Despite an ocean of advertising money, traditional media is still flailing
Digital advertising currently enjoys close to half of total advertising media spend. Instead of attempting to cut a share for themselves, traditional advertisers have instead embarked on short-term cost-cutting exercises with no thought for the future, argue Dr Rohan Miller and Kate Gunby.
As debate rages over the future ownership of Network Ten, it is time to examine why the traditional media is flailing when there is an ocean of advertising money.
The old media guard seems to have been asleep at the wheel and to have too easily conceded advertising revenue share to new media. Over the last decade or so, digital advertising has acquired close to 50% of total advertising media spend, with the lion’s share flowing to Facebook and Google.
Traditional media blame Facebook for a lot of their revenue woes
“…only 6.5% of retail sales are conducted online.” Really?
There is virtually no content based industry in Australian media. Virtually all the execs come from backgrounds in which the revenues required little work and the content was not valued. The dinosaurs will die rich from their overpaid cost cutting jobs. The future belongs to new players.
@ Rosscoe
Plenty of differing stats available, but all around similar levels:
http://business.nab.com.au/nab.....016-22325/
(noting that the stat of 7.1% includes takeaway food, which I wouldn’t classify as ‘retail’ in the traditional sense of the word).
Like a lot of the hyperbole around digital and social marketing, the statistics often tell a far less dramatic story than what you would perhaps expect.
Thanks for checking our stats KGB. Similar data elsewhere in the world. Explosive growth is claimed, but from a very low base.
After all the recent nitpicking over digital metrics, this is a refreshing article. For every post campaign I’ve run, I have to pull DCM data, IAS data, Facebook data and then (depending on client), site analytics data down to individual page url and smash it all together to try and tell some semblance of a story with actionable insight, only to get side tracked on the day by 30 mins of being asked why our CTR’s suck.
Out of Home posts meanwhile –
Agency: This slide shows how much money we spent.
Client: Did it work?
Agency: …
Client: …
Agency: And here are photos that proves your posters where here, specifically, when the photographer was there.
Client: I was at bus stop recently and noticed someone drew a penis on our panel. How can we avoid that moving forward?
Agency: And here is how much money we spent on print
Beautifully put.
Interesting and insightful article. The future as these authors suggest is looking forward not backwards. Just because something has worked in the past no longer holds in this landscape. Will be interesting to see another reflection from Miller and Gunby in 12 months time to track if their predictions are realised.
At least Think TV’s ROI claims are in the realms of believability, as opposed to the majority of digital’s claims.