• by Tony Silber , Staff Writer, April 13, 2022

Digital advertising increased by 35% in 2021, to $189 billion, the largest increase since 2006, according to an Internet Advertising Bureau revenue report released on Tuesday. And the workflow management platform Boostr, in a separate contemporaneous report, offers a deeper dive into what it all means for media companies.

In the IAB report, conducted by PwC and titled "IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2021," the findings showed that all major media channels increased advertising significantly compared to last year, including digital video, digital audio, social media, and search.

Even with the advertising industry facing a variety of challenges, the report stated, including privacy concerns, the elimination of third-party cookies and identifiers, ad fraud, measurement challenges, and supply-chain transparency, marketers have voted with their budgets and digital advertising is where they’re placing their bets. Among the findings:

• Digital video continues to be one of the fastest-growing channels, up 50.8% compared to last year, with total revenues of $39.5 billion.
• Digital audio captured the highest year-over-year growth, up 57.9% to $4.9 billion.
• Social-media advertising was up by 39.3% to $57.7 billion, as consumers continue to engage with Meta platforms, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter.

Read the full report here.

In the complementary Boostr report, titled “Revenue Operations Trend Report 2022,” an analysis of more than 200 media companies found that:

• Programmatic guaranteed/preferred deal CPMs from Google Ad Manager are up by 13%.
• Traditional private marketplace CPMs grew by 16%.
• 80% of publishers reported a decline in sponsorship CPMs.
• A new metric, net revenue retention (NRR), exposes the growing ad churn problem facing many media companies. Those with higher NRRs grow faster.
• The vast majority of the surveyed publishers saw podcast revenue increase in 2021.
• Publishers are more bullish about traditional insertion-order advertising than they are about programmatic, but they feel good about both.

Boostr, based in New York City, combines tracking and dashboards that enable sales-pipeline visibility, intelligence to improve campaign margins, the ability to automate approvals, and overall, to improve information flow between sales, operations, and finance.

The report, its first, is a companion to the company’s Media Advertising Trend Report and is intended to provide useful benchmarks and insights to enable publisher growth.

It found that not only did the digital-ad market expand robustly in 2021, but prices went up as well. The traditional insertion-order channel showed modest 6% growth. That’s an indication that programmatic advertising isn’t growing at the expense of direct sales, at least not yet.

“After years of challenges and headwinds, digital media companies came roaring back with a median growth rate of 49% in 2021,” Boostr Founder and CEO Patrick O’Leary said. “For those thinking that programmatic is eating away at the traditional IO business, that’s not what publishers are expecting. A convergence is coming.”

Indeed, insertion-order advertising still commands much higher CPMs than the various forms of programmatic. The 2021 average CPM for IO advertising is $20.40, while programmatic guaranteed and preferred deal CPMs were $16 and $8.70, respectively.

But programmatic is growing faster than the 6% growth of IO. Programmatic guaranteed and preferred deal grew at 13%, and private marketplace grew at 16%.

Publishers in the Boostr repot also said they expect  IO advertising will grow, with 68.5% of respondents predicting this growth for 2022, while a slightly smaller percentage, roughly 59%, think the various kinds of programmatic will grow this year.

All this growth means more hiring. Sixty-three percent of the respondents said they plan to hire more revenue and ad-operations professionals this year, as superior customer service is critical to business results.

Podcasts continue to grow at a torrid pace. Asked whether they saw an increase in podcast revenue in the last year, just over 80% of respondents said they had, with growth driven by driven by larger audiences and new products.

The survey found that the more customers a publisher retains, the faster it grows.

The Boostr report was derived from two sources. The company analyzed a cohort of primarily digital U.S.-based media companies within the Boostr platform from January 2019 to December 2021. Additionally, a survey of 200 media executives across sales, ad operations, revenue operations, finance and marketing functions was conducted. The full report will be released on Thursday.

Access the report here.