• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, September 13, 2024

The Myers Report on marketing and advertising budget spending trends has come out. In it, you can find the Top 10 touchpoints with the anticipated highest growth rates (in percentage), and of course a Top 10 of the touchpoints with the biggest decreases.

The survey was held in June 2024 and drew participation from 3,462 advertising professionals.

The top five touchpoints where advertisers predicted the most growth were CTV/streaming/OTT video (75% increasing), 1st party data-based decisions (64% increasing), influencer media (63% increasing), digital video (61% increasing) and social media (60% increasing).

Yes, two weeks ago I wrote about the perils of CTV. Clearly, advertisers are finding the lure of CTV greater than all the well-published dangers. But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you!

The top five of touchpoints that are predicted to decline the fastest are editorial/print originated content (36% decreasing), linear broadcast tv (44% decreasing), linear cable tv (43% decreasing), out-of-home/place-based media (28% decreasing) and digital display (21% decreasing).

(By the way, before any mathematically adept people react to tell me that the decliners’ top five is in the wrong order, the way The Meyers Report ranks the results is to list those touch points with the highest score for “Reduce Significantly” before “Reduce Somewhat.” The combination of these two scores determines the overall percentage. For editorial/print, the total number for Reduce Significantly was the highest of all touch points, hence their number one position.)

As I review these trends, a few implications come to mind:

Fragmentation is a given. Many of the top five fastest-growing touchpoints did not exist or were not meaningful five or so years ago.

Traditional touchpoints are “dead.”  They are not, of course. The number of touchpoints keeps growing (per my previous point) and do so faster than advertising budgets are growing. Marketers are clearly choosing to take more budget away from traditional media. This is unfair punishment, since there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with traditional channels.  But if a marketer decides to pursue an influencer or CTV campaign, the dollars are having to come from somewhere. It appears that traditional media is that “somewhere.”

Planning for response. Marketers are continuing to invest more in touchpoints that -- allegedly -- lead to some kind of consumer response (clicks, sales, engagement, leads, etc.). This comes at the expense of touchpoints that have a proven track record of building brands.

Yes, traditional TV is being subbed for CTV and digital video, which could (will) be argued as “similar” to linear/cable TV, but these touchpoints have not yet proven themselves to be as good as linear/cable TV at driving long-term brand health and sales growth. It will be years before we will be able to see the true long-terms effects of the seismic touchpoint shift of the current decades.

Is our marketing education still current? Given today’s touchpoint mix, are we teaching our marketing and advertising students about how to choose, how to analyze, how to prioritize, etc.? Are we arming them with the right knowledge about reach, frequency, impressions, creative excellence, target audience segmentation, etc. across these touch points? I fear we are not -- and that issue will have to be addressed.