• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, May 9, 2016

Partially in reaction to the agency's media buyers professing dissatisfaction with TV's dwindling ratings and its seeming inability to adjust rates accordingly, Magna Global, a division of IPG, has signed a deal with YouTube that will reallocate approximately $250 million from traditional TV to YouTube over the next year.  

The reallocated dollars will funnel through Google Preferred, an aggregator of inventory for premium content on YouTube. The shift is said to amount to a 5X increase over what the agency spent on YouTube in 2015. 

While $250 million constitutes just 5% of Magna Global's overall spend on traditional TV, it's a shift the industry is experiencing more and more of late, as confidence in TV as a medium wanes. According to eMarketer, digital video ad spend is expected to hit $9.5 billion in 2016 and $11.5 billion in 2017. In comparison, TV still grabs $70 billion of the pie.