Hasta La Creative!

An oft-cited notion is that time spent on a medium should equate to ad spending on that medium. The reality is often something different. That very concept was first espoused by the Cable Advertising Bureau as a way to focus attention on cable at a time when broadcast TV, followed by print, still took in a majority of ad dollars. But indeed, the comparison keeps getting made, and from this perspective, online is not doing too badly.

Mary Meeker, at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, analyzed the time spent percentage for each media and compared it to ad spending at the All Things D/Wall Street Journal conference in May 2012. She found consumers spend 26% of their media consumption time online, and marketers spend 22% of their ad budgets. TV is also faring well, with consumers spending 43% of their media time with TV, and marketers spending 42% of their ad budgets here. Mobile is the area with the greatest growth potential, as consumers are now spending 10% of their time with mobile, but marketers are only spending 1% of their ad budgets there. Print is the most likely to lose, with consumers spending 7% of their media consumption time with print, but marketers spend 25% of their ad budgets in print.

Of course, equating time spent leaves no room for the different qualitative ways and levels of attention paid to a medium. You also have to break down the varying formats of online to really get the full picture: The bulk of online spending goes to search, while display, rich media and video, which collectively support most of the content, remained stubbornly flat over the past few years, among the top publishers who report their numbers to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). When you look at industry spending projections, they tend to still fall into the “buckets of the past,” assuming radio is consumed through a radio, print through newspapers and magazines, television through a large box in your living room. The reality is that radio is thriving thanks to an increasingly mobile format and that much of print content is now consumed in interactive formats. The growth in ad spending will come from various interactive formats at the expense of all other media, and interactive spending will be within spitting distance of TV by 2016.

Continue reading at AdAge.com