Web Spend To Grow In 2009 Says WPP

In its extensive report ‘This Year, Next Year - Winter 2008', Group M, the vast media-buying arm of advertising mega-network WPP, is forecasting that global internet advertising will rise almost six per cent in 2009 to reach thirteen per cent of total global ad budgets.  This is against an overall stagnation in global media investment that the report believes will be $458bn - just $1bn less than 2008.  It may seem strange that media investment across the world should stay steady while the globe’s economies burn.  However, the forecast compares starkly to the company's expectations only nine months ago of a five per cent increase in media spend during '09.  Additionally, the continued rises, albeit slowed, of China, Brazil and India balance out real falls in the US and Western Europe.  There’s a similar story in the UK.  Media spend is expected to fall just over one per cent.  However, total expenditure on the web will rise slightly to $3.3bn, mainly due to clients opting for the ‘value-and-certainty’ of paid search.  Clearly good news for Google that ended last year providing eighty per cent of searches conducted in the UK.  Indeed, the Group M figures show interaction (all web activity) taking the largest share of media spend (28.1%) in the UK for the first time, with TV in second (26%) and then newspapers (24.9%).  However, interaction is the only UK media sector expected to show growth.  In some ways these figures feel surprisingly optimistic, considering near-hysterical talk of UK bankruptcy and 1930-style depressions.  However, Group M must have some idea of their clients' media plans over the next two years.  And while WPP has a vested interest in maintaining confidence in the media markets, it would lose credibility to overstate the case too greatly.  We can only wait and see.

Comments

[Brad Bell]

"opting for the ‘value-and-certainty’ of paid search"

:-)

I've become increasingly bedazzled by the lack of certainty with AdWords. In part, this is due to the hugely complex factors Google juggles in ad placement ranking.
'Does the ad link to a site where any intelligent or insightful information has appeared lately?'
'Do the site authors have the cognitive potential to say anything intelligent in the future?'
'Are the site authors or their agents sleazeballs?'

The other part of the bedazzling is realizing just how 'personalized' search results pages are. Log into Google, you see one thing. Logged out you see another. Use the site from a different building, you get different results again. And of course, now there's SearchWiki, which adds another layer of liveliness to the affair.

I am beginning to suspect that Google is protecting it stock price by messing with the emerging SEO industry, 'So you think you can control search results and ad placement to promote less valuable content, do you? Take that ye olde worlde media worms!'

Google is not the yellow pages. AdWords are not the want ads.

Brad

(I like to remind people that Google was born from the Death of Search, when all the search engines got out of the search business and got into the yellow pages business.)

Ref: SearchWiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_SearchWiki

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks, great analysis as ever. The evolution of Search is going to be fascinating to watch in the next few years. The Google monopoly attracts is so lucrative that the whole world is trying to disrupt the status quo. I thought that RWW's take on the 'contextual' web which could 'bypass search' was really interesting - http://tinyurl.com/9kazw7

[Advertising Agency Internet Marketing]

Not surprising at all considering the fact that more people are looking for an online income from home especially in these tough economic times.

[Niaz Ali]

How significant is Internet marketing to businesses?

today, the answer to this question varies dramatically according to who is answering. For companies such as electronics company Cisco, the answer is ‘very significant’ – Cisco sell $9 million worth of hardware using the Internet each day.