• by Andy Oakes  @andyoakes, April 18, 2014

There comes a time when you’ve got to stop worrying about size. After all,it’s the way you use it that counts. Before you splutter your coffee all over your laptop, I’m talking about the age-old debate about the online ad spend figures. Last week, a joint report from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found online ad spend rocketed 17% to $42.8bn (£25.6bn) in 2013, surpassing the $40.1bn (£23.9bn) for broadcast — excluding network TV – revenue for the first time. 

This has been going on for 17 years now. In conjunction with PwC, the IAB has produced the twice yearly digital advertising spend figures in the UK since 1997. As used by the Advertising Association and faithfully reported by all the trade press, these figures claim to be the most authoritative means of assessing the size of the online advertising market in the UK.

Back in 1997, I seem to remember that this meant something. Even as recently as September 2009, when I worked at the industry bible New Media Age, it meant something. We ran a splash front cover story which was ‘Bigger than TV’. It caused a major row with Thinkbox, the body that promotes TV advertising, which rumbled on for many a month. 

It meant something back then because the digital industry was still in its nascent phase. Yes, we had Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al., but they hadn’t yet reached the behemoth all-encompassing size and influence that we see from the likes of Facebook today. The digital world is very, very different today and, frankly, I feel that this constant comparison of market spend is irrelevant to how modern media and marketing work. Do these figures really just reflect that people are viewing more media on differing devices and that Samsung, Apple and Amazon have sold a lot of tablets?

Let’s look at just one example highlighted by the IAB’s figures on tablet usage. We now understand that tablets offer an immediate way for consumers to respond to offline advertisements, and this opens up great opportunities for brands to increase engagement and accelerate the path to purchase.

For example, it’s well known that the number of searches for a brand often peaks during a TV ad for that brand, and this is a key moment to engage with a ‘warm’ consumer. Multi-tasking while watching TV has become second-nature for most people, and the figures from the IAB show how important it is that brands have content that is designed for tablets as well as mobile phones. David Skerrett, managing partner at Nimbletank, told me ‘The tablet’s most valuable contribution to brands is the birth of sofa-commerce. So many people in the UK now graze through commerce sites to kill time while sitting in front of the TV, and making purchases.’

We’ve also seen that apps such as Blippr and Aurasma have increased engagement with newspaper and magazine print advertising, Shazam has worked in conjunction with TV ads for work with massive clients like Jaguar, and we are starting to see how the major outdoor players are using NFC technologies to interact with consumers as well.

So what we are seeing is that it’s not digital vs. TV or digital vs. print. It’s digital as a part of the overall marketing and advertising spend vs. the world. What we can say is that digital advertising has enhanced the overall marketing toolbox for any and every client, and the days of looking at it as an isolated channel should be over. It’s a co-dependent media landscape out there, and the clever media owners and advertisers will be the ones who benefit. I wrote last week how I thought the digital industry was growing up. Perhaps this is just another part of the process.