscape is like a bench and over the years all media has budged up for the internet. Over the next few years we expect its market share to increase from 27% to 30%. And we haven’t see the effects of real-time bidding on the market yet, which over the next few years will explode.”

Phillipson added that the mobile spend figures, which saw a 116% grow last year, have not been added to the online figures, but he said, “anecdotally mobile has been performing very well”.

Lindsey Clay, managing director of Thinkbox, the commercial television trade body, said: “What’s interesting about these figures is that the fastest growing type of advertising on the internet is online TV advertising. It underlines how the internet is a technology that’s helping TV advertising to expand.”

Jason Carter, managing partner, digital, at UM London, said he has seen an increase in client spend in digital.

“It’s no surprise that video and social are driving this growth and the type of brands turning to it for brand engagement and community building are changing,” he said.

“Because of the new range of formats in video and social, we are seeing brands doing more interesting stuff who would have previously shied away from the digital space.

Source : Brandrepublic.com, 05 October 2011

Facebook might be taking the lion’s share of display advertising spend (it generated 68.69bn display ad impressions in Q3 2010 according to Comscore), but as a shopping platform, it’s still struggling to gain traction.

‘Facebook shopping’, it seems, is not quite living up to the expectations of ‘social shopping’, because Facebook lacks independent authoritative content to steer conversations and user interaction with a brand.

While a growing number of brands – from HMV to French Connection, even FMCG brands such as Mountain Dew and Heinz – have all ventured into ‘Facebook shopping’, there’s little concrete evidence emerging on its effectiveness. The most recent and oft-quoted research, by Havas Media back in June, found that 89% of people have never bought anything on Facebook, and 44% are not interested in doing so.

By contrast, research for Telegraph Fashion, which emerged last week, seeking to evaluate interaction and propensity to purchase, as well as the relationship between content and commerce, found that readers of the Telegraph fashion site who engage with expert recommendations drove the highest conversions on the publisher’s fashion shop. They were five times as likely to purchase than those who hadn’t.

Most interestingly, users directed to Telegraph Fashion content from Facebook were identified as greater consumers of content – twice the amount those visiting the Telegraph independently consumed – underlining Facebook’s role in disseminating information and reaching out to new audiences, not as a shopping platform.

Though the Association of Online Publishers’ research last year explored the relationship between engagement, content and ad responsiveness, its findings – that consumers were more willing to engage more with advertising on traditional content sites that on social networks – also goes some way to support this view. Almost a third of respondents (32%) said they felt more positive towards a brand on a content site, 17% on portals and 14% on social networks.

The Telegraph Fashion’s latest approach – marrying content, commerce and social interaction – looks potentially like a more successful combination. TMG will lead with expert comment and editorial, then solicit user recommendation, bringing visitors into an authoritative conversation and disseminating across social networks. The publisher will build on its existing I Spied proposition – the ‘best’ fashion and beauty picked by its editorial experts – extending recommendation on the site to include ways of getting visitors to participate in the selection of products.

Hearst Magazine-owned Digital Spy’s forthcoming technology launch, reported earlier this week by new media age, will take a slightly different approach, leveraging its own communities and forums to gauge user interest, forming a solid basis for product news and editorial, supported by an ecommerce partner.

So perhaps, rather than thinking about setting up a Facebook shop, brands might think about forming ecommerce alliances with magazines and publishers, looking at refining strategies around a strengthened triad of content, commerce and social interaction facilitated by a social network, not dominated by it.

Social media provides recommendation and interaction, but doesn’t have an authority on content comparative with traditional content sites. Content, on the other hand, facilitates influence, and when, coupled with social interactions – including recommendation or sharing – can be even more effective in steering ecommerce.

—- Gina Lovett, New Media Age.