Commentary

Digital Ad Spend Poised To Overtake TV Revenue

Online media ad revenue is on a path to steamroll TV ad spend.

Or so says Forrester Research in a new forecast predicting that by 2019 marketers will spend more than  $103 billion on online video ads, search marketing, display advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing. That amount spent on digital media will surpass the spend for broadcast and cable TV combined, Forrester has said.

Why so bullish? Because of the move to more contextual ads in the digital medium. Another contributing factor is the growth of inventory; there’s simply more media to buy, and digital media is also more measurable.

As an example of the type of tracking in digital video, consider this: for a restaurant chain, YuMe ran a video campaign earlier this year powered by its Creative Studio division that was designed to drive brand awareness and engagement via an interactive video unit. The brand was able to track a 70.5% completion rate, and a 10% interaction rate, with more than 48,000 engagements on Facebook and Twitter, leading to an increase in sales the first week of the campaign.

That’s the sort of data marketers increasingly want for their ads. The availability of such data in digital platforms can help bring more money to the medium.

Forrester’s figures comprise all of digital media, which includes huge non-video categories like email and search. Still, video is driving some of the growth. It reached $1.5 billion in the first half of the year, a 13% rise over the year-ago period, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Likewise, FreeWheel reports sizable growth too in digital TV in its newest report on the state of the video market. The number of video ad views rose 30% year over year for the third quarter, FreeWheel said, driven in part by live viewing increases for news and sports, as well as more cross-platform ad monetization.

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