Next year, digital ad spend will finally surpass TV's, according to a fresh forecast from eMarketer. That’s remarkable. Ever more remarkable is the driving force behind the big shift: mobile.
In fact, mobile continues to drive growth within overall digital ad spending, the research firm says.
This year, mobile ad spending is expected to grow 38%, to $43.6 billion. If that's
right, mobile will then represent 63.4% of total domestic digital ad spending.
“As consumers continue to increase engagement with mobile devices for daily activities and content
consumption, marketers will further integrate all marketing activities -- including advertising -- to the mobile category,” Martín Utreras, senior forecasting analyst at eMarketer, notes
in a new report.
Total digital ad spending is expected to grow 15.4%, to $68.82 billion, this year.
By next year, total digital ad spending will reach $77.37 billion -- or 38.4% of all
ad spend -- while TV will total $72.01 billion, or 35.8% of all domestic spending.
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Media consumption habits are changing so fast that eMarketer had to lower its growth projections for TV ad
spending since the last forecast. The research firm now expects TV to grow 2.5% this year -- down considerably from the 4.5% figure that it predicted last year.
In the long term, TV ad
spending will continue to grow by about 2% a year, eMarketer believes. But by 2020, TV ad spending’s share will drop below one-third of total domestic media ad spend for the first time.
“We still expect positive growth for TV ad spend, driven by political advertising and the summer Olympics,” according to Utreras. “However, we see more ad dollars flowing to
digital as a way of optimizing spending in what may be a challenging economic year.”