Advertisers spend less but experiment more
The Future. Huge changes to data privacy rules and competition in the attention economy have crippled traditional digital advertising. As a result, advertisers are decreasing their ad spend but increasingly allocating that money to new and experimental media like audio and video streaming services. Thinking outside the box might just be marketers’ safest growth strategy.
A gambler’s game
Digiday interviewed various marketing firms about the trend of increased ad spend on new and experimental media.
- Claire Russell, head of media at Fitzco advertising agency, said that while overall client ad budgets have stagnated or fallen 5%, clients reliably keep 10-15% of that budget open for experimentation.
- Clients want efficiency, so instead of reducing testing budgets, they keep those budgets confined to easily measurable channels like video and audio streaming. Spend in both of these categories is rising.
- But advertisers are moving away from the really new platforms, like Web3, VR, and the metaverse. The reason? None are receiving much audience engagement or showing as much promise as content streaming currently is.
Getting real
Still, advertisers caution that no channels are likely to be as effective as they were at the height of the pandemic when engagement hit record highs because everyone was stuck inside consuming content. Marketers now expect their biggest hurdle to be convincing clients to lower their expectations.
That’s gonna be a hard sell.