A recent survey has found that the average person sees 800 advertising messages per day and a rapidly growing area is online, which begs the question are you making the most of your online advertising potential?

 

Although expansion in online advertising is slowing double-digit growth figures are expected over the next few years. The UK spend in 2007 was £2.6 billion – a 30% increase on the 2006 spend – and this is expected to reach £5 billion by 2012.

 

The online advertising medium currently has a market share of 15.3% which is up from 11.4% in 2006, this further demonstrates that this is a growing area for advertisers. Figures showing how people are using media strengthens the argument for the use of online advertising.  52% of people are now regularly online and spend more time online than watching TV, European internet users now spend 14.3 hours per week online, 11.3 hours per week watching TV and 4.4 hours per week. 36% of the people who go online say that they spend less time watching TV as a result.

 

The online advertising sector is increasing 9 times faster than the entire advertising sector, Google released its sales figures for 2007 – this figure was £3.83 billion. The comparison to ITV’s reported advertising revenue for 2007 which was £1.49 billion provides further evidence that this advertising channel is growing significantly.

 

In addition to the above figures and the growth in the number of people seeing these advertising messages, online advertising is much cheaper to produce than TV advertising allowing advertisers to receive a greater ROI.

 

The future of advertising

 

Online advertising can also be much more targeted than other forms of advertising, advertisers are able to anonymously monitor the behaviours of internet users allowing it to become more relevant to them. Evidence shows that the more relevant the messages are to the recipient the less likely they are to view this as advertising and are more likely to respond to it.

 

Mobile marketing is set to be the next big thing, there are 3 billion mobile users in the world compared to 1 billion with a fixed internet connection. Mobile advertising is already widely used in Japan and it is predicted that worldwide spending will reach £19 billion by 2012. Mobile marketing and advertising didn’t become mainstream during 2007, however, events such as the iPhone launch and other improvements, means that mobile marketing is past the experimental stage of development.

 

To see how PCD can help you make the most of your online advertising and take advantage of this growing area contact Steve Moncrieff at steve@pcdagency.com