How Digital Ad Spending Accelerates E-Commerce Growth, Why That Is Good For 'Traditional' Media

by Joe Mandese , March 2, 2018

There were two essential pieces of intelligence about the media economy unveiled during WPP’s quarterly presentation to investors Thursday. You can find them on pages 39 and 43 if you want to download the 130-page deck, but we’ll give you the gist here.

The first one provides some insight about …

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ad spending, digital, ecommerce, paid search, search

4 comments about "How Digital Ad Spending Accelerates E-Commerce Growth, Why That Is Good For 'Traditional' Media".

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Chris Peterson from Rain the Growth Agency, March 2, 2018 at 11:55 a.m.
Fantastic piece teasing out growth of ecommerce relative to overall ad spend. Love the GDP growth relative to ad spend - pretty much demonstrates the dawn of a new age. Thank you for posting. Couple of thoughts: Today ecommerce remains in the low teens as a precentage of total retail sales, but is growing faster than anything (only trillion dollar industry with double digit growth). So today this is still a bit of a small category, but it will plow through the landscape in an unrelenting fashion. The one thing I would point out here is that the "webendemic" companies, while certainly building a strong foundation using digital media, turn to TV next to drive scale. With that, they bring a digital mindset to TV, which is helping transform how TV gets done. The problem I see with the large global ad networks is that they aren't as in tune with this because of these newer brands generally are not inclined to work with a big network agency. When Martin Sorrell anounced recently that they need to align media with data more, it was a bit of a "duh, thanks for the insight from five years ago."
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John Grono from GAP Research, March 2, 2018 at 7:16 p.m.

Thanks goodness that digital ad dollars correlate with e-commerce, otherwise what would be the point.

And thank goodness that the growth in adspend correlates with the growth in GDP.

But I can't see the piece that is "teasing out growth of e-commerce relative to overall ad spend".

And I think that "the GDP growth relative to ad spend" has been happening for most of the last century .. meaning that the dawn of the new age has been happening for yonks.

If it showed a correlation between GDP growth and digital ad spend then there is the possibility of evidence of a 'new age'. The caveat being that correlation should never be confused with causation.

But I am just glad that you are happy Chris.

Chris Peterson from Rain the Growth Agency replied, March 2, 2018 at 7:25 p.m.

Having a bad day John? Enjoy your weekend.

John Grono from GAP Research replied, March 3, 2018 at midnight

No way Chris. It's a beautiful day here in paradise where I live.

Have a good weekend :).